If we fight racism in silos, we just can’t win
JVL Introduction
Aditya Chakrabortty points out that the real error of Diane Abbotts’s letter was that it separated the subjects of racist attacks into silos when the necessity is for unity.
He discusses how, whatever the scale of her error, the reaction to it was grossly disproportionate and frequently hypocritical. Many, with records of similar or greater errors than Abbott, spoke from positions of white privilege. Abbott’s own experience of constant abuse does not excuse the letter but it is an important factor in deciding a proportionate response to it.
Abbott has been accused by many of inventing a ‘hierarchy of racism’. This exposes the casual negligence of her critics. She was reacting imperfectly to the hierarchy of racism identified by Martin Forde in his report commissioned by, and sidelined by, Keir Starmer.
Many of the critics, and defenders, of Abbott can be categorised as ‘the usual suspects’ but it is telling to note some unexpected defenders who include core Blair operative John McTernan and mainstream Jewish commentator Robert Peston
Chakrabortty urges us to rise above competitive racisms and enjoins us to remember what those of us old enough to be there chanted in the 70s: “We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite”.
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Thu 27 Apr 2023. Read the original here.
The lesson from the Diane Abbott row: if we fight racism in silos, we just can’t win
The row caused by her dreadful letter was depressing, but just as sad was what the furore revealed about modern racial politics
Long before Hackney North first elected Diane Abbott as its MP, my mother was a teacher in one of its primary schools. As a small boy I sometimes went with her, on long journeys by bus and train and across the wooden bridge over Clapton Pond, chanting about the billy goats gruff. Trip trap, trip trap.
Visiting her staffroom was almost a whistle-stop tour of the British empire, with teachers from Jamaica, Trinidad, Nigeria, Pakistan, Cyprus and Ireland. All, I think, first-generation immigrants to the UK and all women – and all aware that those two things meant they wouldn’t get the money or the promotions they deserved. So they organised. My mother was in her trade union’s black caucus, which spoke for “all teachers who face racism”. This was London in the early 1980s, where the streets still echoed to the Anti-Nazi League’s chant of “We are Black, We are White, together we are Dynamite”.
This was Abbott’s world, too. She came up through the Labour movement’s Black Sections, activist-organised groups open to all historically oppressed by colonialism, be they African-Caribbean or Bengali or Cypriot. To fight racism then was to recognise that its victims looked different, spoke many tongues and had a tapestry of histories – but that they faced obstacles in common and could only beat them together.
That was a vital political schooling for Abbott and so many others. At its best, it was leftwing, alive to the complex play of class and sex alongside ethnicity, and universalist. While often more confident, today’s racial discourse is narrower and less radical. Apart from the direct shock of stupid and crass remarks made by Abbott this week, one of the most troubling aspects of both the arguments made and the reaction to them is that they indicate some of the worst aspects of this discourse.
To counter her argument that the “prejudice” experienced by Irish, Jewish and Traveller people is not a patch on the “racism” suffered by black people, I cannot improve on the letter from someone whose family left a city in Poland where more than 99% of Jews were exterminated for their race and whose experiences of British antisemitism includes having Nazi insignia brandished in their face. As the anonymous writer says: “To compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible.” Quite.
The other theme of her argument is about the white privilege enjoyed by, say, Irish people, which flies in the face of a long history in which ethnic groups are sometimes deemed to be white and other times not. As Kenan Malik notes in Not So Black and White, Irish immigrants to 19th-century America were described as “niggers turned inside out”, while in England the social reformer Charles Kingsley labelled them “white chimpanzees”.
There is much to criticise here, and yet some of Abbott’s most ferocious critics are very low on shame. Not so long ago, the Sun ran a column by Katie Hopkins comparing migrants to “cockroaches”; naturally enough, this week it ran an editorial decrying racism. It was joined by former MP John Mann, who once published a pamphlet giving advice on how to “remove any gypsies and travellers [sic]”. Also spotted this week, fretting no doubt sincerely about antisemitism, was Boris Johnson, who is possibly modern journalism’s best-remunerated user of racist language. Piccaninny, anyone?
Compare the blond Etonian to Britain’s first black woman MP, and you see how racist and sexist 21st-century century Britain remains. No matter how great the sin, how brazen the deceit, how lethally complacent the politician, he gets to come back again and again, and fills his pockets while doing so. Abbott can’t even enjoy an M&S mojito on the tube without it becoming a major scandal. She has faced racial bullying – including from within her own party – that would have broken others. Little of that is remembered, and none of it helps. Given the right class, ethnicity and comportment, some people can get away with a million “mistakes”; others aren’t allowed to make one.
That is the context for so much race politics: a “gotcha” culture where an unpopular person’s misbehaviour or genuine error counts for more than actual policy, and an approach to race that prizes diversity over equality, and representation over transformation. This is aided and abetted by some within the ethnic minorities themselves who pursue what David Feldman, the director of Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, calls “competitive racisms”. A couple of years ago, the Muslim Council of Britain published a report looking at how it could emulate the takeup of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism by coming up with its own hard and fast definition of Islamophobia. A couple of weeks ago, neocon thinktank the Henry Jackson Society published the “first national study into the discrimination facing Hindu youth in the UK”, what it naturally calls Hinduphobia.
Not only does this make legalistic what should be political battles but it also, as Feldman says, “turns racialised minorities against each other, with each group thinking it can make gains on its own”. In other words, anti-racist politics ends up resembling the strategies and practices of the racist societies it seeks to change.
Let us end with a more hopeful story. It begins with a young man of Pakistani parents standing outside a mate’s house in the dark, chucking tiny pebbles at his window. It is 1984, and Mukhtar Dar needs to wake up his friend because they are driving to Orgreave to join the miners’ picket.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Waiting in the minibus are others from the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement, formed to defend their families and homes from the far-right thugs who enjoy Paki-bashing, a sport they play with fists, knives and petrol bombs.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Finally! Out he tumbles, eyes still crusty with sleep. But when they reach the picket line, a miner says, “What the fuck are the Pakis doing here?” In an interview in Tribune magazine, the activist Dar recalls his mate’s reaction. “Shit man, you get me up at five in the morning … [for] this racism?” Dar says, “Bro, we can see the bars and some of them can’t.”
Even if some white miners are racist, he explains, their communities share much with the Asians of Sheffield: both are tight knit, working class, suffering in the slump and victimised by Margaret Thatcher. The same goes for the Irish and the African-Caribbean communities. “Even though we organised autonomously, we saw our struggle as one.”
To strain a hand beyond the bars of one’s cell is human. But freedom, the real freedom to – as Nina Simone once said – live as fearlessly as a child; that will only come when we dismantle the entire prison
I take issue with this article not because of what it says but because it omits the entire context of the article and the research it cherry picked that Diane was replying to and to which a much better constructive response could and should have been made.
The article by Tomiwa Owolade takes unfiltered stats from the research that Jews and Travellers face more racism than black people in Britain. Now with the row about the letter we see distractions about ‘treating all racism equally’ etc. rather than looking at which groups really do face the most systemic and enduring discrimination and racism in Britain.
And of course the GRT communities have been ignored by Labour and we see the further ratcheting up of the antisemitism weaponisation based on the ludicrous and now received wisdom that British Jews are among the minorities suffering the most racism when the opposite is true.
This isn’t about history but the here and now in Britain.
This is a dreadful article. Chakrabortty attempts to give Diane Abbot some leaway whilst slinging mud at her. He appears to be one of those ‘leftish’ commentators who likes to ride two horses. Nothing that Diane Abbot said was racist or antiSemitic yet Chakrabortty, looking over his shoulder at Guardian gatekeepers Viner and Freedland, still manages to squeeze a mention of antiSemitism into his diatribe.
In my experience racism is practised by all nations all races. So it would seem racism is a human condition, a condition that arises out of ignorance, fear and most importantly unfamiliarity. When we witness the advantage racism offers to people in positions of power who use racism as a tool for their endeavours it must be obvious that it is going to be a supreme task to get the peoples of the Earth to jettison it. As long as we tolerate the essential worker getting paid less than the comedian and any other more serious comparison any of us could add here as examples of inequality we have little prospect of confining racism to the dark ages.
Diane Abbott has been criticised for comparing different racisms. It has been suggested that she has described a “hierarchy of racism” by stating that prejudice experienced by Black people is worse than that experienced by Jews, Irish or Travellers.
Keir Starmer has stated that she has been suspended for “Anti-Semitism”. Why not for anti-Irish and anti-Traveller racism as well? Does that make Keir Starmer guilty of arguing for a “hierarchy of racism” too? Just asking.
Several apposite comments above in my view.
I agree strongly with Dave re ‘the here and now in Britain’ and with Jack T re ‘Guardian gatekeepers’.
Chakrabortty is usually quite lucid but he seems to have got himself into a pitiful state of confusion over Diane Abbott’s letter
It is an indisputable fact that at some times and in some places Jews have been the main or among the main victims of racism. It is equally clear that at other times and places they have not. There is now a convention, to which Chakrabortty subscribes, that it is always appropriate and sometimes obligatory to refer to the former fact but unacceptable and even antisemitic to refer to the latter one. The reality is, however, that either both propositions invoke a ‘hierarchy of racism’ or neither does.
Different groups experience prejudice and oppression in different ways and with different intensities, and these factors change over time. A careful analysis is needed to see where the interests of different oppressed groups coincide and where they may appear to conflict. Chakraborty apparently rejects this approach and prefers to see the oppressed as a single undifferentiated mass. If he were to read Diane Abbott’s letter more carefully he might learn something from it.
Diane Abbott’s lifetime obsession with skin colour has made her blind. I was at college in South Wales during the miner’s strike and regularly attended picket- line duty and saw nothing of this ‘working class ‘ bigotry. It was a time when whole communities came together to fight the common enemy, although the battle was predominantly fought by the white working class, there was great comaraderie among the Black; White and Asian Communities in Pillgwenlly.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 criminalises the ‘lifestyle’ of one minority group at a stroke; Gypsies. Any form of trespass can now be a criminal offence, no other demographic faces such hostile laws. Gypsies are the most persecuted people and this continues to this day. Diane Abbott needs to get a grip of her limited perceptions and understanding.
Incidentally, I once held Nina Simone in great esteem until I read an article in which she described Dusty Springfield as a white woman wanting to ‘sound’ black’ as the only reason why she was favoured by Burt Bacharach & Hal David. A certain Dionne Warwick appears to contradict this assertion.