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In recent years, educational initiatives promoting empathy as a pathway to understanding and global citizenship have surged (see for example ; ; ). Yet viewed through a decolonial lens, this moral revival raises critical questions: after centuries of colonisation, extraction and epistemicide, what histories or hierarchies might it conceal or reproduce?

Far from a moral breakthrough, this blog post argues that the institutionalisation of empathy risks rebranding the colonial gaze, replacing domination with paternalism and emotional performance, while preserving hierarchies through new moral vocabularies.

‘The institutionalisation of empathy risks rebranding the colonial gaze, replacing domination with paternalism and emotional performance, while preserving hierarchies through new moral vocabularies.’

Empathy as rebranding

In contemporary education, empathy is often presented as a teachable skill. Yet as Fanon (1963) argues, colonialism functioned through territorial domination as well as through an epistemic order that rendered the colonised less human, and thereby less deserving of empathy. This legacy persists today. Moral pedagogies often centre the emotional growth of privileged groups while positioning others as passive sources of trauma or inspiration (Pedwell, 2014). This form of emotional extraction may encourage students to care yet seldom prompts them to interrogate how their comfort is entangled with the marginalisation of others. Who, then, truly benefits?

This shift from colonising to empathising is not a rupture but a rebranding of imperial domination as moral authority. Where empire once sought to ‘civilise’, postcolonial empathy now universalises Eurocentric moral frameworks, determining who is deemed worthy of moral attention. For example, many schools cite impartiality when discussing Palestine (see DfE, 2025), effectively silencing discussion, while responding differently to Ukraine (see CAGE, 2022; Askew, 2023). In doing so, such institutions uphold colonial power structures, dictating which injustices are recognised and who receives empathy, thereby sustaining selective authority through the politics of empathy.

Empathy as containment

As hooks (2000) warned, love and care without justice pacifies rather than liberates. In prevailing pedagogical practices, empathy often reassures the privileged of their moral virtue while leaving structural inequalities unchallenged. Wynter (2003) critiques this through the ‘overrepresented Man’; the white, Western subject whose moral, epistemic and emotional norms dominate global imaginaries. Rather than pursuing justice, this subject risks self-referential engagement by seeking to ‘understand’ the other, primarily to affirm his own ethical superiority. Hence empathy functions as a strategy of containment, projecting the semblance of ethical engagement while maintaining and legitimising the very power structures that produce inequality.

Empathy as abstraction and aesthetic

Simpson (2017) argues that Indigenous pain is frequently co-opted for settler moral growth rather than supporting Indigenous sovereignty, turning trauma into a resource while ignoring ongoing injustices. Many empathy initiatives follow a similar pattern, aestheticising suffering and reducing structural violence to individual experiences of emotion.

For example, initiatives like highlight narratives of hardship and resilience yet often sidestep how colonial legacies and global inequalities produce these conditions. Historical specificity is frequently neglected, and colonialism, racial capitalism, enslavement and Indigenous dispossession are either downplayed or completely omitted. The result is a depoliticised emotional pedagogy which moralises inequality as a deficit of understanding, rather than as the product of entrenched power systems.

Hence, teaching students to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ without asking how those shoes were made, or by whom, obscures the structural roots of oppression and risks replacing critical consciousness with sentimentality.

Towards decolonial empathy

As Fanon (1963) reminds us, genuine humanism requires decolonisation. Without structural redress, emotional resonance remains a mere evasion. A decolonial approach to empathy therefore begins with historical and political grounding, while asking who is being empathised with, who is doing the empathising, and for what purpose. It prioritises solidarity over sentimentality, moving from storytelling and passive consumption of experiences to active relational accountability.

Such an approach decentres liberal Western moral frameworks, which often emphasise abstract notions of justice and individual virtues, framing empathy as an internalised skill or detached from the historical and structural conditions that produce inequality (see Rawls, 1971). In contrast, ethical traditions such as Ubuntu (Southern African philosophies of mutual humanity), iḥsān (Islamic ethics of moral excellence and relational care) and Buen Vivir (Andean concepts of communal and ecological wellbeing) root empathy in relationality, reciprocity and collective justice.

Practically, this means reimagining curricula where emotional learning, participatory dialogue, and action against systemic inequities are inseparable, forming a coherent practice of decolonial care.

Conclusion

To empathise without structural critique is to moralise inequality. In education, empathy must move beyond emotional performance towards collective responsibility and structural awareness. Without this shift, kindness remains a moral privilege. The challenge, then, is not to teach students how to feel for the ‘other’, but to improve the systems that produce that need, recognising that justice, not emotion, is the foundation of true empathy. Only then can education enact solidarity, repair and the possibility of a truly decolonial humanism.

References

Askew, J. (2023, November 20). Censorship and safety: How the Israel Hamas war is affecting students at schools in Britain. Euronews.

CAGE International. (2022). CAGE briefing: Understanding Ukraine and Palestine solidarity in UK schools.

Department for Education [DfE]. (2025). Political impartiality in schools: Guidance.

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Weidenfeld.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love. William Morrow.

Pedwell, C. (2014). Affective relations: The transnational politics of empathy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Belknap Press.

Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.