Once upon a time (actually, a few weeks ago), I joined an online book launch. The conversation was thoughtful, challenging, and familiar. Then, almost like fog rolling in, something began to change. Names started appearing. Organisations. Connections. Who was linked to whom? Who should we be wary of? Who was making things worse?
As I listened, I found myself imagining another screen glowing somewhere else. Another group gathered in another room, perhaps asking exactly the same questions about us.
Different people. Different politics. Different beliefs. Same mapping. Same suspicion. Same villain.
Everybody knows where the villain is. And it is never in the mirror.
October is a good month for villains.
Schools start filling with ghosts, spiders and monsters. Somewhere, there will probably be a cardboard creature crouched under a desk. You can see just enough of it from the doorway. Two eyes. A hand. A shadow. There is something strangely comforting about knowing exactly where the monster is. We can point to it. Name it. Warn people about it. And once we know where the monster is, we know where it isn’t.
The monster is always somewhere else
In our training, we sometimes ask four deliberately uncomfortable “Who is more racist…” Slido questions. (play along if you like, no fence sitting)
- Who is more racist, the UK or the USA?
- Who is more racist, the police or teachers? If we are working with youth workers, we swap teachers for youth workers.
- Who is more racist, your local authority or your school?
- Who is more racist, you or your colleagues?
They are not scientific questions. We are interested in what happens as the question moves closer to home.
A few things tend to happen as we move through the questions. Responses get slower. The room gets quieter. Phones that were being held out in front of people somehow end up a little closer to their bodies. Around question three, the clarification questions begin: “What do you mean by racist?” By the time we arrive at ourselves, the certainty we started with has mostly gone.
Overwhelmingly, people tend to locate the problem furthest away from themselves.
- America.
- The police.
- The local authority.
- My colleagues.
That makes sense. Most of us want to believe we are decent people. We know our own intentions, our doubts, our context and all the reasons behind the things we do.
If you’re reading this thinking, “Could never be me,” then… boo! You’re doing it now.
Us and them
Richard Valencia gives us useful language for what may be happening here. In his 2020 book International Deficit Thinking, Valencia adds a seventh characteristic to his deficit thinking model: ‘Othering and binarization’.”
Othering turns difference into something loaded with value. Binarization then makes the world easier to organise: us and them, normal and deviant, good and bad. The hero and the villain.
Valencia also writes about our attraction to simple explanations. We are often quicker to explain somebody else’s behaviour by what we think is wrong with them than by looking at the circumstances around them.
The villain makes a complicated story easier to understand. It also makes it easier to understand ourselves.
We turn good and bad into a kind of moral hammock: hero at one end, villain at the other, and us relaxing comfortably in the middle. I mean, sure, we all have some work to do. We could all be better. But at least I’m not ________. (Insert villain here.)
Schools need villains too
Schools are no different.
The disruptive child. The aggressive parent. The uncaring teacher. The family who “never engages”. The member of staff who “lets them get away with everything” The school who “is worse at that than we are” . Once someone becomes the problem, the rest of the story starts to organise itself around them.
If the child is the problem, remove the child. If the parent is the problem, manage the parent. If the teacher is the problem, retrain the teacher.
Going back to those four questions, imagine we are standing in a school hall and 78% of staff think their colleagues are more racist than they are.
Well, that’s easy then.
Get rid of the 78%.
Problem solved. Racism sorted. Maybe give the remaining 22% a well-done sticker .
Except, of course, everyone in the room is somebody else’s colleague.
This reminds me of one of our favourite quotes, and one we shared on the Class 13 Instagram years ago. That is the problem with needing a villain. Everyone can oppose racism while locating the racist somewhere else.
What happens if, instead of looking for the racist person, we start looking at racism as something all of us can reproduce?
What if there are no villains?
And what if the idea of the villain is the thing getting in our way?
Not because nobody does terrible things. Not because racism, abuse, misogyny or injustice become less serious when we understand where they come from. Not because power is equally distributed, or because the person harmed and the person causing harm carry the same responsibility.
But because, in a world where each of us will be the villain in somebody else’s story, perhaps “villain” does not actually tell us very much.
When we cause harm, we rarely imagine ourselves suddenly dangling from the villain end of that hammock. We know our intentions. We know our context, the pressure we were under and all the things that led to that moment.
So we shuffle around a little, explain what happened, and somehow find ourselves comfortably back in the middle.
I could have handled that better, but…
I was stressed.
I was trying to help.
I didn’t mean it like that.
I didn’t really have a choice.
Some of those things may even be true.
The harm is also true.
Bad or Dangerous?
Michel Foucault once put it like this: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.” There is something important in that distinction. Bad sends us straight back to the hammock. Good at one end. Bad at the other. Us, somewhere comfortably in between. Dangerous asks something different. Not, “Am I one of the bad people?” but, “What am I capable of?” What harm might I participate in while still understanding myself as caring, fair or just?
None of us gets to make innocence our permanent address. Perhaps the challenge, then, is not to exorcise our own villain, but to become more familiar with them.
To understand the moments when we have caused harm. The certainty we had at the time. The explanations we reached for afterwards. The ways we shuffled ourselves comfortably back towards the middle. Because if I can understand how I caused harm without reducing myself to the harm I caused, perhaps I can extend that same complexity to somebody else.
And that creates the possibility of a different kind of conversation. One where we do not need a confession from the villain before change can begin. One that moves us away from accusation and towards empathy, curiosity and accountability.
From pointing a finger at somebody to working alongside them to understand what happened, being honest about the harm we have caused too, and sharing what we are doing to make change possible.
Look under the desk again
Which brings me back to that online room. The people in that conversation cared deeply about injustice. I imagine the people in the parallel room on the other side cared deeply about something too. Perhaps the least useful question is: “Which room contains the villains?”
A more useful set of questions might be: What happened? Who was harmed? Where was the power? What made this possible? What needs to change? And what part of that change belongs to us?
Those questions do not give us the comfort of a villain. They do not allow us to point across the imaginary Zoom divide, condemn the people on the other side, close the laptop and return to the middle of the hammock reassured that the problem lives somewhere else.
When the monster looks back
They ask something more difficult of us. To stay curious about harm without becoming casual about it. To hold people accountable without reducing them to the worst thing they have done. To recognise differences in power and responsibility without turning those differences into a hierarchy of human worth. And, perhaps hardest of all, to recognise that the capacity to cause harm is not something possessed only by them.
Once we shine a light into one dark corner and name the monster, it becomes very easy to stop looking anywhere else. What is easier to miss is how much of our own hand is still pointing back towards us.
Perhaps that is where some of the work has to begin.
So this October, when we spot the monster under the desk, perhaps we resist the urge to simply point.
Maybe we pull up a chair.
Look a little longer.
Edge a little closer.
And, eventually, notice something uncomfortable.
[Jump scare]
They look an awful lot like us.
Because once we are willing to recognise our own capacity for harm, the distance between us and them becomes much harder to maintain.
And without that distance, perhaps there is nowhere left to hang the hammock.
