Race is something that is not going away. And ethnicity with it.
But it is definitely the focal point of a discursive arena in which it seems to be increasingly impossible to find genuine consistency and appropriate levels of nuance in actions of both thought and language (whether spoken or written, and whether ‘academic’ or ‘vernacular’).
While there is a sense in which this particular post comes into being by virtue of the ongoing controversy (at the present time of writing) in British politics that involves the currently suspended Labour MP Diane Abbott (who, it must be said, has failed to speak for me as a Black British citizen for some time now) and one of the more generous donors to the Conservative party, an individual (he has not earned the right to be characterised as a ‘gentleman’ on this blog) by the name of Frank Hester, I would like to begin this conversation at an earlier historical juncture: January 31st, 2022, when the African-American actor and activist Whoopi Goldberg, whilst appearing on the ABC (a US television network) show The View made some comments in relation to the Holocaust that not only went viral extremely quickly but resulted in her being suspended from The View for a fortnight.
It is more than a little unfortunate that one of the most important contextual aspects of this conversation has been lost in the firestorm that ensued: the fact that in the US, long before we get to the question of the right to free speech, we have an upsurge of censorship activity that is doing the opposite of supporting conditions for ‘free thinking’. Banning the study of books in secondary schools that have supported some very important ethical and moral principles of pedagogy that contribute to conditions in which all of us learn how to be better human beings in societies where difference is a given – not least in relation to the historical consequences of what happens when people fail to welcome ‘the other’ – can only undermine any claims that we are in fact ‘enlightened’ (and at this point, I take the ongoing catastrophic failures of abysmally large numbers of academics in the English-speaking West who continue to belittle Adorno (and Horkheimer and co) for both a style of writing that they take to be turgid and uninspiring as well as for a brand of pessimism that they take to be wholly unjustified to be an even bigger problem than many of us will have the emotional intelligence to face up to).
[And yes, that really was a very long sentence.]
So in a moment of prototypical TV talk-show panel discussion in which the banning of To Kill a Mockingbird and Maus are being discussed, Goldberg makes a monumental misstep of thought. It happens that the Guardian columnist Kenan Malik has done a solid job of explicating that particular situation and so I happily direct you to that piece of writing. Given that there is obviously no way the majority of those reading this who have not already encountered Malik’s article will necessarily stop to read it before continuing to read this post (although that is genuinely advised), here is a short excerpt that moves this post’s discussion forward:
“Racism today is viewed primarily through the lens of “whiteness” and of “white privilege”. It is something that white people dish out. And something from which non-whites suffer (unless you’re an Asian-American, in which case you are deemed to be almost white).
Jews today are seen as white and privileged and so incapable of being victims of racism. It’s a perspective that has led some on the left to become blind to antisemitism. It’s also led many, like Goldberg, to deny the relationship between racism and the Holocaust.”
Malik will go on to argue – contra many exponents (and would-be exponents) of ‘critical race theory’ – that race has never been just about ‘black and white’ – something that should have been de facto but is clearly anything but in the minds of many people. And so we come to the piece of writing that caused Diane Abbott’s suspension – and in this moment I am not talking about anything that she herself wrote, but about this article by Observer columnist Tomiwa Owolade. For reasons that only Ms Abbott herself can ever actually get close to knowing, upon reading this Owolade piece Diane Abbott decided to write a letter in response. Now, it would seem that at the time that this blog post is being written it is impossible to find an official link to this letter on the Observer website, and time does not permit my going to an archive to find a copy of the original. [It should also be pointed out that there are several places online where the evidence suggests that an author has endeavoured to present a link to the online version of said letter, and more than one of these all seem to have been signposted towards a completely different piece of writing by Martha Gill…]
As such, I now make use of an online source for which I would prefer not to provide a direct reference, and invite the reader to engage in their own verification activity in relation to what follows. According to said source, here is an excerpt from that letter:
“It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”
This one excerpt has done more than many things I can think of to set back the cause of rigorous and nuanced antiracism here in the UK. As a teaching academic, it has never been clear to me that a significant part of my vocational identity – irrespective of whichever specific discipline or combination of disciplines I am teaching at a given moment – is to teach critical thinking skills. Where this results in students holding different opinions to my own, that is literally neither here nor there; that they can think for themselves in ways that they could not prior to their encounter with my pedagogy is evidence that I have done my job. One aspect of this involves helping students to understand that the word ‘critical’ has significantly more valence than its vernacular use presupposes, and if I had to lead an exercise in critical thinking using this particular excerpt, it is literally impossible that its author could emerge with any credit (solely on the basis of this particular piece of thinking).
I am only able to speculate as to exactly what account of ‘prejudice’ Abbott has offered in her letter prior to the first sentence of this excerpt; that she refers to the prejudice that she takes “many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads” to experience with a different article indicates that there is something specific for which “this prejudice” is a referent. But even without knowing exactly what that may be, one outcome of the first and second sentences combined is a recognition that Abbott takes there to be a distinction between ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’. Now, superficially speaking, it is of course ipso facto that whereas racism is of course an instance of prejudice, not all prejudice takes the form of racism. However, it is not at all clear what such a distinction contributes towards her argument – until it becomes clear that Diane Abbott has done a ‘Whoopi Goldberg’ and assumed that Jewish = white – and that as a given and intrinsic reality. It is one thing for an African-American actor – operating in a cultural environment in which thinking about race is notoriously toxic and preposterously conceptually limited – to hold such an opinion. It is entirely another for the very first b/Black woman to be elected to the UK Parliament (and the holder of an earned undergraduate degree from Cambridge) to hold such an opinion. One now has to ask whether or not this MP’s personal circle of relationships includes any Jewish people who might have supported her capacity to recognise the calumny of such a position (I will return to this specific question shortly).
Separate, however, to any notional ‘academic’ concerns one may have with the thinking espoused herewith is the fact that in rational and pragmatic terms, this sort of prose offered in that sort of context had an extremely high potential to constitute a political death warrant. ‘Suggestions’ are essentially just as dangerous as ‘categorical assertions’ if one is a politician and the combination of both in this context leaves the writer of this blog post in no doubt that a sanction of some sort was the least one might expect. It is unfortunate that whereas the evidence appears to suggest that Irish people are no longer discriminated against in ways that have historically been the case, the same cannot be said for not only Traveller communities but also Gypsy and Roma people groups – and that their ongoing plight has essentially been erased from this conversation. So as we turn our focus to the question of whether or not (a) Jewish people are in fact an example of “types of white people with points of difference” and as such (b) people who “are not all their lives subject to racism”, it should become clear that the capacity of such assertions to withstand scrutiny was essentially non-existent before they were even formulated. A person does not have to agree with Israel’s political machinations (and in relation to more than its actions in Gaza long before the present crisis at this time of writing) to understand that anti-Semitic racism is as wrong as any other racism, and so it is entirely possible that some Jewish people will experience racism from some Muslim people (including but not necessarily Palestinian) even if said Jewish people are completely against the way the Israeli government has operated at more than one historical juncture in the past and how it is operating at the present time of writing). How does Diane Abbott know who is and is not “all their [life] subject to racism”?! And the point here is rather less to do with whether or not the empirical evidence exists for anyone to know the answer to such a question and rather more to do with the fact that the very possibility of such knowledge itself is by definition non-existent.
And so, politically and pragmatically speaking: why on earth would a veteran MP put themselves in a position where the risk of writing something for which an apology might be required was as high as we see in this letter (albeit at present from the position of one extract – albeit one very explosive extract)?! The physical attack on three different Jewish people in London’s Stamford Hill district (London) in 2021 was a hate crime differing only in degree (scale, in this instance) than in kind to the racist murder of pensioner Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham back in 2013. Ms Abbott’s position literally beggars belief.
A wide range of political commentators have offered their thoughts as to quite what agendas were nicely served by this monumental political, ethical and conceptual misstep. Observations in this regard include notes on the fact that Labour Party members who are ideologically very far away from Abbott have stated categorically that her apology – which was swift and unambiguous – should have been taken seriously by party leadership.
But being wrong in your categorisation of racism, different forms of racism or of xenophobia and prejudice is not the same as being racist. Tory minister Grant Shapps’ claim that the letter amounted to “hateful anti-Semitism” is utter calumny from a man who serves in a government that:
- has passed a law enabling the seizure and destruction of Traveller caravans – which would be the destruction of actual homes of ethnoracially minoritised people/s
- recently (at the time of writing) had a Home Secretary who was essentially diverting the fight to end Child Sexual Exploitation into a dangerous campaign to blame “British-Pakistani men” – a position her own department has refuted
- also has a former leader, Boris Johnson, who (as Prime Minister) is supposed to have said that he didn’t like being bypassed as he was supposed to be “the Führer”
- is accused of maintaining close links with the antisemitic nationalist right in Eastern Europe…
And with that, we return to Frank Hester and his coruscatingly negative remarks about not only Diane Abbott but “all black women”. As one b/Black online commentator (Ovo Gharoro) notes:
“She made no calls for people or a person to be shot. She never said that she hated anyone or any group. She called their experience prejudice, acknowledging that it was “wrong” but did not go as far as calling it racism. Yes, she has also apologised and still, she has been suspended for about a year.”
Many MPs acknowledged that Diane Abbott has experienced more hatred over the last 40 years than her colleagues. She was suspended for saying something that I still don’t disagree with. Maybe it is because she is not a wealthy donor, giving £15 million to a party—just 43% of their annual donations. Why can’t we draw a connection to how experiencing more hatred would lead her to make a statement like the above?
Ironically, in Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday [March 13th 2024], dominated by this row, Diane Abbott tried 45 times to be heard and was not given a voice. Some people blame the Speaker for not calling on her, and he gave his excuse that there wasn’t enough time. I look at everyone in the chambers who made a statement or asked a question; they could have been allies and asked Diane Abbott to be heard. Instead, we saw yet again another example of what racial bias can feel like in a working environment.
I have experienced the Diane Abbott treatment, and I know of many senior leaders who could share similar experiences.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/he-apologised-being-rude-so-lets-all-move-ovo-gharoro-npiqe/?trackingId=kEbCgwd6SUmw63wB%2F7Q%2BYQ%3D%3D
The sentence highlighted in red is what precludes the possibility of my 100% endorsement of Gharoro’s post. But before I get to that, let us be clear about the fact that the £15 million to which he refers was in fact at that time of writing £10 million that had come in two equal instalments plus the promise of another £5 million (reported in this article 3 days before Gharoro’s post). The Guardian article cited above states that at £10 million Hester is already the biggest Tory Party donor in history…so in this regard I am completely with Gharoro: it is absolutely insane that he offers a mealy-mouthed apology for ‘being rude’ but not sexist or racist and the PM believes that his apology should be accepted. Meanwhile, the leader of the Labour Party appears to be completely disinterested in accepting Ms Abbott’s apology. Now, what has prompted this apology? A wholly cynical view might likely take the position that a flashing red light went off in Diane Abbott’s mind having seen some of the remarks from Jewish community members in response to her letter and as such the apology is nothing more than an emblem of political expediency. I would like to suggest that it is also possible that some of Diane Abbott’s actual friends and (closer) associates have called her on this particular position and as such, some part of the motivating drivers for the apology include genuine awareness that she was in fact completely wrong to think in such a way, much less express that in public. The author of the article whose position she was contesting was absolutely on point and as a politician she had been nowhere near the real world on this matter.
No aspect of this is straightforward – and this before we get to the small matter of the fact that Southern Asian people are just as capable of antib/Black racism as white people…
For the Tories to continue to accept this money is absolutely tantamount to an astronomical lack of respect for black and Black identities. However, let us now progress to the final big issue that this post will address: the small matter of what is highlighted by red type in the Gharoro excerpt above.
Gharoro does not believe that Diane Abbott was wrong to say what she said. Does this mean that he believes that only b/Black people experience racism?! Does that mean that Jews and Traveller communities (et al) do not experience racism?! Is one supposed to understand that b/Black people cannot express racism?!
To hold the position that racism of any stripe directed at any people group is bad is not tantamount to saying that all racisms are experienced in equal ways. In times past I was one of those who did not believe that we needed a word like ‘antiblackness’ (or antib/Blackness) because racism covered everybody and everything. But after the murder of George Perry Floyd, Junior (1973-2020) and the fact that an East Asian BIPOC person was also complicit in his death (WHY it is STILL the case that no one is talking about that?!?!), I could not be clearer on the fact that we really do need this word. But the ubiquity and pervasiveness of antib/Blackness is not beginning to constitute epistemic warrant for the position that nobody who is phenotypically white experiences racism. I now find myself in the egregious position of having to constantly make the point that I am pro-b/Black without being anti-white – and the fact that this can no longer be taken for granted is a sign of how diseased and underpowered the discursive arena is around these issues have become.
There is no hack or fix for this situation but as ever, this blog post is offered in hope that it might stimulate a vastly more rigorous and nuanced conversation in some location where its contents are read, understood and digested. And even where you have read to this point and do not agree, thank you very much for at least giving the positions espoused herewith the time of day.
Alexander Douglas - a writer of words and music 