| 8 mins read
Diane Abbott–Britain’s first black woman MP and the longest serving woman in parliament, a veteran anti–racist with a large number of Jewish people in her Hackney constituency–has been suspended from the Labour Party for a second time after a BBC interview in which she appeared to place anti-black racism above antisemitism in a hierarchy of racisms: “It's silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism".
It’s hard to see how her new comments can be understood as antisemitic or that they merit discipline, but this is precisely the path Labour has chosen to pursue. On the eve of Abbott’s suspension, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner bluntly told The Guardian newspaper: “there’s no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party”, yet failed to explain how Abbott’s comments bear any relation to it. What did Abbott actually say–and, more importantly, is she right?
Although in her interview, recorded in May this year, Abbott said that she stood by her 2023 remarks, the position she articulates now is a different one. In 2023, she contrasted “racism”, which she associated with skin colour and historic structural forms of discrimination in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States, with mere “prejudice”, such as that experienced by Jews, Irish and Travellers (as well as red haired people). In her more recent comments, however, she acknowledges antisemitism as a type of racism, and indeed a serious one, but affirms a radical difference between racism associated with skin colour and other forms.
Abbott’s original comments in 2023 responded to an op ed by Tomiwa Owolade that describes some of the findings of a major study of discrimination by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity at Manchester University (CoDE). The study, called EVENS and led by geographer Nissa Finney, explored the experiences of self-defined members of ethnic groups in the UK, and was unusual in having large enough samples to make fairly robust claims about the startling range of barriers and inter-personal racism some smaller groups face.
The study found that more than 60% of Gypsy and Traveller people, more than 55% of Jewish people and more than 40% of Irish people reported that they had experienced some form of racist assault–compared to 50% for black Caribbean people and more than 30% for black African people. Roma, Gypsy and Traveller people experienced some of the worst outcomes across a whole range of societal sectors, from health to housing to employment. Jewish respondents, like some those of some Asian groups, tended towards better outcomes in many sectors, although in morbidity, housing security and employment during the pandemic there were some surprising indicators of Jewish clusters of disadvantage. The results of the study pointed to the way in which structural disadvantage and “skin colour” do not always map on to each other in a straightforward manner.
On a deeper conceptual level, the complex history of “race” and racialisation shows that apparent skin colour is just one–highly contingent–dimension of the human categories racism has fixed on. As Cedric Robinson, the great theorist of black Marxism and racial capitalism noted in the 1980s, European societies marked off a wide range of European groups, including Irish, Slavs, Jews, Sámi and Roma, as hyper-exploitable and enslavable. Recent historians of the mediaeval period, such as Geraldine Heng and M. Lindsay Kaplan, have explored how Muslims and Jews were racialised long before the word race came into use.
Similarly, a global view pushes us away from valorising “skin colour” as the primary vector of racism. Taking a planetary perspective, a 2022 Political Quarterly collection edited by Tariq Modood and Thomas Sealy argued against “over-privileging European and American frameworks, what we refer to as Euro-Americancentricity.” They continue that instead we need “to draw from understandings derived from the relevant contexts in order to broaden the purview to include other empires, cognitive traditions and political agendas, and the legacy of their racial hierarchies today, as well as the development of new forms of racism outside the West, under the orbit of racism”. In many cases, these precede contact with European colonialism (drawing on concepts such as caste, that have their own histories) although many have been re-articulated alongside models drawn from the Atlantic lexicon. Some have been re-animated as part of rising nationalist projects: “Cases of this kind, for instance, include the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, Hindus and Muslims in Sri Lanka, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, Muslims in India and Christians in Pakistan.”
And even hierarchies of “skin colour” play out differently in different contexts. Anti-blackness in Mexico is not the same as colourism in Britain. Or in Sudan, where “fifty shades of blackness” range from Red at the top to Blue at the bottom. As Mohammed Elnaim notes, the hierarchy of Green and Yellow is a racial index “which make sense in Sudan, and thankfully seem stupid elsewhere” — but is far from the “craziest regime of racialization”, a distinction he reserves for the taxonomy used in plantation Haiti before its revolution, described in The Black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James, composed of 128 distinct racial categories.
All this is to say that while Abbott might be able to “spot [a] person of colour from hundreds of yards away”, as she says in her recent interview, the regime of visibility that makes that possible is historically recent and place-specific.
A better approach is to acknowledge racism as multidimensional, with a wide range of logics (some based on exclusion, others on exploitation). Antisemitism is one form of racism among many; like anti-blackness it takes a range of forms in different places at different times. Like Islamophobia and anti-Roma racism, it draws on a deep reservoir of narratives of otherness circulating widely in our culture–but has material effects that continue to bite in the here and now.
Alongside similarity, however, is dissimilarity. Today in Britain, Jewish people, as a group, experience personal vulnerability without facing structural disadvantages to the same degree as other racialised minorities. This is the element truth contained in Abbott’s 2023 and more recent comments.
In making this point, she has pushed to the centre of debate the question of how different groups experience racism, an important question which should not be suppressed or shut down. But rather than a zero sum either/or approach–contrasting “real” colour-based racism to mere prejudice, or the counter insistence that Jews should count more–we need a 360 degree politics of solidarity, one that acknowledges the specificities of different racism but also what they have in common. We need to do better if we are to build an encompassing anti-racist politics at a time when the racist right is on the rise.
