MIDDLEBURY, Vt. (AP) — A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is encouraging Middlebury College’s newest graduates to engage in “radical empathy.”
Journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson said at Sunday’s commencement that imagining how it would feel to walk in someone else’s shoes is a start.
But she said more is required in the “dangerously fragmented world we live in.” She said people must learn and listen “with a heart wide open” to understand another’s experience. Wilkerson said she learned empathy from her late father, who was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.
Student speaker Sebastian Tomas Sanchez said the world is full of hatred and fake news but that students have the tools to leave the world “a little more truthful, a little more kind.”