I FEEL YOUR PAIN 71bullets at him on the doorstep of his own apartment building. One of the
most troubling details was that the officers mistook his wallet for a gun. The
officers were acquitted in a jury trial, but for many people the case remains
a painful example of police racism. It is also sometimes cited as an example
of contagious shooting, where groups of officers fire their weapons, without
thinking, after one of them discharges his or her weapon (Saletan 2006).
The event is only one instance of racialized violence between unarmed
citizens and police, which had occurred before and has been repeated since —
including in Ferguson, Missouri, just as Diallo’s friends and family were mark-
ing the fifteenth anniversary of his death. But it still strikes me, and many oth-
ers, as a particularly poignant and devastating example of misrecognition —
one that raises questions about how racialization and other power relations
inflect perceptions of others.^2 Diallo was shot not simply because his wallet
resembled a gun, but because to the police officers who killed him, Diallo
himself appeared to the officers to be someone who was about to use a gun.^ I
cannot help but remember him and others who have shared a similar fate, in
stark contrast to the discussion of theory of mind, action understanding, and
empathy that follows.
Neurons That Mirror
Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and other neuroscientists working in
the Parma lab first identified mirror neurons in macaques using record-
ings of the electrical activity of individual cells. Single- cell recording is an
invasive technique; it requires the insertion of tiny electrodes directly into
brain tissue in order to measure the action potential (electrical firing) of
individual neurons. To study mirror neurons in humans, the researchers
looked to neuroimaging labs such as the one run by Marco Iacoboni at
ucla. Using imaging technologies such as fmri, which are much less inva-
sive but also less precise, mirror neuron researchers have reported finding
“mirror” activity in humans, not only in the premotor cortex but also in
areas of the brain thought to be associated with affective and interpersonal
processes (for a review see Grafton 2009). They make two fundamental
claims about mirror neurons: they generate action understanding, and they
are the biological substrate of empathy.
First, mirror neurons are thought to register another’s actions in one’s