Why Gary Younge and Others Should Back Diane Abbott

JVL Introduction

April 23rd 2024 will mark a full year since Keir Starmer removed the Labour Whip from Diane Abbott MP and there is still no sign of a date for a final decision.  Justice delayed is justice denied as we know.  Here Gavin Lewis looks again at what Ms Abbott was trying to convey in the letter that led to Starmer deciding that, pending investigation, she would lose her right to sit as a Labour MP.  Initially inspired by reading a generally supportive opinion piece by Gary Younge, he was nonetheless frustrated by Younge’s reference to the letter as “appalling”.

Here Lewis explores many aspects of Black people’s experience, the very every single dayness of the experience of racism and the ongoing structural racism that impacts so heavily on Black people’s lives. The reality of that experience is what Diane Abbott was trying to convey and why she deserves our solidarity.  He also looks at the written and oral traditions of passing on personal and community histories and how this has been different for Jewish and Black communities.

LL

Why Gary Younge and Others Should Back Diane Abbott

by Gavin Lewis

Nelson Mandela was smeared as a “an enabler of anti-Semitism” by Israel national news  and Diane Abbott was similarly smeared by the lobby.

Gary Younge wrote in support of Diane Abbott but sadly includes the following claim: “Last year she sent an appalling letter to the Observer claiming that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people” do not suffer racism “all their lives”.

This approach echoes that of so many others, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong!

Diane Abbott was, at the simplest, pointing out that Black and Brown people experience racism on the basis of their skin colour all the time.  That while white Jews, Roma and Irish people have been discriminated against, unless easily identifiable, eg Haredi Jews, they  “pass” and so do not experience racism in every aspect of their lives as people from her community do.

Antisemitism in a historic context of divide and rule

It is wrong as a summary of Diane Abbott’s analysis of precedents, and it is intellectually wrong in its assumptions about anti-Semitism and its overall place within West-European religious sectarianism.  Part of the reason we have a subjective historical narrative about antisemitism, where experience as victims is emphasised – instead of a popular broader class and sectarian based analysis – is that Western Jews had access to a written tradition.

Sectarianism is usually based upon the historical attempts of particular aristocratic tribes to dominate the landscape of Knights’ Garrisons, Earldoms, Dukedoms, the Monarchy and pursue ever greater territorial acquisition.  Its’s also, therefore, been used to ensure colonial proxies – as in Ireland – don’t go native.  It’s a tragedy that because of these power dynamics, working-class people have found themselves fighting and killing each other on irrelevant trivialities, such as a disputed belief over the correct length of the final lines of the Lord’s Prayer.  The persecution of Western Jews has often occurred against the backdrop of these power dynamics.

A big event in British Jewish history was their violent expulsion from England by Edward I – he’d first taxed victims up to the ears, then drowned those who did not take him seriously and migrate.  The same Monarch put Scotland to the sword and destroyed Wales as an autonomous entity.  Another key event was when Oliver Cromwell removed the prohibition on a Jewish presence on our mainland.  So Cromwell was comparatively welcoming to Jewish people but not to others.  His forces would throw out the rule book on warfare and taking prisoners, whilst slaughtering their way across Ireland.

Other communities have been treated appallingly, eg  French Huguenots were expelled during Europe’s religious city state wars.  It used to be part of the urban mythology of London, that French speakers could find Huguenot inscribed cornerstones on buildings that had become the settled Jewish East End; there is famously a former Huguenot Church there that became a Synagogue and is now a Mosque. Earlier in our history,  when the Spanish Empire made their territories exclusively Catholic, among those obliged to leave alongside Jews, were Muslims.

Obviously, no one can blame Jewish diarists and journal keepers from representing their specific communities’ experiences. Nor did it matter, given for decades particularly after WWII, leftists – a disproportionate number of whom were Jews – would point out that oppressed groups were mutually historical victims of the class system and capitalism.  But those were the days, before anti-intellectual media McCarthyism had intimidated leftist human rights activists from referring to the critiques inspired by Marx and the Frankfurt School.

Since then, we have seen Israel’s imperialist lobby take advantage of past Jewish history not least by strategically prioritising one primary victim of Nazi eugenics with its accompanying brutality and murder over the diverse many, and one victim of global persecution, to the exclusion of others, in order to legitimise colonialist conquering apartheid in Palestine.  A news media now obscuring the existence of capitalist and imperialist oppression, is now happy to help.

Oral history has been largely ignored

Against this written tradition and unacknowledged by Gary Younge is the lesser status attributed to the oral histories of Black and indigenous people, which continues to maintain the ongoing material reality of racist experiences Diane Abbott invokes.  The late Benjamin Zephaniah had long pointed out, people of colour have been stripped of their languages, culture and social systems.  For example, because of lesser status, and the reliance on oral histories, it is still rare outside of selective parts of academia for the Battle of the Little Big Horn [known in the West as Custer’s Last Stand] to be told from Native American accounts.  Comparatively, it has taken very long and very late for racism to be acknowledged as a structural and historical phenomenon (even if this is now conceptually under attack by political/media elites).  The word racism only started to become concrete in regular usage by the end of the 1970s – people previously struggled negotiating the usage of terms ‘bigotry’ or ‘racialism’.  (eg Anti-racist playwright Horace Ove’s 1979 BBC drama ‘A Hole in Babylon’ about the Spaghetti House siege was still experimenting with the term ‘racialism’.)

The darker the skin the lower the status

The critique of Abbott is also wrong because it plays down the significance of light/dark western hierarchies, the limited preferment under the slavery/colonialism gravy-train that occurred on this basis, and the capitalist commodification applied to Black identities.  To this day physical light/dark hierarchies have an impact on employment, renumeration and provision across health, education and housing.  As the Aspen Institute description of  structural racism includes

“”…dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practise. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.”

Significantly, in supposed popular culture, Sacha Baron Cohen’s, Ali-G character was predicated on the premise that the proliferation of Black popular cultural iconography among other groups was somehow clown-like.  David Baddiel has repeatedly racially mocked Black ethnic physicality without any damage to his media marketing profile. Yet no one equivalently claims that it is aspirationally ludicrous for a Black professional to wear western business attire.

Since the early days of slavery and colonialism Black people have continued to have ethnic self-loathing peddled at them in the form of imposed social deferment and of products designed to make them look ‘desirably more-white’.  Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary ‘Good Hair’ noted that for Black people “good hair is white hair”. Rock also interviewed Black women actors whose use of make-up and camera lighting techniques functioned to lighten them.

Even now, image search engines will confirm the ongoing horrendous physical skin injuries incurred by Black people attempting to bleach themselves white because they internalised this hierarchy.  Very many of these images are too grim to republish here.

The more palatable modern examples are here, many 1960s equivalents were far worse and involved the desperate use of industrial strength cleaners by the tragically uneducated.

Images from “Vanguard” article on Skin bleaching fuels cancer, hypertension, kidney failure — Dr Gab-Okafor

It is worth noting that the Nazis subsumed Jewish and the Roma and Sinti peoples into a racialised pseudo-science narrative and formal categorisations. They spent ages working out physical dimensions, proportions of the face, length of nose (of course), to be able to better “spot Jews” – demonstrating again, that racism is a social construct. The Roma were treated similarly and again much of their experience lost because they had oral rather than written traditions.

After the eugenics-based crimes of the Nazis, western powers made a number of ‘never again’ type public pronouncements.  Yet none of the “never again” pronouncements stopped western museums from continuing to hold the remains of Black people as examples of supposed ‘missing link-type’ primitiveness.  Among these Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman remains were held at Musée de l’Homme in Paris, only returned in 2002. And to the embarrassment of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the local El Negro de Banyoles continued to held until the new millennium.

Muslims under attack

When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour turned Britain’s foreign policy back to imperialist mode, they excused and fuelled this policy with a collective guilt narrative of ‘radical Islam’ or ‘militant Islam’.  Muslim diasporas that often-had major differences, were smeared as part of this supposed conspiracy.  In our media’s mis-conjured public imagination, Muslims are primarily people-of-colour, while Jews are just other white people (this ignores white Muslims and Jews of colour too). It’s difficult enough to critique the 19^th white colonial ideology of Zionism, but imagine if Blair or Brown had substituted ‘Judaism’ for ‘Islam’ it would have immediately been termed anti-Semitism.  This the difference between being Black and white, between having and not having class and lobbying status.

Among the domestic victims of the belief in Muslim collective guilt was 82 -year-old Muslim grandad Muhammad Saleem stabbed to death while commuting to Mosque in the West Midlands in 2013, with his killer also planting arson devices at three mosques.  Sikh dentist Dr Sarandev Bhambra suffered an attempted violent beheading because his attacker presumed him to be a Muslim.  Clearly Diane Abbott is right: those whose ethnicity manifests also as part of their physicality, bear a particular burden of racism as part of their historical, structural and capitalist economic reality in western societies.

Antisemitism as a smokescreen?

The most recent census suggest the British Jewish population is 0.5% of the population.  Black, Asian and Mixed-Race groups add up to less than 17% of the population, over 18% if the ethnic ‘Other’ category is included.  In theory for every Rachel Riley, Emma Barnett or Jonathan Freedland enjoying a position of prominence there should thirty-four people of colour with similar status. But professional environments are rarely ethnically representative in this way.

Nor are there Jewish equivalents to – Marc Duggan, Jermaine Baker, Rashan Charles etc – BLM deaths at police hands.  Chris Kaba’s killing by police received less media outrage than the support for the smears against Diane Abbott that shamefully occurred just few weeks later.  Nor, in Britain, is there a white Jewish equivalent to the Windrush deportation scandal.

Attempts at anti-Semitism moral panics have been used against supporters of justice for Palestinians for decades but became much more prominent with the Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, which verified by the United Nations killed 2251 people, of which 551 were children. Since then, there have been continued attempts to portray Israel, and supporters of its violence, as the real victims. The dates even suggest that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA) was formed before the corpse of the last Palestinian child killed in that “war” of 2014 had cooled in its grave.  The current Israeli genocide in Gaza exceeded some time ago, ten times the death toll of 9/11. Indeed, it has taken the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians – and 6 western aid workers – for the outrage to begin to match that expressed in relation to the Israeli deaths from the Hamas attack on October 7^th.

Supporters of this public relations process have been treated as respectable while Jewish human rights activists, our anti-racist friends, allies of Black and indigenous communities, have been treated as proverbial lepers by the corporate media. This is not a process to which Gary Younge should be giving even tacit support.  Given aspects of Israeli colonialism oppress even Jewish people of colour, he might instead as a Black man, want to give some thought as to how hazardous he’d find it walking the non-tourist streets of Apartheid Israel or the difficulty he’d have renting a room in certain towns, even if he was Jewish, and warn other Black Britons about the risks.

The fact that as a prominent figure Diane Abbot could so easily be smeared by the lobby says a lot about the issue of racism.  She is not alone.  Indicative of the reality of racism for Black people, no social or professional status offers protection.  Nelson Mandela was smeared as ‘an enabler of anti-Semitism’ by the Israel National News. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has also been regularly smeared by the same lobby, as were Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. U.S. Members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley have faced similar attacks. Attempts were made to ‘rescind’ a Civil Rights Award to academic and former 1960s radical icon Angela Davis because of her support for Palestinians.

It is vital that we stand up for Palestinians and that while doing so, we do not fall into Israel’s rhetoric by equating their actions with Jews.  But while we are doing that, we must also recognise the reality of racism for Palestinians and for Black, Asian and Muslim people in the UK and elsewhere.  We need to remember that racism is structural and a daily experience for people from a (UK) minority community easily identified by skin colour.  For so many, going out into the world means putting on an “I am now ready not to react” cloak .  This is what Diane Abbott, that most abused female politician, was referring to and she deserves more understanding than she has received.