The ongoing face-off between federal immigration agents and well-organized neighborhood resistance in Minneapolis reminded me once again of the parable of the Good Samaritan and of how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently invoked it in his sermons.

According to Luke 10:24-37, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan as part of a Socratic dialogue with an expert in Jewish law. Jesus had said something about “loving your neighbor,” and the lawyer (probably trying to stump Jesus) asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In response, he heard the now-famous parable.

In brief, “a certain man” is walking on the seventeen-mile road between Jerusalem and Jericho, a treacherous area where bandits and robbers were known to prey on travelers. The Samaritan sees a man who has been severely beaten and left half-dead, lying by the side of the road. The Samaritan administers first aid, takes him to an inn, remains with him overnight, and even pays the bill.

In his sermon of April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, King preached about the parable and noted that two others had earlier bypassed the man lying beside the road after having asked themselves, ‘If I help this man, what will happen to me?’ But the Good Samaritan reverses the question and asks, “If I don’t help this man, what will happen to him?’ King was asking people to put themselves at some risk in service to what he called radical altruism, and I’ve chosen to call “dangerous empathy.” Recall that when King was murdered, he was in Memphis to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers. He was asking, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”

However, we can’t underestimate a major cultural impediment to putting dangerous empathy into widespread practice. Setting aside the 2 to 3 percent among us that can be classified as psychopaths (those at the highest levels of government, business, and the military), we see a society that has generally displayed an anesthetized conscience toward the suffering of others at home and abroad, especially if they’re not white.

We hear “the cry of the people,” but the moral sound waves pass through cultural baffles as capitalism deadens natural feelings of empathy and moral responsibility. It’s an awkward turn of phrase, but I’ve described this as culturally acquired empathy-deficit disorder, having its roots in our dominant socioeconomic system. The late primate scientist Frans de Waal captures the system’s need for this callousness when he asserts that “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

Given this reality, it’s my sense that King would be fulsomely praising the actions of the brave citizens of Minneapolis as they respond to their immigrant neighborhood communities living in constant fear and dread of deportation. He would undoubtedly commend them for modeling their law-enforcement monitoring on tactics first employed by Black activists in Watts in 1965, the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the American Indian Movement, which was founded in Minneapolis.

Along with counseling massive, nonviolent civil disobedience involving arrests, King would encourage activists not to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice that require dangerous empathy, that, in his words, “it’s better to cure injustice at its source than to get bogged down with a single individual effort.” He was raising deeper questions about how dangerous empathy should proceed when he wrote, “For years I have labored with the idea of refining the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

In Minneapolis, ordinary citizens are asking themselves, “If I don’t help my undocumented neighbors, what will happen to them?”I want to believe that their practice of dangerous empathy in confronting Gestapo-like thugs portends promise for wholesale structural change in the country. We should remain open to the possibility that a particularly egregious event will create a tipping point toward our biological predisposition for empathy and, with it, a further step toward working-class consciousness.

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