Monthly Archives: June 2020

“You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument” By Caroline Randall Williams

Posted on by
Reply

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

(Great searing article filled with raw emotions on confederate monuments. On the same subject, Lincoln Project is airing an advertisement, ” Treason” which depicts the confederate leaders and generals as traitors which took arms against USA and lost. They don’t deserve monuments.)

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

Full Article
posted by f.sheikh

Blind Spots (Muslims in India) By Shireen Azam

Posted on by
Reply

Some excerpts;

“ON A DELHI PLAYGROUND in the late 2000s, five-year-old Azania was about to kick a football with her white canvas shoes, when a boy from the rival team screamed, “Get away from the ball, you Paki.” When the author Nazia Erum heard about this—one of several instances of Islamophobia in elite schools in the National Capital Region, she writes—she wondered whether she should give her own daughter a Muslim name. When did schools become like this? She remembered that her elder brother was called “Hamas” in the 1990s, but that had felt somewhat light-hearted by comparison.

A few years before the playground incident, another child in a different part of the city found that there was an unexpected problem with her new home. After moving near her workplace in a Muslim-dominated locality near Jamia Millia Islamia, the author Rakhshanda Jalil sent handmade cards to her daughter’s classmates to invite them home for her birthday. Most of her daughter’s friends declined the invitation. Over the phone, their mothers explained to Jalil what had changed. It was different when Jalil lived in Gulmohar Park, an elite outpost where Muslims are not conspicuous, they said, but “we have no idea about the Jamia side.”

In 2008, after night-time discounts for phone calls kicked in, the writer Neyaz Farooquee and his friends used to spend hours gossiping and mocking each other. They spoke about the women they were interested in, college life, and their friend Kafil’s obsession with trivia regarding guns and weapons. Days after the Batla House encounter in September that year, Farooquee deleted the numbers of his closest friends from his phone.”

“A good deal of Muslim autobiographical writing in India seems to hinge on two points: a remembered past, and a present that is worse and more difficult in myriad ways. The sense of an escalating decline is ubiquitous, but the patterns signifying that something has been lost are less linear than they may initially seem. All Muslims did not inhabit the same havens to begin with. 

There is a certain way in which ‘Muslim memoirs’ are written and reviewed. The years of a writer’s life are often charted against depleting levels of secularism in the country. A few themes make frequent appearances: the pain surrounding Partition and a sense of disbelief that the Congress let it happen; the ostensible glory of the Nehruvian era—the 1960s and 1970s—when Muslims could do their jobs without being made aware of their religion, and how this started changing; the ulemas of the 1980s, who stymied attempts to reform the community and change antiquated personal laws; and the gradual institutional collapse of secularism after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But is there more to Muslim lives in India that this arc obfuscates? 

A wave of recent non-fiction books use the autobiographical form to tell the story of Muslims in India. Published in the last few years, faced with an escalating assault on Muslims under the Narendra Modi government, these writings provide an insight into Muslims’ minds as they witness these times. The writers contextualise their experiences against the broader history of independent India. In her book Mothering a Muslim, Nazia Erum, faced with bringing up her daughter in an Islamophobic world, describes her conversations with other Muslim parents. Neyaz Farooquee, in An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism, takes us into the petrified mind of a young Muslim man who fears being labelled as a ‘terrorist’ by a biased state and an unquestioning media. Rakshanda Jalil, in her collection of essays titled But You Don’t Look Like A Muslim, responds to the stereotypes she faces. Seema Mustafa’s Azadi’s Daughter: Being a Secular Muslim in India and Saeed Naqvi’s Being the Other: The Muslim in India compare the authors’ experiences of growing up in a secular, pluralist India to what they later witnessed as journalists reporting on events that reveal the erosion of the India they once knew.

The narrative of the steady disenfranchisement and marginalisation of Indian Muslims is important and urgent, and deserves to be told again and again. But there is another story that gets neglected in this telling. Indian Muslims are constantly talked about, yet the role of caste in the Muslim community remains almost entirely secret. Islamophobes, liberals and prominent Muslims in both religious and intellectual spheres have consistently overlooked the issue. The dominant discourse on Muslims—focussed on discrimination, backwardness, marginalisation of women, terrorism and communal violence—sees them solely within the confines of religious politics. The questions it asks of Muslim lives are limited to ones of secularism, communalism or fanaticism. One of the primary reasons for this is the caste identity of the writers, scholars and critics who have so far formed the Muslim intelligentsia. As the scholar Arshad Alam noted, most Muslims of India are lower-caste, whereas the people who represent them are upper-caste.”

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh

Western Renaissance myth-by Brown Williams

Posted on by
Reply

Culture and the universal genius were not the only things to thrive in this supposed golden age – so too did slavery and warfare.

We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-informed or incompetent, and so on. And by contrast, “renaissance” is usually a sunnier word. It evokes exuberance and creativity, intellectual freshness. A “renaissance man” (and it usually is a man) is someone endowed with an almost superhuman galaxy of qualities and skills.

As many scholars have pointed out, this odd bit of chronological snobbery is largely a 19th-century creation, from the days when the Renaissance was seen as the precursor of the Age of Reason, the moment somewhere around the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century which saw the beginnings of Western civilisation’s liberation from dogma and bigotry. It is not news for historians that the story is more complex than this – or that it was also a period (particularly in Italy) of ceaseless and destructive warfare.

The publishers of Catherine Fletcher’s book have described it as an “alternative history of the Italian Renaissance”, but it is in fact a finely-written, engaging and clear essay in rather straightforward narrative history. It is none the worse for that, but is it really the case that we have failed to notice the “stranger and darker” side of Italian politics in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they suggest?

Professor Fletcher’s introductory chapter quite rightly notes that we are familiar enough with the stereotype of violent and corrupt machinations in Italian courts of the period (thanks to historical soaps about the Borgias and the Tudors), and that we need to penetrate more fully those systemic aspects of the society that colluded with or promoted slavery, sexual exploitation and the like. This book succeeds admirably in highlighting some of the features and figures of the period that have indeed slipped below (or never been spotted on) the radar.

Full article

posted by f.sheikh

There could be 36 communicating intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, study says

Posted on by
Reply

( Shared by Dr. Shoeb Amin)

Earth has proven unique in its ability to host life in the universe so far, leading us to question if we’re truly alone.Maybe we’re not.Scientists have calculated that there could be a minimum of 36 active, communicating intelligent civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy, according to a new study. However, due to time and distance, we may never actually know if they exist or ever existed.The study published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal. Previous calculations along these lines have been based on the Drake equation, which was written by astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1961.

“Drake developed an equation which in principle can be used to calculate how many Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent (CETI) civilizations there may be in the Galaxy,” the authors wrote in their study. “However, many of its terms are unknowable and other methods must be used to calculate the likely number of communicating civilizations.”So scientists at the University of Nottingham developed their own approach.”The key difference between our calculation and previous ones based on the Drake equation is that we make very simple assumptions about how life developed,” said study coauthor Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, in an email to CNN.”One of them is that life forms in a scientific way — that is if the right conditions are met then life will form. This avoids impossible to answer questions such as ‘what fraction of planets in a habitable zone of a star will form life?’ and ‘what fraction of life will evolve into intelligent life?’ as these are not answerable until we actually detect life, which we have not yet done.”

Full article

posted by f.sheikh