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. 2023 Apr 11:14:1143384.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1143384. eCollection 2023.

Compassion as a tool for allyship and anti-racism

Melissa M Karnaze  1   2 , Ramya M Rajagopalan  1   2 , Lisa T Eyler  3   4 , Cinnamon S Bloss  1   2   3
Affiliations

Compassion as a tool for allyship and anti-racism

Melissa M Karnaze et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Racist systems, policies, and institutions subvert the quality of life for minoritized individuals and groups, across all indicators, from education and employment, to health, to community safety. Reforms to address systemic racism may be accelerated with greater support from allies who identify with the dominant groups that derive advantage from such systems. Although enhancing empathy and compassion for impacted individuals and groups may foster greater allyship with and support of minoritized communities, little work to date has assessed the relationships among compassion, empathy, and allyship. After reviewing current work in the area, this perspective offers insights into the utility and specific components of a compassion-based framework that can be used to combat racism, using findings from a survey study in which we investigated the relationship between validated psychometric measures of compassion and allyship with minoritized communities. Several subdomains of compassion, as measured among individuals identifying as non-Black, correlate significantly with levels of felt allyship with Black or African American communities. These findings inform recommendations for compassion-focused research, including development and testing of interventions to promote allyship, advocacy, and solidarity with minoritized groups, and support efforts to undo longstanding structural racisms that have patterned inequality in the United States.

Keywords: allyship; anti-racism; compassion; empathy; systemic racism.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Partial correlations of empathy and compassion with felt allyship with Black People, controlling for sex, social desirability, and political beliefs. SOCS is the abbreviation for the Sussex Oxford Compassion for Others Scale and is used to refer to each of the five subscales of the measure.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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