47 pages • 1 hour read
Jamil ZakiThe War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World
Jamil ZakiNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Caring Too Much”
Content Warning: The Chapter 5 Summary mentions infant death.
Zaki opens Chapter 5 by recounting his own experiences with the intensive care nursery (ICN) at the Benioff Children’s Hospital, located within the University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center. He and his wife spent days at the ICN after their daughter, Alma, suffered a stroke during her birth. Zaki expresses deep gratitude for Alma’s neonatologist and the unit’s associate medical director, Liz Rogers. Liz, alongside other doctors, nurses, and staff, showed Zaki and his wife profound empathy, something they do for all families. Zaki describes them as “empathic superheroes” (95), but he raises several questions: “Can they possibly sustain this rhythm and, if so, for how long? What does their care cost” (95)?
To address these questions, Zaki returns to the ICN as a researcher nearly two years after Alma’s birth. One of the workers he observes is Melissa Liebowitz, the unit’s newest doctor who shadows Liz. Melissa and Liz oversee Francisco, who was born 12 weeks premature. He suffers from necrotizing enterocolitis, a fatal condition which causes brain hemorrhage and failing intestines. The team decides to operate on Francisco, which is unsuccessful.
Zaki recounts how the team gives the news to Francisco’s parents, who are Mexican immigrants, through an interpreter:
[Francisco’s parents] sit on a chrome bench holding each other, faces turned down. Seven ICN staff members emerge. They yank at other benches on the terrace, but find them bolted down, and decide to kneel instead, encircling the parents like worshippers at a shrine (101).
With this passage, Zaki illustrates the ICN staff’s deep empathy while delivering news of death.
Francisco’s death takes a toll on the ICN staff. Melissa feels guilty that Francisco might have felt pain during the surgery because his heart rate spiked. She confesses to Zaki that, “I should have been a better advocate for him” (106). The team practices different forms of self-care to help process Francisco and other infants’ deaths. Zaki cautions that self-care and professional support alone will not fix the high burnout rate seen in healthcare workers. The former does not address the root cause of burnout, and healthcare workers often do not use the latter.
Zaki turns to ways in which “caregivers are becoming more purposeful about empathy—finding ways to combat burnout and better support one another” (108). One method is meditation, which helps healthcare workers “turn their focus inward, diagnosing their own emotions the way they would a patient’s illness” (112). By understanding their own emotions, medical staff can then change them. Healthcare workers recognize when they start to take on their patients’ emotions (empathetic distress), which helps them change their distress to concern (empathetic concern). Concern enables them to feel for their patients without taking on their emotions. Zaki notes that meditation techniques need additional research to determine their impact on reducing healthcare workers’ distress, but he finds the preliminary results promising.
To Zaki, it is crucial that researchers continue to help healthcare workers “wield empathy in more useful ways” (117). Doing so will benefit countless families who interact with medical staff. It will also improve the health and burnout rates of healthcare workers, enabling the sustainability of the healthcare profession. This, in turn, will mean more families can receive care.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Kind Systems”
Zaki notes that “we copy what other people do and think, or at least what we think they think. One problem here is that we’re often wrong” (119). People conform to extreme viewpoints, such as those of cable news hosts or social media influencers, because these tend to be the loudest, making us mistakenly believe they are cultural norms. These viewpoints are often highly polarizing, emphasizing an “insiders versus outsiders” mentality. For this reason, people who conform to these viewpoints have a hard time holding on to empathy.
However, Zaki underscores that cultural norms do not always promote less empathy. In some cases, they inspire empathy. Zaki notes that “many moral revolutions begin when extreme voices demand that we acknowledge one another’s experiences” (121). Conformity can lead to much needed social change if it pulls “people toward healthy or kind actions” (122). Zaki explores two examples, the first example being warrior policing.
Sue Rahr, who leads police training for Washington state, is trying to combat the “warrior mentality” (125) in police officers—which encourages them “to view themselves as combatants embedded in dangerous communities” (125). Rahr’s training focuses on how police officers should be “guardians of democracy” (128), who work with community members to keep them safe. Zaki notes that the concept of guardianship is ambiguous. Rahr and her staff make this concept tangible by removing the warrior-like culture from police training, teaching recruits about racial bias, mental health, and emotional intelligence, and having recruits practice managing volatile situations.
While guardianship values are spreading to other cities, it also has critics. Some feel that Rahr is not training her officers to respond to volatile situations, while others argue that her teachings are nothing new—that she repackaged “standard police ideals in prettier language and took credit for them” (132). There are also police officers who believe Rahr has created greater distance between police and their communities by elevating warrior policing.
Zero tolerance policies in schools are a second example of warrior policing. They represent “norms that are meant to promote order but create animus instead” (137). Students who break certain school rules under zero tolerance face predetermined penalties, which are often severe (i.e., law enforcement referrals or suspensions). Zaki notes that “Black and brown children are three times more likely to be suspended than their white peers” (137), highlighting the structural racism embedded in zero tolerance. Under zero tolerance, a teacher’s job becomes protecting other students from so-called dangerous peers rather than understanding students who are going through tough times.
Psychology professor Jason Okonofua experienced unfair discipline first-hand. After Jason refused suspension for an issue he wasn’t involved in, the vice principal referred him to the police. A judge expunged Jason’s record after seeing his file, which included his class grades, and told him to “get out of here and tell your school to never send you back” (139). This experience with zero tolerance greatly impacted Jason. He currently studies racial disparities in education, in the hopes of creating solutions to combat these inequities. Jason conducts research on programs that “teach children how to regulate themselves and care for one another” (140). These programs are making a difference, helping students emotionally and academically.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Prior to Chapter 5, Zaki focused on how people need to build more empathy. But in Chapters 5-6, he explores what happens when people have too much empathy. In Chapter 5, Zaki focuses on healthcare workers’ empathetic distress. Compared to other professions, healthcare workers are at higher risk of “compassion fatigue” (96), which is then they think they can give patients more support than is possible. Healthcare workers often take on their patients’ emotions rather than simply feeling their emotions. Empathetic distress has numerous health risks, including exhaustion, detachment, and burnout. These hazards also spread to healthcare workers’ patients. Patients might not receive explicit details about their prognosis because their doctor or nurse sugarcoats the difficult news to avoid causing them more suffering; they might also receive poor care from disconnected healthcare workers.
Zaki expresses a great deal of hope that a healthier level of empathy among healthcare workers is possible. Strategies that seem especially promising are those that help healthcare workers determine the difference between empathetic distress and empathetic concern, such as meditation. Preliminary findings suggest that meditation helps caregivers “strike a delicate balance between connection and self-protection” (116). Zaki underscores that caring too much does not have to be the norm in the healthcare system. Healthcare workers can still help people with a healthier level of empathy.
In Chapter 6, Zaki turns to police training, noting that “the warrior mentality places cops in a psychological powder keg. They come to believe that their only option is to dominate citizens rather than listen to them” (126). This belief impacts empathy. Police officers often have little empathy for community members because they view them with distrust. They have greater empathy for fellow police officers, as they all face serious risks to their lives while on duty. At the time of the book’s publication, more than 60 percent of police officers disagreed that officer-involved shootings were an issue within police culture. In contrast, 60 percent of the public thought this was an issue. This data highlights that police have greater empathy for each other than for their communities, even in situations where they have made poor decisions.
To build bridges between police officers and community members, Zaki recommends that the former need to first decrease their ingroup empathy. One way to do this is by increasing the accountability of police officers. Police need to be held legally accountable when they use excessive force. Ironically, Sue Rahr, who promotes greater empathy between the police and their community, did not agree that accountability was an issue. This further reiterates the strength of ingroup empathy: Even in trying to break the mold, Rahr still harbored a “warrior training” mentality.
In previous chapters, Zaki focused on the mindsets of individual people. But in Chapter 6, he leverages Jason Okonofua’s work to illustrate how “we should also think about where those mindsets come from” (143). People choose how to interpret their surroundings. This can be problematic when they view their environment through a racist, sexist, or classist lens, as often happens with zero tolerance policies. Children from marginalized groups often suffer more under these policies than their white peers because some teachers assume they will be problematic. Zaki underscores that “we also create environments together” (143). When teachers bring preconceived notions into the classroom, they fuel distrust among students—resulting in a low-empathy classroom.
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