Even though comparisons are always imperfect, I often rely on metaphors to understand the world. I need to use things I understand to learn about things I don’t understand. Something I have trouble with is “social imagination” and the ability to understand how somebody feels unless they tell me directly, even if I still care immensely about how they feel. Because of this, I’ve never understood what was meant by the instruction to place myself in someone’s shoes. My dad and I have the same size feet but walking in his shoes is still confusing because they have been worn down differently than I can understand or articulate on my own. I can pretend to know how other people feel but I will still be limited to my own experiences, biases, and perception of the world. Not even neurotypicals can force their mind into someone else’s experience; they can only provide their closest approximation. Being able to compare and contrast things I don’t understand to things I do understand allows me to grasp a more concrete and holistic understanding of the mysterious topic. This obviously comes with issues because metaphors are imperfect and I’m bound to run into those differences. I know that racism, ableism, and homophobia are very different experiences but I still want to be able to understand racism to the best of my ability even if I don’t experience it. I do understand ableism and homophobia to some degree as I experience both so a lot of my work of recognizing and combatting racism in myself and the world has come from my understanding of other prejudices. I know to never say that racism is just like homophobia or that it’s 63% homophobia and 37% ableism or something like that. However, I can still use what I do know to understand a bit more. If I told someone that something was ableist, I would never want them to go Google another opinion so they don’t have to believe me. Therefore, I would never do that to someone labeling something as racist. As someone in seminary training to be a pastor, I’m annoyed when people quote the Bible to me to explain why I’m going to hell for being gay so I’m definitely not going to find a random Martin Luther King Jr. quote to tell Black people how to protest. Mainly, I work to find stories and testimonies online where I can learn about racism directly and I don’t have to “step into someone’s shoes” to guess what it would be like. I can learn about different situations and then use comparisons to better understand the emotionality behind these experiences. People seem to not like comparisons for some reason but the way it connects different topics throughout my life have made me a smarter and better person. It takes something I can understand more fully and allows me to more closely, although never perfectly, understand someone else’s feelings or struggle and be an ally for them in a way I normally can’t comprehend as well.
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