Empathy plasticity: decolonizing and reorganizing Wikipedia and other online spaces to address racial equity

ABSTRACT

The spring of 2020 represented a watershed-moment-in-the-making, as broad, inclusive discussions on how to best cultivate discursive and policy mechanisms towards racial equity presaged a reckoning with America’s vast ethnoracial disparities. However, many of the remediatory actions proposed and thus far implemented have failed to address historic, epistemologically-embedded forms of racism that anchor and validate repressive informatics structures and thereby enable knowledge colonization. Focussing on a social psychological concept of “empathy plasticity”, the critical developmental window in which humans begin to formulate attitudes and dispositions on phenomena around them, this commentary explores how a re-organization of online spaces, such as Wikipedia and social media, can be used to more holistically present knowledge on topics in the realm of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Such a technocratic shift is one means of content democratization and dialectical gatekeeping to ensure our contemporary epistemology acquires and maintains methodological, ideological and ethical merit.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race Theory
• epistemology
• pedagogy
• racism
• social media
• Wikipedia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.