Diane Abbott and racism then and now

Today (Sunday) the Observer printed a letter from Diane Abbott, the Labour (well, now suspended from the party) MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington in inner east London, who is Black, opining that white ethnic minorities such as Jews, Irish and Gypsies and Travellers do not experience racism in the true sense; she offers three examples of ‘proper’ racism which only happened to Black people, namely slavery, segregation in America and Apartheid in South Africa. This has provoked widespread outrage, some of it echoing racist tropes (e.g. people calling her thick, a thing I have heard said about her often, and never about any other MP that I can recall), and she has been suspended from the party (something which may well have been on the Labour leadership’s wish list for some time given her close links to Jeremy Corbyn, but she has now given them an excuse).

Both Abbott and some of her detractors miss important points here. All three forms of discrimination mentioned took place in the past; the 17th to 19th centuries in the case of the slave trade and the period from the 1880s to the 1960s in the case of segregation. During both of these periods, Jews were being persecuted in one country or another; in the earlier example the persecution was mostly in imperial Russia where Jews were heavily restricted in where they could live, subjected at times to onerous military conscription and at other times to pogroms, although throughout mainland Europe, Jews were required to live in ghettos (the word ghetto originated as a Jewish quarter in an Italian city) and restricted in what trades and professions they could undertake. The era of segregation in the US also includes the height of Russian persecution, which prompted the mass emigration of Jews from the Russian “Pale of Settlement” to western countries including the UK and USA, as well as the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It’s true that Jews that made it to the UK or the USA were freed from Russian persecution and protected from the Holocaust and were not subject to segregation, although there actually was some discrimination. But racism as it affected Black Britons, South Africans or Americans isn’t the only kind of racism and never has been. In Europe until the mid-20th century, Jews were by far the most persecuted people.

However, this does not mean Jews in the UK or US now are among the principal victims of racism; racism generally targets visible minorities who are perceived as both foreign and troublesome. Over the last few weeks we have heard much reporting on police abuses and failures to tackle abusive officers; many of the victims include young Black people who have been stopped and searched, sometimes violently assaulted, for no good reason, including “matching someone’s description” in no other way than having the same skin colour. Black British people who came to this country as citizens in the 50s and 60s when they were free to do so have been deported for no good reason, because there was no record of when they moved here and thus were assumed to have come illegally. Some were detained while awaiting deportation; many people deported to Jamaica and other Caribbean countries have no remaining family there, and some have been murdered. Laws are being introduced that mean a British citizen can be denaturalised if the government deems them undesirable and they have any recent foreign ancestry; this is targeted at Black and Asian people, of course, but Jews are affected too as Israel exists as an avenue for their deportation, something considered an unfortunate by-product and unlikely to be used. It is also significant that the populace chose the government that had already perpetrated these abuses against Black and Asian people, as well as targeting disabled people, over a Labour party tainted by accusations of antisemitism which did not stray into violence or threaten Jews’ right to live here.

Gypsies (Roma) and Travellers are also groups that have suffered centuries of persecution. People feel very justified in despising both groups and in supporting the destruction of Travellers’ homes, even people who think they are not racist and who would condemn any other prejudice. The Friends, Families and Travellers campaign posted a Twitter thread in response to Abbott’s letter which declared that “Irish Traveller, Romany Gypsy and Roma people are constantly subjected to hate, cruelty and all kinds of humiliation on a daily basis … face extreme marginalisation and racism, across all levels of society, from cradle to grave. … From experiencing bans from holiday parks, to being called derogatory names in school, to being denied access to healthcare, to being overly represented in the criminal justice. This is racism”. Sites for Travellers are often in undesirable and unhealthy locations, often close to rubbish dumps or sewage works, but planning laws are routinely used to block attempts for them to settle anywhere else. This discrimination spans both the times referred to in Abbott’s letter and the present day.

Abbott has posted a tweet distancing herself from the letter, claiming she emailed a first draft rather than the finished letter; this has not convinced a lot of people who reason that “well, she still thought his and put it in writing”. It is even speculated that she clicked ‘send’ rather than ‘save’ and the letter was eagerly published by the Observer to discredit her. Jewdas, the left-wing Jewish organisation, noted on Twitter earlier that Barry Sheerman posted a tweet in 2020 about “silver shekels”, referring to two Jewish businessmen who were in line for peerages, and faced no disciplinary action after he deleted the tweets and apologised; they deduce that it was because Sheerman is, as they call him, a rightwing warmonger (he consistently voted for the Iraq war and against independent inquiries into it) rather than an outspoken left-wing Labour MP. The letter, first draft or otherwise, reflects a mentality among some anti-racist activists that only Black people can be victims of racism; she even fails to acknowledge racism against Asian people, who are targeted as much in modern Britain as Black people and were the subjects of colonialism, with its regular man-made famines, at the same time as Black people suffered the slave trade. I agree that it would be unfair to treat her more harshly than Barry Sheerman, but we must also ask if someone who can betray her own confidence this easily can be trusted to keep anyone else’s.