Covid-19 meant a shift in how we interacted in public places. The government knew they could not govern our every interaction. Instead they set us a moral standard: we were to ‘be kind’. Many of my European friends envied us a leadership that fostered empathy. But I had a concern: empathy is defined by your understanding of another’s experiences. Bluntly put, kindness is not the same as justice. So in practice what did this slogan, to ‘be kind’, foster?
To provide some background, Aotearoa NZ lives with colonialism. Its colonialist origins lie in the British State’s deceptive disruption of Māori sovereignty. Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing conversation about how we respond to this past so as not to perpetuate the injustices experienced and being experienced by Māori. In spatial disciplines, we often turn to ‘participation’ to develop justice. Yet, academic scholars have also reviewed the idea that participation is intrinsically linked to spatial justice (Calderon, 2019; Egoz et al., 2018). In Māori scholar, Tina Ngata’s, book, ‘Kia Mau’, she also addresses how, “indigenous participation on the margin is vital to the centring of the coloniser” (Ngata, 2019, p. 46). It is these concerns, with the dynamics within participation, which this essay aligns itself with.
The problem with supporting ‘correct’ kindness
Our leadership did successfully reform my mundane, everyday use of public places. This was done using specific, everyday examples of how to be kind - by shopping once a week or creating neighbourhood Facebook groups. Our daily government briefings and regular communications from our science commentators were focused on speaking to our neighbourly kindnesses. They were both encouraging and discouraging of our ideas for how to feel and be together in this lockdown world. We were encouraged to go for walks with our children and hunt for Teddy Bears in one other’s windows (Tokalau, 2020), but at the same time, discouraged from holding driveway drinks with our neighbours (Satherley, 2020). This support for ‘correct’ kindness was admired and desired by my European friends. They floundered between policing their neighbours, and devising their own boundary pushing schemes.
However, as the lockdown continued, some Māori articulated points of injustice that I did not experience in this project of kindness. The slogan ‘be kind ‘was inadequate in addressing disparities and differences between Pākehā (NZ European) and Māori’s relationship to public space. To exemplify, this essay turns to two public debates. Firstly, in relation to tangihanga (Maori funerals), the government seemed to struggle with the question of the harm done by restricting gathering. Unlike my own situations, there was not a simple response to how this change would work. For Māori leaders who struggled, one problem was “an absence of engagement with Māori in the process of its framing” (Ngātokowhā Peters, 2020).This resulted in a disruption to tikanga (Māori convention), rather than an easeful shift to a new way of gathering. In contrast, community checkpoints on roads, set up by Māori, recognised the health inequalities within those communities. Many Maori and Pākehā recognised the value in the service they provided, and some sought to develop a legal case for them (Harris & Williams, 2020). This centring of a Māori approach was supportive of social and physical well-being, and was a way to ‘be kind’ to our vulnerable citizens.
