The Daily Express-Race, and the ‘post truth’ world

Some people have argued that the very notion of living in a 'post truth' world - a world in which lies a wilfully peddled as truth - is not a new phenomena, but rather something that has crudely surfaced in recent times, particularly during Brexit and the US elections.

Perhaps the most wilful deception in post-war history was that made by General Colin Powell on behalf of President George Bush's US Government, which told the world, via the UN, that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussian had weapons of mass destruction and the means to fire them within 45 minutes. As a direct result of that lie, over one million people died. Indirectly, a further one million people have died including around half a million Syrians.

Closer to home Black people, both here and around the world have to deal with both macro and micro levels of daily lies.

A few days ago the Daily Express attacked SOAS University lecturer Dr Kehinde Andrews, arguing that, he Andrews, ‘Defends calls to ban Plato and Kant’ from Universities.’ The piece went on to add, that Dr Andrews, ‘backed calls for philosophers such as Plato and Kant to be removed from the syllabus.'

Both are completely untrue, and wilfully misrepresenting Dr Andrews views to cause alarm across British acedemia, and discredit him and SOAS university.

In actual fact Andrews clearly stated that:

“with the Black Studies degree that we do, we don't not teach the enlightenment—I teach Kant; I teach these ideas—but we put them in their proper context' .  Furthermore, he stated that:

“there have been no calls from students at the School of Oriental and African Studies to 'ban' or 'remove... philosophers such as Plato and Kant'.

On the macro level the point that Andrews was making was that all too often in our Universities today we rarely teach beyond a narrow set of philosophers, who are almost exclusively white, and, it has also been argued, that because of the centuries of cultural and political European hegemony they have tended to propagate a white supremist philosophy, which has broadly ignored the African and Asian continents beyond their exploitation.

Acadamics at SOAS and beyond have argued that the canon of intellectual thinking needs to broadened to include great philosophical ideas from Africa and Asia.

Breaking free from a narrow prism of thinking that viewed the Africa and Asia and its people as 'less than' is in of itsself an enormous challenge, but then the likes of Andrews and others must also deal with ongoing denial by the academic institutions and media deception to wilfully misrepresent their views

But Black academics are fighting back; Professor Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, with the support of many others has written a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the Daily Express news piece.

Whether its fighting the institutional deception that the only thinkers worth knowing were from Europe, or the malicious lies from tabloids, these fights must be had and won.

To some they may seem trivial but if they go unchallenged we have more of same rubbish that in effect states that we have  ‘contributed little or nothing to the world’, and media outlets and academic institutions can rubbish us at will and without any recourse.

Good luck to brother Nathanial for taking on the press, and good luck and great strength to Kehinde for taking on the UK academia.

We at OBV support you.

Simon Woolley

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b088k00m/newsnight-09012017

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/752279/Kehinde-Andrews-Enlightenment-racist-BBC-Newsnight-SOAS