I LAUGH BUT BELATEDLY BY DR SOHAIL ANSARI
‘All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no
superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab;
also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over
white except bypiety (taqwa) and good action.’ The last sermon of
Prophet Muhammad
Part 1
‘A VIDEO SHOWS George Floyd, a black man, lying in the street in
anguish, with his head crushed against the pavement. A white officer presses
his knee into Floyd’s neck. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd, 46, says repeatedly.
“Please. Please. Please. I can’t breathe. Please, man.” Bystanders, filming the
scene, plead with the officer to stop. He doesn’t. As three other officers
stand by, he kneels on Floyd for eight minutes and 48 seconds as the life seeps
from his body’.
“It was a modern-day lynching,” said Arica
Coleman, an historian, cultural critic, and author.
“This man was lying helplessly on the
ground. He’s subdued. There’s the cop kneeling on his neck. This man is
pleading for his life. To me, that is the ultimate display of power of one
human being over another. Historically, you could be lynched for anything.”
“It was a modern-day lynching: Violent deaths reflect a
brutal American legacy” writes DeNeen L. Brown,
the award-winning writer.
Having read that, I forwarded one tweet
that reads:
White kills Black=Self defense
Black kills White=Murder
Black kills Black=Gang violence
White kills White=Accident
Muslim kills White=Terrorist
White kills Muslim=Mental Health issues
I had a response: ‘This is completely
wrong. Right, as a response, suggests is:
‘Black on white.
Black on black violence.
Killing of white by cops.’
“Laughter” is an excellent book by Robert
Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore. Prof Dr Robert Provine states: ‘Laughter is part of the universal
human vocabulary. All members of the human species understand it. Unlike
English or French or Swahili, we don’t have to learn to speak it. We’re born
with the capacity to laugh.
One of the remarkable things about laughter is that it occurs
unconsciously. You don’t decide to do it. While we can consciously inhibit it,
we don’t consciously produce laughter. That’s why it’s very hard to laugh on
command or to fake laughter. Laughter provides powerful, uncensored insights
into our unconscious. It simply bubbles up from within us in certain
situations…..laughter is triggered by many sensations and thoughts……and do follow jokes, funny comments or questions…. A laugh
is kindled deep within our brains’.
Laughter was to follow a response; but it was
not triggered; it failed to bubble up.
Fabian van den Berg is a developmental Neuroscientist at
Maastricht University (known as well for his quote:
"An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can
be explained to a barmaid.") Writes:
‘Humor
is when we expect one thing and then something else happens, when our scripts
are broken in a non-threatening way. This also corresponds with a lot of jokes
and physical humor. You expect one thing, and then the twist turns it around
completely’.
Fabian van den Berg means that
we laugh when things do not happen in a way taken for granted. The response was
not in a way that is taken for granted: it negates a modern-day lynching and denies that violent death reflects a
brutal American legacy. But I did not laugh because the script of mine
as it seemed was broken in a threatening way.
I had known so far that the USA was built on racial ideals of white supremacy that what
Green says: ‘Forty of the 56 founders who signed the Declaration of
Independence, as well as 10 of the first 12 presidents were slave owners. The
Constitution did not recognize black people as fully human, counting enslaved
people as three-fifths of a free person’.
“There is a depth of hatred in the bone
marrow of this country that supports the killing of the black body,” that is what
CeLillianne Green, a historian, poet, and author told me.
To me, savageries and
atrocities against black were well- substantiated:
“Breathing while
black” is the crime, Coleman said. “And that goes back to the history of the
country. So many black people were lynched just for being black. It gives white
people power, which is why that woman, Amy, knew the exact role to play—the
white damsel in distress being threatened by the big, bad, black wolf. ‘I’m
going to call the cops and tell them there is an African-American man
threatening my life.’ She knew the script.”
The body of 32-year-old Rubin Stacy hangs from a tree in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida on July 19, 1935. Stacy was lynched by a mob of masked men
who seized him from the custody of sheriff's deputies after he was accused of
“attacking” a white woman. According to an NAACP report, Stacy was hanged near
the home of Marion Jones, the woman who had made the original complaint against
him. The New York Times wrote that “a subsequent investigation revealed that
Stacy, a homeless tenant farmer, had gone to the house to ask for food. The
woman became frightened and screamed when she saw Stacy’s face.”
Slaying of a black does not exist in a vacuum, Coleman said.
It comes from the history of “dehumanizing” black people.
From 1877 to 1950, more than 4,400 black men, women, and
children were lynched by white mobs, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
Black people were shot, skinned, burned alive, bludgeoned, and hanged from
trees. Lynchings were often conducted within sight of the institutions of
justice, on the lawns of courthouses. Some historians say the violence against
thousands of black people who were lynched after the Civil War is the precursor
to the vigilante attacks and abusive police tactics still used against black
people today, usually with impunity.
Historians say the death of George Floyd
seemed to rip the scab from 400 years of oppression of black people. During a
pandemic that has disproportionately sickened and killed African Americans, the
deaths unleashed a rage against oppression that became a catalyst for uprisings
across the country and around the world—from Paris to Sydney, Australia; from
Amsterdam to Cape Town, South Africa—as thousands poured into streets,
demanding justice and an end to police brutality.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive
director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that tries to address the
nation’s racist legacy through activism and education, said the roots of the
protests lie in the reality that the country has not yet come to terms with its
brutal history of slavery, lynching, and continued oppression of black people.
“We have never confronted our nation's
greatest burden following two centuries of enslaving black people, which is the
fiction that black people are not fully evolved and are less human, less
worthy, and less deserving than white people,” Stevenson said.
“This notion of white supremacy is what
fueled a century of racial violence against black people, thousands of
lynchings, mass killings, and a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that
persists to this day,” Stevenson continued. “So when Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna
Taylor or George Floyd are killed, the immediate instinct of police,
prosecutors, and too many elected officials is to protect the white people
involved. Video recordings complicate that strategy, but even graphic violence
caught on tape will be insufficient to overcome the long and enduring refusal
to reckon with our nation's history of racial injustice."
History writer and
award- winning author ‘Barbara Krasner’ writes in her famous book ‘Historical Revisionism’:
‘Historical
revisionism refers to any reinterpretation of recorded history, but whether
this practice is beneficial, harmful, or somewhere in between is hotly
contested. While allowing newly discovered evidence and facts to enter the
historical record may seem benign, the reinterpretation of existing facts to
reflect contemporary morality is a far more controversial aspect of the topic.
Many also worry this could lead to historical facts being distorted….’
In historiography, the term historical revisionism identifies
the re-interpretation of an historical account. ‘It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established,
accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or
time-span or phenomenon, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the
motivations and decisions of the people involved. The revision of the historical record can
reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then
results in revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of
older moral judgments or the reversal of moral findings whereby what
mainstream historians had considered (for example) positive forces are
depicted as negative. Such revisionism, if challenged (especially in heated
terms) by the supporters of the previous view, can become an illegitimate form
of historical revisionism known as historical negationism if it involves inappropriate methods such as:
·
Attributing false conclusions to books and sources
·
Manipulating statistical data
·
Deliberately mis-translating texts
Right, as a response, suggests is:
·
‘Black on white.
·
Black
on black violence.
·
Killing
of white by cops.
The response was a reversal of older
moral judgments and of moral findings, but without new discoveries of fact, evidence,
and interpretation which then results in revised history. This was impossible to
challenge response to prove it as historical negationism not
because it involved the excellent appropriate methods but because it involved
no method.
Evans, Richard is a professor of Modern History at the University of
Cambridge, and a major expert-witness in the Irving v. Lipstadt trial. He
writes in his book ‘Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David
Irving Trial’: ‘Historical revisionism can present a re-interpretation of
the moral meaning of the historical record, but Negationists use the term
"revisionism" to portray their efforts as legitimate historical
revisionism’.
This was impossible to challenge a response to prove it as historical negationism not
because it involved the excellent appropriate methods, but because it involved neither
method nor any academic effort.
Historical revisionism is the means
by which the historical record –
the history of a society, as understood in its collective memory –
continually integrates new facts and interpretations of the events commonly understood
as history, about which the historian and American
Historical Association member James M. McPherson, said:
‘The fourteen-thousand members of
this association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of
historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue,
between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to
change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new
perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no single, eternal, and
immutable "truth" about past events and their meaning.
The unending quest of historians for
understanding the past – that is, revisionism – is what makes history
vital and meaningful.
Without revisionist historians, who
have done research in new sources and asked new and nuanced questions, we would
remain mired in one or another of these stereotypes’.
The statement that ‘there is no
single, eternal, and immutable "truth" can only be true if interpretations of historical record as
understood in collective memory are
subject to change in response to new evidence and new perspectives.
The response could
be termed gas lighting, if it evoked cognitive dissonance by using denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the
victim's beliefs. But the response did not use the abuser’s techniques of gaslighting as observed by Patricia Evans in
‘The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to
Recognize it and How to Respond’ by countering
or discounting information to fit the abuser's perspective.
The illusory truth effect was introduced
in 1977 in a research paper describing a study by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein,
and Thomas Toppino.
The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct
after repeated exposure. This phenomenon is also known as validity effect
because the repetition is often conflated with validity. This explains why
certain beliefs such as “Humans only use 10% of their brains” are still widely
considered to be true today, despite the large amount of evidence proving the
statement to be false.
When truth is assessed,
people rely on whether the information is in line with their understanding or
if it feels familiar. The first condition is logical, as people compare new
information with what they already know to be true. Repetition makes statements
easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to
believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful. The illusory truth
effect has also been linked to "hindsight bias", in which the
recollection of confidence is skewed after the truth has been received.
Hertwig writes in "The reiteration effect in
hindsight bias":
‘Although the truth effect has been demonstrated
scientifically only in recent years, it is a phenomenon with which people have
been familiar for millennia. One study notes that the Roman statesman Cato closed each of
his speeches with a call to destroy Carthage ("Ceterum
censeo Carthaginem esse delendam"), knowing that the repetition would
breed agreement, and that Napoleon reportedly
"said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance,
namely, repetition", whereby a repeated affirmation fixes itself in the
mind "in such a way that it is accepted in the end as a demonstrated
truth". Marcus
Antonius in Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar takes advantage of the truth effect.
OLIVIA PASCHAL says in ‘ Trump’s Tweets and the Creation of ‘Illusory
Truth’ that President Trump’s repetition of words like “witch hunt” could have
a psychological effect on Americans—say it enough, and people might start to
believe it.
A responder could
use this type of
manipulation of information; but I had no avalanche of academic studies
and scholarly articles repeating
information in line with his
understanding so that I could believe what he said to be true instead he
suggested some sites to endorse his views:
These
sites cannot serve as the reference point because these are not the credible
source of information nor these can ever be. Only a long-form publication (academic book)
and a short-form publication (scholarly article)
that is the result of
in-depth academic research can only be the basis or standard for
evaluation, assessment, or comparison.
One site ‘https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/04/on-racism/’ is a kind of a
blog followed by a disclaimer that ‘We cannot guarantee the
information to be free of mistakes and incorrect interpretations’.
When I read the
content of proposed sites I laughed because I realized that script of mine was
broken not in a threatening way; but in a funny way.
So finally I laughed,
but a bit belatedly.
(In the remaining
parts, I will dissect the content of these sites as well)
I have as well, something
to suggest.
There's a plethora of academic books documenting
the atrocities perpetrated against black. (However, I failed, despite much effort, to find a single study or
research proving what a responder was claiming to be a fact).
In 2016 one scholarly
book by Edward E. Baptist: ‘The Half Has Never Been Told:
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism’ was published. This
book makes the great original contribution to a field of study. Critics
describe this book as:
‘A groundbreaking, must-read history demonstrating that
America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves. Americans
tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin,
perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to
do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As
historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in the prizewinning The Half Has
Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after
American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United
States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal
strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the
United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy’.
There are many other academic and research based books; for example:
The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans.
From “brute” to “thug:” the demonization and
criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America.
Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans.
‘THE STRUGGLE
FOR FREEDOM A History of African Americans’
People must
read protestor poetry as well.
‘Among
protestor poets during slavery, Phillis Wheatley, was the first published African American poet. More prominent in the
poetic protest vein during slavery is George Moses Horton.
His first
volume, The Hope of Liberty, Although their poems were published following
slavery, both Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Paul
Laurence Dunbar had much to
imagine in verse about how things had been for their enslaved ancestors. In
poems such as “The Slave Auction,” “The Slave Mother,” and “Bury
Me in a Free Land,” Harper paints
heart-grabbing pictures of the separation of families and the yearnings for
freedom for which blacks longed during slavery. The concluding quatrain of “The
Slave Auction” illustrates the first point:
“Ye may not
know how desolate
Are bosoms rudely forced to part
And how a
dull and heavy weight
Will press the life-drops from the heart.
Both Harper
and Dunbar complained
in their poetry about the conditions of black people after slavery. They
thereby straddle the divide between protest directed against slavery and protest
during the period of segregation and Jim Crow. Harper used her “Aunt
Chloe” poems to highlight the
negative conditions in which many of the newly freed found themselves. In addition
to issues internal to the black community, Harper depicted politicians who
pressured those blacks who could vote to change their votes, or they simply
bought their votes. Her two-pronged, internal and external to the community,
approach to protest is echoed in many poets of the twentieth century.
Contemporary with Harper, however, Dunbar also addressed issues of the late
nineteenth century, including segregation in public transportation (“To Miss
Mary Britton”), lynching (“The Haunted Oak”), and general restrictive conditions for black people (“Sympathy,” “We Wear the Mask”)’.
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