Diane Abbot labour whip removed

[justpreeing]

Didn’t see a thread here so I thought I’d start one.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/23/diane-abbott-suspended-by-labour-after-saying-jewish-people-not-subject-to-racism

Personally, I think it’s the correct call. Incredible unforced error.

Also happy to see her go. No fan of her and her politics.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/15/racism-in-britain-is-not-a-black-and-white-issue-it-is-far-more-complicated

Ms Abbott seems not to appreciate that many Jews are not white, some are even black.

https://twitter.com/SholaMos1/status/1650909272396513280?t=Bshj-BK2y_vjXCZQto0wMA&s=03
Tweet from Dr Shola

I'm white and I'm really, really upset because, as others have already said above, Diane Abbott deserves so much better and she's too socialist for Starmer so this was just waiting to happen. At the same time, my first reaction was wtf why did she say such things. Diane Abbott is someone I've always admired and been proud of as a Londoner. Yet her comments were inevitably going to mean removal of the whip. I can't imagine what she was thinking.

Again - it’s important to understand where she was coming from. Many (not all) white Jewish and Irish people are phenotypically indistinguishable from other white people and if they change their names or accents - they are able to hide in ways black and brown people are unable to. This is not to deny the obvious oppression, discrimination and racism these groups experience but understanding the nuance in the differences in experience they all have. Regardless - she’s now gone from Labour.

Pretty sure that if the Jews could easily hide amongst other Europeans we would not have had the holocaust as you wouldn’t have been able to find any.

Because so many couldn’t possibly fathom the depths of depravity that awaited them (I mean who could even imagine it) - the persecution of them was a slow steady drip some people had the foresight in the 30s to emigrate but then when people started losing their jobs and having to walk around with visible identifiers (because not all Jewish people looked stereotypically Jewish) - people who were known in their communities as Jewish couldn’t suddenly change their names and visibly Jewish people (Orthodox) couldn’t hide. There were a lucky few who were able to hide but not many (and how frightening for them that they could be found out at any moment). If some of these people could have seen what was coming - some would have moved to places where no one knew them and shed their visible identifiers and names, some would have emigrated and still some would have stayed.

For a comparator - in the Rwandan genocide many Tutsis were only identifiable by their neighbours knowing they were Tutsi (similar to many Jews) and hence they were unable to escape their fates but someone from outside the region would be unable to distinguish between a Hutu and a Tutsi objectively.

Regardless - there are no words for how evil what happened during the Holocaust was but that is not the discussion DA was having. It’s alright because people don’t want to acknowledge a difference of experience in the present - and that’s fine - we get it.

@skullbabe
Yes, I understand that it is a visibility point. DA was extremely misguided in choosing Jewish people to make this point, as some are extremely visible on looks and religious signifiers She was also misguided in making this point in order to try to claim an "always worse" status, which is what seemed to be her point in the column - the fact that people are experiencing racism relating to skin colour and this is something that must be weighted extremely heavily in how we think about the impact on racism on them given the lack of option to blend or pass is I think irrefutable and reasonable BUT it is still a leap to say that this type is necessarily always automatically a worse type for the victim than, for example, your child being attacked and badly beaten by kids at school who know from observing them that they are Jewish, or your neighbours putting dogs hit outside your front door because they want to drive you away because you are from the travelling community.

DA had a valuable point to make - the column she was responding to was making the point that based on the number of reported instances of racism and the communities that are impacted are more varied than we might think and not just about skin colour. It would be entirely legitimate to point out that actually not everything is counted and that the effects of accumulated ill treatment (much unreported) and the mental health impact of this consistent othering and prejudice experienced by those with different skin colour (or who are visibly from a member of a historically persecuted race) is not sufficiently weighted and taken into account in the type of survey to which the columnist was referring. It's just that the column was not written sufficiently subtly to make this point. I do really feel for her, as I think she did not mean this.

The general loathing of DA goes beyond MN. It's clearly both racist and sexist.

Dr Shola has it spot on.

"Trans issues" as you put it are also about usurping words. And related to sexism.