Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

When we began the partnership between the Indiana Minority Health Coalition, Lake County Minority Health Coalition, Minority Health Coalition of Marion County and Purdue University, we had two broad pictures in mind: (a) our partnership was focused on building health information capacities among African Americans in Lake and Marion Counties of Indiana, so that community members would have access to the health information they needed in addressing their heart health issues; and (b) our partnership began with the understanding that local community values, beliefs, and understandings ought to be centered in how problems and solutions came to be understood, implemented and evaluated. Now, as our culturally-centered heart health campaign wraps up the initial phase, I am struck by some key lessons regarding culturally-centered processes of social change, both in terms of research methodology as well as in terms of the development and evaluation of the campaign. The first lesson I have lea...

I sit here head sunk in shame in the knowing that my Hindu soul stands a silent witness In the murder of a muslim brother. You say he was a terrorist one that deserves to die So I should celebrate so you don't count me as a traitor to my Hindu state of birth. I sit here unable to argue unable to have a conversation with you Because I too am the majority that takes for granted my body my privilege my identity Like you, I am complicit in murder. I sit here and write a poem in my pain as I witness a muslim brother led to the gallows. Without evidence Without due process With questions left unanswered. I sit here because I know that's what happens when you are muslim in Hindu India. I sit here and hold my child in pain As I know somewhere in Kashmir A child, the child of a terrorist has no father to hug him and to protect. A child left by his father to be cared for by God.

Many of you have heard me share with you stories of my grandmother, Nana. An amazingly strong woman, nana was a healer, a knower of secrets that worked wonders on my health and my spirits. She was an amazing source of knowledge, one who believed in the principles of Marxist socialism and also believed in the incredible powers of the spirit. She was an avid reader, one who read more than eight hours a day. The daughter of a medical doctor and the niece of the scientist Sir J C Ghosh, the architect of India's now-fabled IITs, she was a student of science. Married to a family of engineers, she voraciously read books for herself, her husband, her children and her grandchildren. Nana taught me to love the world of books. For her, the spirit of science was embodied in asking questions, in not taking things for granted, and in drawing upon systematic observations to arrive at conclusions. Perhaps it is this very spirit of science that worked in her everyday resources of hea...

July 5, 2010. In an article titled " The trophies of Operation Green Hunt ," the academic Nandini Sundar interrogates the complete erasure of stories of large scale violence deployed by the Indian state on its tribal subjects. She documents the rapes, murders, arrests, and encounters, most of which are disproportionately carried out on women. The unprecedented degree of state-sponsored violence carried out on indigenous women is the subject of her critical interrogation. Most of these stories of violence go unnoticed and unheard. We don't feel outrage as middle-class subjects of Shining India, having been led to believe that this is collateral damage that is natural to our democracy. The media mostly don't cover the cases, and even when they do, the story is buried somewhere in a back page in a small paragraph. And even when we see these stories, we pass on, getting on with our lives. We are normalized into not feeling empathy. Noting this collective inabili...

Even in death, the politics of race shapes what we remember, who we remember, and how we remember. A Black US President feels for the children of Newton. He imagines them as his children, and is lost for meaning at the loss of the White children in rich suburbia of Newton. His solidarity for these children is expressed in the pain that he visibly feels and the responsibility he takes for collective action. The President’s sense of solidarity connects his experiences as a father with the fathers of the children of Sandy Hook. His tears offer a moment of authenticity through which we connect with him and with the pain of being a parent who has lost a child. Like him, as a father, I feel pain. I also feel pain for the children in Gary, Indiana, a place a few miles South of Chicago where Black children die from gun violence. I have heard stories of suffering and hope that community members in Gary share. In Gary, the politics of race is written into the everyday organizing of sch...

A story on Al Jazeera Television memorializing the victims of the Newton shooting describes the short lives lived by the children, describing their lives, remembering their acts of kindness, and describing their innocence. As I bear witness to the stories memorializing the children that were killed violently in the Sandy Hook shooting, I feel pain in seeing the faces of the children whose lives were taken away. Seeing their faces, reading their names are acts of memorializing, of remembering them, and of acknowledging the dignity of their lives. Recognizing the names of the children gives meaning to their lives and offers a space in our thoughts for recognizing their everyday lived experiences, the potential they could have achieved, and the people they could have become. As we feel pain in witnessing the lives of the children, we connect with them. We empathize with their journeys, and find a way to link our separate stories with theirs. Our feelings of pain and empathy thus ...

From the screen of the Television set which is playing a John Wayne classic, gunshots are flowing everywhere. The good guys on horses are killing the bad guys. And the gun is their weapon. The gun is the salvation in a plot of good versus evil. It will kill the enemy and the hero will use it adeptly and expertly to seek out moral justice. For the Frontier man, the gun is the weapon for justice. Owning the gun and using it against the enemy is embedded within the broader cultural story of "good versus evil." Guns bring about liberty. And owning the gun is the right of the citizen, understood in a storyline of democracy and liberty. Citizenship is connected to the right to own. And more specifically, to the right to own a gun. The gun symbolizes a technological innovation, an innovation that is able to carry out mass killings. Its sheer force lies in its technological ability to kill at a distance. The greater the distance and the greater the ability of the...