Cultural Empathy as Moral Technology: Kenneth Clark, Race, and Social Sensitivity in Postwar America

In the post WWII period, the reach of psychological and psychiatric knowledge greatly extended due to the successful wartime treatment of soldiers suffering from combat fatigue, the training of clinical psychologists, and the growing authority of psychoanalytic perspectives in psychiatry. Popular sources reflected this surge of interest in matters psychological, and beginning in the 1950s, the new term "empathy" was introduced to the American public in a variety of popular venues and cultural media, such as newspapers and television. As an intensive method of getting inside another's emotional experience, "empathy" was seen as an emotional tool for creating balanced relationships in the family and for understanding others from different cultures and ethnicities. In a series of speeches and essays composed during the turmoil of the civil rights movement, the psychologist Kenneth Clark called for the cultivation of empathy as a form of emotional intelligence, and a means to achieve greater harmony and understanding between whites and blacks. This paper explores the introduction of the new concept of "empathy" to a post war American public, and argues that this form of emotional understanding was touted by psychological experts and embraced in the popular domain as a humanistic moral technology to bridge increasingly evident differences across varied cultures and ethnic groups.