An Emmy & The Rage of the Few

I learned of it before the house had woken. Autumn comes early to Palmerston North, and at that hour the light is the colour of weak tea, sliding low across the Manawatū. The dogs had not stirred. I was holding a phone, which is a foolish way to receive good news, and there it was. Prime Minister, the documentary about Dame the Rt. Hon. Jacinda Ardern, had taken the Emmy for best documentary. I have watched the film three times. It breaks me in the same place each time, and each time I let it, because some things are worth being broken by.

I came to this country in 2017. I was Provost Chair Professor and Head of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore, and there were other offers in front of me, the kind that arrive on heavy letterhead and measure a man by his salary band and his citation count. I turned them down for a cluster of islands at the bottom of the world. I did it because of a promise I had heard in the way a young leader spoke. She used the word kindness in public, where powerful people are trained never to use it, and she used it as though she expected to be held to it.

A critical theorist learns early to be suspicious of soft words from people with power. Kindness, in the mouths of the comfortable, is usually an alibi. But this was different. This was a head of government proposing that care could be a method of rule, a lever you pull rather than a feeling you announce. For a scholar who has spent two decades building voice infrastructures alongside the communities the state would rather keep quiet, that was not a sentiment. It was a wager on the politics of the possible. I packed up my life and made the bet. I have never once wanted it back.

The film walks me through the years I have lived inside. It carries me to the fifteenth of March, 2019, to Christchurch, to fifty-one people shot dead at prayer by a man fattened on the white-supremacist sludge of the feeds. I remember the days after better than I remember most of my own life. A leader who would not say the killer's name. A leader who put a scarf over her head and sat down among grieving Muslim families and did not perform her sorrow so much as climb inside theirs. People call that a gesture. It was a communicative act of the first order. It told a terrified minority, in a language deeper than policy, that they belonged to the body of the nation. Then the film moves into the pandemic, into the long, strange, suspended year, and shows a government that ruled by explanation rather than by edict, that spoke to a frightened population as if to adults who could be trusted with the truth. Seeing it scored and framed for the world, I finally understood what I had only felt while living it. This was a rare experiment in what care looks like when it gets its hands on the machinery of a state.

What lifts the film above a love letter is that it keeps the books. It records what came for her, and it does not flinch. Misogyny first, because it is always first, the oldest blade in the drawer. Then the white-supremacist grammar that reads a Tiriti-honouring, many-coloured Aotearoa as treason against a country that never existed. 

Then the disinformation, and here I want to be precise, because precision is where the fight is won. The disinformation did not drift in like fog. It was made. It was paid for. It was seeded into the platforms and amplified by an architecture that turns human cruelty into quarterly revenue and files it under engagement. Behind that architecture stand interests that have always grasped a simple thing. A leadership of care is a threat to a settler-colonial, neoliberal order that runs on extraction and on the daily lie that some lives are worth less than others. Kindness is dangerous to them for one reason above all. It works. So they set out to prove it could be made to fail. They wanted to drive a powerful woman embodying this value in global politics from office, and they wanted the watching world to take the lesson home: this is what happens to anyone soft enough to try.

I study this ecosystem for a living, mostly after midnight, once the household has gone dark and the only sound is the river. I read the threads, the manifestos, the campaigns that look spontaneous and are nothing of the kind. I have been on the receiving end of my own small share of it, the Hindutva networks, the far right Zionists, the white supremacists and the free-speech crusaders who decided that an Indian professor in New Zealand talking about racism was a provocation that had to be answered. One of them, a verified account, posted the venue of a school anti-racism seminar I was due to speak at, the way you would mark a target. I know this hatred from the inside of my inbox, in the small hours, with my children asleep down the hall.

And here is what those nights have taught me, the thing I want to set down plainly on the morning of an Emmy. This is a fringe. It is loud, it is funded, it owns the wiring of the feeds, it has the full economic weight of the platforms at its back. It is a fringe with a fortune, and it has learned to mistake its own volume for the sound of a majority. We grant it that error far too easily, out of fear, out of fatigue, out of a decency that hesitates while the cruel do not. But it remains what it is. A small and furious minority that has bought itself a very large microphone.

The deeper truth, the one this film carries onto the world stage, runs the other way. Most people want what it remembers. Across this country and far past it, ordinary, decent human beings are exhausted by leaders who treat contempt as strength and division as a strategy, and they ache for a public life built around care instead. The rage belongs to the few. The longing belongs to the many. The trouble is only this: the many have not yet built the voice infrastructures to make their longing as loud as the fringe has made its fury. That is the work. It is the whole of the work I have given my life to. Communicative sovereignty for the people the powerful prefer mute. The slow, unglamorous construction of a public square in which the subaltern voice is not a visitor but an author.

It moves me, more than I can sensibly explain over a cooling cup of tea, that the world chose to honour this story. An Emmy is a small object set against the scale of what is at stake. It is also not small at all, because culture is where the war over the possible is fought long before it reaches a ballot or a law. A film travels. It slips into living rooms in countries that will never learn how to pronounce Manawatū, and it tells them that for a few short years, on a set of islands at the edge of the map, a leader refused the cheap currency of fear, and that those years were real, and that they are worth defending and worth attempting again. The award does not crown a memory. It keeps an argument alive about who we might still choose to be.

So this morning, with the light coming up over the river and the dogs finally beginning to move, I raise a toast. To a film that holds, in a hundred and one minutes, much of what is finest about Aotearoa, and has now said it where the whole world can hear. To the leadership it remembers, and to the vast and ordinary majority who hunger for its return. And to everyone still bent over the patient, thankless labour of building a public life worthy of our better instincts, against the rage of the few. Who are fewer than they would ever have you believe.