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 Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

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 with w...

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...

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