When Canacee kneels to comfort a wounded, weeping falcon in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Squire's Tale, we might understand this scene as a tender connection across difference. But here Wan-Chuan Kao reads that moment through the lens of empathy to show how whiteness operates in medieval literature, often in the places we least expect them. A princess coded as foreign and a falcon coded as white and European meet in a gesture of pity, but their shared feeling doesn't erase racial difference. It produces it.

The idea that empathy can carry us across race—that feeling someone's pain is the same as understanding their world—still shapes how we talk about difference today. Premodern critical race studies helps us see the limits of that promise, and why "walking in someone else's shoes" has never been a cure for racism. Whether you teach Chaucer, courtly love, the history of race, or the ethics of empathy, this video gives students a sharp, teachable case for how whiteness gets built, valued, and carried forward through centuries.