Presentation and Projection

There's this girl at school. She's obviously really smart and she looks at things from a perspective I don't see. Probably because of where she came from-but sometimes I find myself very frustrated. Today we were talking about understanding in performance theory and narrative. She kept saying that it wasn't possible to understand what it meant to be X because you are Y and can never live the life of X. Well, this is true in the most concrete of terms-but she seemed completely closed to the possibility that one can project oneself into a persona.
So I mentioned the Sister. Who tells me one of her scenes for her showcase is a Chicana and the other is an army wife from the city or New Jersey in the Korean War era. Well Little Girl has never been Chicana and no would mistake her pale visage for being of Latin heritage. Yet, she is able to project onto her personage the image of being that person. She is able to be many things she has not experienced but through empathyor some concept for which I do not have a word but I think it is a basic concept humans understand-the idea of knowing how someone feels. Similarly-I can write about events in a way that people are able to understand what I am writing about. If I wrote about my dangerous life in my groupie days would you not know what I was saying unless you experienced it? Is it reasonable to presume that because I never drove a Taxi I don't understadnd what Harry Chapin is singing about? Due to the fact that I've never tended bar in Boston I can't possibly understand an episode of Cheers and since I've never been a peasant I have no right discussion folklore. Isn't it about as blind as if one attempted to not learn anything that took place outside of one's own life to say that is it not possible to understand what another person is saying? Isn't empathy the point being put across? Aren't we supposed to understand-not be-just comprehend on some level beyond knowledge that such a condition exists?
It's very frustrating. No, I don't think you need to experience what I did to know what it feels like to have what happened to me happen. Isn't a transcription of my account enough? Or even vague details. Aren't people able to infer knowledge based on their experience as human beings with similar experiences-positive or negatively similar. What logic implies that it is necessary to be held down chased accused and terrified to understand that sensation?
It really frustrated me to think that someone couldn't understand that it is possible to re-live a moment that one never lived courtesy of the stories of a person who did.