Indifference is Not Neutral: Why Privilege Makes Us (White Women) Stop Seeing.

Jonelle
2 days ago
6 min read

The Crushing Weight of Indifference. How indifference operates as structural harm, and the psychology behind why privilege makes us stop seeing.

There are moments that don’t feel like violence. No one raises their voice. No slur is spoken. The meeting runs on time, the doctor checks the box, the news cycles forward. And yet, something in the room tightens. Something gets smaller. Someone gets smaller.

That something is the crushing weight of indifference.

“Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.” That’s Eli Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, speaking to the White House in 1999 about what he called the perils of indifference (1).

I’ve been thinking about indifference a lot lately. Not the dramatic kind that announces itself as cruelty, but the quiet kind that sounds like efficiency, neutrality, and just getting through the day.

What Does Indifference Actually Look Like?

Indifference looks like a dean referring to a human being as a “line item” in a budget meeting. It looks like a company president casually announcing layoffs during a pandemic while his own position was never at risk. It looks like a doctor’s flat affect when you describe months of pain.

In our latest episode, my mom Karen shared a memory from early in her teaching career. She sat in a meeting where her dean discussed staffing, and every reference to the position she wanted was reduced to a budget number. She walked out thinking: all I am is a line item. That phrase, the crushing weight of indifference, was the only language that fit what she felt.

I connected it to my own experience navigating the medical system during a health crisis that’s been going on for months. The pattern is the same: the person making the decision isn’t in the pain, so the pain becomes abstract, manageable, deferrable. We’ll deal with it later. It’s the language of indifference dressed up as professionalism.

Why Does Privilege Make Us Indifferent?

Indifference isn’t a character flaw. It’s a cognitive pattern, and researchers have identified at least three mechanisms that explain why it thrives in privileged spaces.

Construal Level Theory, developed by Trope and Lieberman and published in Psychological Review in 2010, shows that the further something is from our direct experience, the more abstract it becomes in our minds (2). Abstraction is the breeding ground of indifference. If you’ve never been proximate to poverty, discrimination, or displacement, those realities remain concepts, not truths.

The Empathy Gap, studied by behavioral economist George Lowenstein at Carnegie Mellon, demonstrates that we consistently underestimate the emotional and physical states of others when we ourselves are not in that state (3). When you’re employed, you might not grasp someone else’s financial fragility. When your mobility is fine, you forget that someone you love might be in constant pain.

And Social Baseline Theory, published by Lane, Luminet, Nave, and Orehek in 2015, found that people with greater access to resources develop stronger self-sufficiency and become less practiced at recognizing needs in others (4). The more cushion you have, the less your brain has been trained to notice when others have no cushion at all.

How Does Indifference Become Structural Harm?

Indifference is not neutral. It operates as a force. When a system is built by people who have never needed to notice certain kinds of pain, it will be indifferent to that pain by design. Healthcare systems that dismiss chronic pain. Workplaces that reduce people to budget numbers. Social safety nets full of holes that only become visible when you fall through them.

Research on racial empathy gaps shows this pattern is not evenly distributed. Studies in social psychology demonstrate that white participants consistently underestimate the pain and emotional complexity of Black and Brown individuals, even when consciously committed to fairness (5). The indifference isn’t intentional. It’s inherited, structural, and it compounds.

Karen asked a question during our conversation that I haven’t been able to shake: how does my indifference traumatize others? That reframing matters. It moves indifference from a passive state to an active one. It asks us to consider that our not-caring has weight, and that weight lands on someone.

What Is Self-Indifference, and How Does It Connect to Depression?

Self-indifference is the moment when you stop caring about your own wellbeing, not as a conscious choice but as a collapse of energy. It’s the point where fighting for yourself feels like more effort than giving up.

I named this during our conversation because I’ve experienced it through my health journey. There’s a difference between rest and self-indifference. Rest is intentional. It restores. Self-indifference is when you lose interest in your own recovery because the system keeps telling you to wait, to defer, to be patient. It mirrors depression: the flattening of care, the withdrawal from your own story.

I want to be clear that I’m not shaming anyone who lives in that space. Depression makes self-indifference a daily reality for millions of people. What I am saying is that naming it, seeing the difference between rest and giving up, is the first step toward choosing yourself again.

How Can White Women Interrupt Their Own Indifference?

If indifference is the crushing weight, proximity is the antidote. The research is clear: when we close the distance between ourselves and unfamiliar lives, empathy follows. Construal Level Theory tells us that bringing abstract realities into our direct experience is the mechanism that breaks the cycle (2).

Seek proximity. Visit a community kitchen. Sit in a space where you are the minority. Have a conversation with someone whose daily reality you have never had to consider.

Interrupt your abstractions. The next time you hear a statistic about immigration, gun violence, or displacement, ask: do I know one person this number represents? If not, find their story. Read a first-person account. Watch a documentary. Turn the number back into a name.

Trust people’s stories. Karen named this as her own growth edge: her default is now to trust the lived experience someone shares, even when her instinct wants to question it. She said something that stayed with me: I’m okay being duped one out of a hundred times if it means 99 people were heard.

Ask yourself: whose weight am I not feeling right now?

Stay curious, be open and keep waking up,

Jonelle

Where in your life have you been indifferent without realizing it? What shifted when you noticed? Leave a comment.

This article draws from conversations featured in the White Women Wake Up podcast, Season 2, Episode 15: “Indifference Is Not Neutral: The Empathy Gap White Women Don’t See,” aired on March 31, 2026. In this episode, Jonelle and Karen unpack three psychological theories that explain why privilege breeds indifference, share personal stories of medical and workplace indifference, and explore how self-indifference connects to depression.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the crushing weight of indifference?

The crushing weight of indifference refers to the cumulative harm caused when people or systems fail to care about others’ suffering. The phrase draws from Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel’s 1999 White House address, where he warned that indifference reduces others to abstractions. Research in social psychology shows that indifference is not neutral but operates as a structural force that compounds over time (1).

What is the empathy gap in psychology?

The empathy gap is a cognitive bias identified by behavioral economist George Lowenstein at Carnegie Mellon University. It describes how people consistently underestimate the emotional and physical states of others when they are not currently experiencing those states themselves. This gap widens along lines of race, class, and proximity to suffering (3).

How does privilege reduce empathy?

Social Baseline Theory, published by Lane, Luminet, Nave, and Orehek in 2015, found that people with greater access to resources develop stronger self-sufficiency and become less practiced at recognizing needs in others. Privilege trains the brain to stop noticing who has no safety net, not out of cruelty but because the skill of noticing was never required for survival (4).

How does indifference affect white women doing anti-racism work?

For white women engaged in anti-racism, indifference is often the default they are trying to unlearn. Construal Level Theory explains that racial injustice remains abstract until proximity makes it personal (2). The White Women Wake Up podcast explores how comfort, self-sufficiency, and distance from marginalized communities create a form of indifference that operates beneath conscious awareness.

What is self-indifference and how does it relate to depression?

Self-indifference is the state of losing interest in your own wellbeing, distinct from intentional rest. It mirrors patterns of depression where the energy to fight for yourself collapses. Recognizing the difference between rest and self-indifference is the first step toward re-engaging with your own care and recovery.

References

1. Wiesel, E. (1999). The Perils of Indifference. Speech delivered at the White House, April 12, 1999.

2. Trope, Y., & Lieberman, N. (2010). Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440-463.

3. Loewenstein, G. (2005). Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychology, 24(4), S49-S56.

4. Lane, S. P., Luminet, O., Nave, C. S., & Orehek, E. (2015). Social Baseline Theory and the social regulation of emotion. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of Emotion Regulation (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

5. Forgiarini, M., Gallucci, M., & Maravita, A. (2011). Racism and the empathy for pain on our skin. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 108.