In Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu’s polemic against the professional managerial class, she calls attention to how Obama talked about reading in the waning days of his presidency. In his farewell address on January 10, 2017, he said:
Social attitudes oftentimes take generations to change. But if our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction—Atticus Finch—who said “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Obama paraphrased this line a few days later, in an interview with Michiko Kakutani for the New York Times book review, where he said that reading allowed him to “get in somebody else’s shoes.” It’s a curious reference. Finch is the white lawyer who represents a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The villain in the novel is a man named Bob Ewell, the woman’s father, who beats her and helps her frame the Black man for the crime. As Liu notes, the book holds up Finch as the “good” white man who fights for justice while Ewells are the “bad” white people who live off public assistance. But in Go Set a Watchman, the sequel published in 2015—eighteen months before Obama’s speech—it’s revealed that Atticus Finch was a member of the Klan.
Many Klansmen were in fact educated and upstanding citizens by day, even as they donned hoods and rained terror at night. Their daytime performance of polite civilization was as much a mask for the violence and brutality as the hoods themselves. Similarly, Liu points out that Finch’s righteousness and commitment to justice contrasts with Ewell’s “white trash” status to elevate Finch into white saviorhood while simultaneously denigrating the people who depend on welfare—valorizing the performance of justice absent the realization of it.
Liu locates a similar move in Obama’s embrace of his role as “reader-in-chief.” Despite a public commitment to raising educational standards, Obama’s policies “left 19.3 percent of American children under the age of five living in extreme poverty.” That is, while Obama ostensibly raised educational standards, he did not substantially increase funding to schools, nor did he upend the anti-labor practices that punished teachers when their (often poor) students didn’t make the cut. And those same standards promoted an approach to reading in which stories were stripped of their social and political standpoint and read naively, as if the world from which the stories emerged didn’t exist. Liu asks us to imagine a child from that nineteen percent of the population, being instructed to read a book in which those who take public assistance are dismissed as trash, while responding to a prescriptive writing prompt about how the book asks people to “take a stand.” But who is taking that stand, and for what?
Liu writes: “Atticus and Obama showed us that individual acts of empathy and private self-cultivation would produce justice and understanding in a world torn apart by racism and violence.” This is what Jade Davis warns of in The Other Side of Empathy, the reproduction of an empathy culture in which “change and action stop being necessary…because the feeling and sense of understanding are action enough.” Rather than giving someone money, we feel what it’s like to walk in their shoes; rather than ending social disparities, we passively read stories about their lives. In this mode, empathy is a kind of terminating gesture: once you’ve empathized with someone else, you’re relieved of taking any action on their behalf.
Liu proposes: “Let us read Atticus Finch as a political project and the novel in which he exists as a piece of well-crafted, anti-welfare state, antisocialist propaganda. Reading matters deeply, but not in the way Obama and Kakutani want it to.” That is, reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other; it isn’t about the performance of social class absent a criticism of that class structure. To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.