Thread by @Anasuyashh

This 🧵 is about the film #CodedBias and its director @shalinikantayya. It's a painful and poignant thread for me because I am friends with so many of the scholars who are centred in this film, and respect their work enormously. Yet (and therefore) I cannot stay silent. (1/n)

The crux: the cognitive dissonances at the heart of the director’s problematic association with the @hinduamerican foundation and how it impacts the film's message. I hope @jovialjoy @timnitgebru @safiyanoble @poptechworks and others understand why+how this affects us all. (2/n)

It’s not surprising that I was one of the many who took down #TheSocialDilemma for its white tech-bro centred angst about Big Tech, without any reference to the work of so *many* women and BIPOC activists+scholars. (3/n)

https://twitter.com/Anasuyashh/status/1306168779655741442

So I was thrilled to know #CodedBias was being made, as a much needed counterpoint to #TheSocialDilemma, featuring the formidable pioneering work of Black woc scholars like @jovialjoy @timnitgebru @safiyanoble @rajiinio @zeynep, and others like @poptechworks @merbroussard. (4/n)

But when I read the brilliant @UpFromTheCracks's critique of the film, and her discovery that the director @shalinikantayya had keynoted at an @HinduAmerican (HAF) gala, the sirens went off in my head. (5/n)

https://twitter.com/UpFromTheCracks/status/1399014256679473157

I know @hinduamerican and its work far too well. Amongst other efforts, a bunch of us have been fighting HAF and its US-based constellation of Hindu supremacist ideologues for a long time now. (6/n) indianexpress.com/article/blogs/…

In 2016 during public hearings for CA textbooks, we were attacked physically and virtually, vilified for seeking a plural and nuanced accounting of South Asian histories, rather than one valorizing savarna/upper-caste “Vedic” versions as the HAF was. (7/n)caravanmagazine.in/vantage/califo…

The CA textbook hearings were horrifying. I testified with the most courageous Dalit Muslim Sikh Ravidassi folks, trying to stay calm as HAF+co hurled invectives at us. The only other time I've encountered similar hatred? In India, fighting similar Hindu supremacists. (8/n)

I’ve been fighting this multi-headed hydra across continents for decades now. It has been part of my life’s work as a Hindu, fighting Hindu fundamentalisms as someone who has borne continued witness to its horrific oppressions and long shadows. (9/n)

So when @shalinikantayya responds by distancing herself from HAF by saying she has no affiliation to HAF and believes it doesn’t promote nationalism, I am honestly appalled and troubled. (10/n)

She keynoted at a time when HAF’s particular brand of “human rights” and “civil rights” was well known in the desi/Indian/South Asian circles in the US (2 years after my CA textbooks experience). (11/n)

https://twitter.com/shalinikantayya/status/1399621804654747650

Being a keynote speaker has meaning. It implies a general comfort with the politics of an organization, unless you use the keynote to courageously critique those politics. I'm careful about the spaces I speak in, and what I say in them. Surely @shalinikantayya is too? (12/n)

Here is where responsibility-by-association and dissonance-by-disassociation has significance for the message of #CodedBias and all of us fighting multiple intertwined systems of oppression. Our struggles and solidarities connect us. They mark our respect for each other. (13/n)

You can't be a crusader for Black women’s scholarship in one space and an apologist for Hindu supremacists attacking Dalit women’s scholarship in another. You can't spotlight one system of oppression and gloss over another. It's cognitive dissonance at its painful worst. (14/n)

Just as I have supported, celebrated, amplified, fought for the work of @jovialjoy @timnitgebru @safiyanoble and other incredible Black women scholars to be recognized and centered, I hope they will understand why my struggle against Hindu fascism is their struggle too. (15/n)

Even more importantly, @shalinikantayya, the struggle against Hindu fascism is your and my struggle. Whether we were born Hindu or not, we are associated with its cognitive, material, physical oppressions. My integrity demands I condemn it and fight against it. Will you? (16/n)