Boris Johnson emerged from 10 Downing Street yesterday (28 April) looking like had been duffed up. Leaning heavily on his podium outside the black painted door of Number 10 he proceeded to tell congratulate us, the NHS and the economy for surviving the first round of an unexpected mugging by a thug. But of course, this wasn’t unexpected, the government watched for weeks while China, and then Italy dealt with their outbreaks of the virus, and scientific, and indeed political, advice on planning for pandemics had been developed in 2006, 2011 and 2014. But Boris’ language, and that of the cabinet who have been keeping his government staggering along for the last couple of weeks, reeling under the onslaught of this thuggish mugging, is that of a sudden and unexpected attack, a blindsided mugging.
This is the language of white male privilege. The language of a man who doesn’t need to plan, who wanders into unsafe parts of a strange tourist town, slightly tipsy on the local booze, overconfident and brimming with machismo. He isn’t afraid, he owns the streets, and doesn’t expect to be mugged. He is the most powerful and privileged person he encounters as he stumbles around the cobbled back alleys, until he meets a local. I am a white privileged male, and it has taken me decades to even begin to become aware of my privilege. It is so natural to me, it is even less obvious to me than the air around me. Wherever I go, I meet people of equal power who look like me, speak like me and act like me. When I walk into a meeting, correction, when I drop into an online meeting, the person chairing that meeting is most likely to look like me, speak like me, or even be me. If I’m allowed out for a walk I can walk around the streets with little to no fear of assault, even hidden behind my new ‘surgical burka’ I represent no threat to other white men like me, but other men who are not like me, who have different colour skin and eyes to me, who can’t access a surgical mask and have to wear a black scarf, they frighten me. I’m not female, so all the public spaces are open to me without fear of physical, verbal or sexual violence. If I were to be mugged, I would be surprised. In the district I live, a multi-cultural, high crime, high violence part of town, it’s not unusual for men of colour to be involved in crime, violent altercations with one another. There are prostitutes and drug-dealers, but I’m white and privileged so I don’t really get to know about what happens to them at 3am in the park. There are women whose lives are hidden behind curtains and behind the veil, by choice and by oppression. When these people get mugged, and it happens very frequently, they are not surprised. The language of war, thuggery and mugging may make sense of white privileged males in Cabinet office. It may give them a sense of machismo purpose, but it’s self-defeating because they are still essentially taming a incredibly complex problem. Over-simplifying a problem may make it easy to communicate to the public, but also betrays a lack of understanding. So far, only Jim Dickinson of WonkHE writing about the responses of the University sector to Covid-19 has managed to understand that this pandemic is what Russel Ackoff, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber identified in the 1970s as a ‘wicked problem’. This isn’t an isolated, unexpected mugging by a solitary thug in a back alley of a white privileged male who should have known better, but a socio-political situation that is affecting the most vulnerable in society the worst. It requires the skills and experiences of not just epidemiologists and mathematical models, but whole communities of social innovators.
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