Sympathy for the oppressed can coexist with damaging representation of them

Evidence

It is only after taking into account that structure of sympathy and the kind of politics in which it is embedded that one can proceed to examine the more central issues in his representation of women, and then to relate those issues back to the generality of his political positions. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 245

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A privileged man’s pity toward disadvantaged women makes him prey to their demands. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1933; Humanitarian discourse recast colonized people as passive objects of sympathy rather than political agents — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 390; Western radical intellectuals must choose between granting oppressed expressive subjectivity or declaring them unrepresentable — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1777 (+1 more)

Related

• Pity presupposes inequality while empathy requires equal standing (similarity 0.79)