This week we read the article “On Thinking Like a State and Reading (about) Refugees” , where the author Carrie Dawson uses Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For to illustrate a point about how people do/ should treat refugee’s. Her basic argument is that we, as people, should not have to necessary like the people that feel the need to flee their home country in order to allow them that right to flee. While her basic idea seems easy enough to grasp for most people, I feel as though human tendencies make us more willing to extend help to those that we feel empathy for. Willie Van Peer, as we read at the beginning of last term, argues that empathy can be learned though things such as fiction, and that it can foster the necessary imagination needed to feel empathy and evoke change. I feel as if Dawson’s approach, and by extension Brands approach, are too idealistic for human nature to allow. Van Peer’s approach is more realistic, as it allows for people to grow- Brand and Dawson expect us to be at that point already. By expecting every and all people to be at a point where basic human rights are never questioned is a good idea, but in the real world sometimes people need a little push in the right direction- as it were. While I agree that human rights should be extended to all people, not only those who we feel empathy for I do not pretend to ignore human nature. People, it seems, react more positively towards other when given the chance to feel empathy for them. I think that the approach of Dawson and Brand is therefore a bit counter-intuitive, as it fosters an imagination in which the reader does not feel empathy- and perhaps instead feels dislike- towards the characters, and thus is unable to get to a point where they feel empathy.