On gratitude: The everyday practices of gratefulness

Over the week, in our monthly college magazine, I read the story of a colleague retiring. The story talked about how this colleague was such a key part of our college.

I was overwhelmed with powerful emotions reading the story.

A sense of sadness gripped me. The sadness seemed to appear like a tsunami, lifting me up in a tide of emotion.

Reading the story, I realized suddenly how I had been putting off sending a "thank you" note to this colleague for the past several weeks to tell them how much I appreciated their kindness and their presence in the college.

The rhythms and demands of building and sustaining community-academic-activist partnerships often mean that I am negotiating multiple commitments. Amidst these commitments, which are complicated by the various hate groups that target our anti-racist work at CARE, I end up spending a large part of my labor fire fighting.

But perhaps that is an excuse I give myself for not adequately expressing my gratitude to people that I ought to be expressing my gratitude to.

I was reminded in the week how this colleague offered a beautiful lesson in the possibilities that could be.

Over the past several months, they would make it a point to check on me and send their good wishes.

One evening, as the day was wrapping up, and I had called her to follow up on some documents, she shared with me the challenges in our personal lives in challenging the racism and hate that seem to flow into our familial and community networks.

The conversation was healing because it foregrounded this understanding that there are so many of us who are doing the everyday work of challenging hate. In different forms, in different contexts, across different organizing structures mobilized by the virality of hate on digital platforms.

These everyday practices of kindness are reminders of the reason why we challenge the organizing politics of hate.

As I write this note of gratitude, I am reminded of its power in imagining the possibilities of another world.

Another world that is rooted in the many possibilities of love.

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

Disinformation, Zionist propaganda, and free speech: Far right cancel culture

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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