How Does It Feel to be a Problem?

I enjoyed some of the readings from this week. Many things caught my attention that I did not know before or was unaware of. For instance, I thought the Tuskegee experiment was the key to Black people not trusting White medicine or treatments. But then I read about how medical racism goes back at least 100 more years before Tuskegee.

I read in horror how three Black women were operated on over 30 times without anesthesia. I read about how Black men were buried up to their shoulders to test the affect of prolonged exposure to sun, and how the Tuskegee experiment should be called the U.S Public Health Syphilis Study.

It is depressing to see how the politics of cultural identity use race and ethnicity to the advantage of the White people. Education about such issues sounds more like assimilation than aculturation. "In the United States, race allows us to define the problem within a historical context, whereas ethnicity provides us with the cultural identity framework for affirming meaning of psotive health and generating solutions to health problems" (Airhihenbuwa, 2007, p. 57).

Throughout history, specifically Black history, violence has been constructed as a Black experience. Race and ethnicity both have roles to play in understanding experiences and history, but such roles have been ignored by Eurocentric idealism. Race has been considered as a source of problem, but never as an identity marker where "understanding of race is critical to contextualizing the many variants of racism that manifest in the United States today" (p. 60).

It is this understanding that I want to embark upon. It is this understanding that I want to be the corner stone of my academic journey. I want to re-look into issues taken for granted, from the viewpoint of the underprivileged and I want to try to assist them in getting a voice. After Eurocentric ideas, we now have started to see Afrocentric ones. What about Asiacentric views? That is what I want to get involved with.

I am eager to find new truths and see how culture acts as my lens for finding it.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

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...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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