Skip to main content

On savarna fragility by Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt





Some brown folks in academia are as toxic and fragile as some white folks. 

Their hunger for both power, recognition and capacity for toxic positivity is just harmful to all those who are trying to do the “real” work of equity and social justice on the ground and face serious resistance from both masked and unmasked oppressors.
 
These are the same people whose capacity for any scholarly engagement is minimal. 

When you confront them with their transgressions (which are actually very passive-aggressive) they seem to disengage.


And if these are “savarna women,” then their brand of feminism is both self-serving and oppressive. They do little to put their bodies on the line to resist or organize, but jump up and take credit for solidarity movements and coalitions that others create (and they participate by standing on the periphery, and often performatively).


Once you recognize these folks, you really need to be aware of them. 

Call out when they lay any claim to movements that are not their own but co-opted, or ideas that you’ve created - which they will grab like spiders and give you no credit.


This is a kind of violence that must be addresssed. It is predatory.


This is the kind of lateral and horizontal violence that is most harmful to the very bodies that are desperately trying to remove themselves from a cycle of oppressions that they encounter — created by these savarna fake intellectuals.

Popular posts from this blog

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