During the AIDS epidemic, people treated empathy like a dangerous contagion. Today, many still demonize it – calling it weakness or “wokeness”. But empathy has always been fragile. It’s what keeps us human, and what keeps history from repeating itself.
When I was a kid, our family used secrets to protect ourselves. My mom did not tell us anything until my uncle was very sick. She feared we’d confide in our friends or a teacher and that one slip would expose him. Silence, she believed kept our family safe.
But silence is a strange shelter; it keeps the world out, and keeps the pain in. I learned early that secrecy doesn’t just hide the truth; it reshapes your entire world.
I still remember the day my mom’s coworkers found out. When my uncle John passed, Erica and I were sixteen years old. Old enough to take turns greeting people at his visitation. They saw the red AIDS ribbons on our black dresses and said, “We had no idea”. We said, “We know”.
So much said in so few words.
The Cost of Protecting Ourselves
I understood my mom even then. We grew up in Alabama in the 1990’s, surrounded by church pews and quiet judgment. Faith could turn into condemnation faster than breath. She wasn’t silent out of shame- she was protecting him.
Back then, admitting someone in your family had AIDS could destroy a reputation, a career, or a life. Silence felt like love. It felt like safety.
But it also became out inheritance.
The inheritance shows up in quieter places: the pause before mentioning mental illness, the calculation of who is “safe” enough to tell.
Silence doesn’t only shield – it isolates. It keeps grief from becoming shared, and healing from becoming possible.
Fear Finds New Targets
Today, I feel that same shadow of silence spreading across the country again.
Different decade, different language- same instinct.
In the 90’s, fear made people see those with HIV/AIDS as threats instead of humans. Now, I see that reflex aimed at immigrants.
Back then, the message was: some lives matter less.
Now it’s the same message – directed at different people.
When empathy is framed as weakness, people become priorities to manage instead to lives to protect.
Breaking Inheritance
Every time we stay silent to feel safe, the cycle continues.
We trade truth for belonging, and repeat the harm we swore we’d never allow again.
When I write now-about loss, music, survival – I’m unlearning that silence. Each story becomes an act of resistance against the belief that quiet equals safe.
If the past taught me anything, it’s this: what we bury doesn’t disappear. It lives in us. waiting for light.
Empathy Isn’t a Threat
Empathy kept people alive when policy didn’t.
It made nurses hold hands they weren’t “supposed” to touch.
It made my mom’s coworkers hug two teenage girls at a visitation and whisper, “we’re here”.
Empathy is the refusal to look away. When the world turns cold, it’s the hand that grips yours anyway.
Those who fear empathy usually fear accountability. Once you truly see someone’s pain, it becomes harder to justify the systems that cause it.
Empathy isn’t weakness, it’s courage. It forces us to face our history and our reality.
It asks us to speak when silence feels safer.
A society that treats empathy as a problem starts to mistake cruelty for strength. But empathy is not a threat – it’s what binds us together.
