Is Diane Abbott right that only Black people experience racism and other ethnic groups experience prejudice?

[IwantToRetire]

Diane Abbott has been suspended as a Labour MP pending an investigation into a letter she wrote about racism to the Observer, the party has said.

The politician said "many types of white people with points of difference" can experience prejudice, in a letter published on Sunday.

But they are not subject to racism "all their lives", she said.

She later tweeted to say she was withdrawing her remarks and apologised "for any anguish caused".

Labour said the comments were "deeply offensive and wrong".

Suspending the whip means Ms Abbott will not be allowed to represent Labour in the House of Commons, where she will now sit as an independent MP.

In the letter, she wrote that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people "undoubtedly experience prejudice", which she said is "similar to racism".

She continued: "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."

She had been responding to a comment piece in the Guardian questioning the view that racism "only affects people of colour".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65365978

No, technically being Jewish is an ethnicity and a religion - ethnoreligion. There are some Jews who do not share the same ethnicity, but they are a very very small minority (africa and some Chinese I think?). Majority of all of the Jews in the world are related to each other despite living in different places for hundreds of years, as they don’t tend to mix out. Conversion is also very difficult and not encouraged. You can tell a Jewish person very easily if you know them.

There are very very few ‘non ethnic’ Jews, or Jews of alternative ethnicity to the overarching ‘Jewish DNA’ in the world. Case in point, my ‘Jewish’ family lived in morocco, amongst other places, my husbands family in Europe - we still share the same DNA as evidenced by dna testing. There are also genetic diseases carried and various other health conditions distinct to the group.

unless you’re searching under a rock or you’re deliberately trying to prove Jews are not a race (or rather ethnicity) there’s plenty of scientific research including:

https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2010.277

Arguments against Jews being an ethnicity have largely been used to distance or hope to distance Jews away from being persecuted as a ‘race’ following the Holocaust - in more modern times it’s been used as a reverse orientalism to paint Jews as ‘white’ and ‘privileged’ particularly in discussions on Israel - Palestine where Palestinians are illustrated as ‘brown’ and colonised. Technically speaking most Jews are also most closely genetically and ethically related to Palestinians, as also evidenced by scientific study.

Personally, I don't think Dianne abbott should be ex-communicated from the Labour party, any more than Jeremy Corbyn should. These discusssions need to be had. Kier Starmer is more interested in making the sorts of noises he think will get him elected than in maintaining integrity. This sort of totalitarian behaviour whereby people must be silenced and cancelled is not the way forward.

Dianne Abbott effectively being forced to apologise is no different from the multiples of women who have had to apologise for upsetting the TRAs. Becoming even more immersed in the politics of grievance and victimhood is not a good move. And it will only embed division even more - because behind the scenes on the Left there is still an obsession with Israel and an automatic knee jerk reaction against it - which is, in itself, to do with inherent ideas about structural oppression/oppressors and oppressed which form the foundations of Left politics.

@AG247 that looks like a really interesting article - unfortunately can't read it as would need to subscribe to Nature first

Presumably the Italian contribution is from the prolonged Roman occupation of Palestine 2000 yrs ago rather than more recent colonialism in MENA?

NotHavingIt

The question then is how do you ensure the Labour Party, at all levels, is a welcoming place for Jews (and GC women and others).

What happens in Westminster and at party leadership level filters down through local parties, Unions and into student politics.

And in particular leaders including DA need to be very clear that criticism of Israel as a state has nothing to do with acceptance of people who happen to have Jewish DNA. (The genetics lesson has been fascinating….wrong thread but Icelandic DNA is also cool.) Indeed this might have the advantage of enabling those British Jews who have their reservations about the current Israeli government and policies to speak out.

During the Corbyn Boris election DD found the group chat for students on her course inundated with Corbyn/Palestinian stuff which was worded in a way that could have made Jewish students feel isolated. At one point she (she is not Jewish) challenged it, only to be piled upon. I later met someone who is a Jewish community leader who confirmed this is all too common and very difficult for young Jews.

We are a multi ethnic, multi religious society. We all, especially politicians need to be careful to ensure that pro-Palestine does not become a proxy for pro Muslim, anti Jew.

There is a story, though no idea of its veracity, from long ago about Thatcher, whose constituency, Finchley, has a large Jewish population visiting Israel/Palestine. She was apparently shocked by the conditions in the refugee camp she saw, and told her hosts that they risked raising a new generation of terrorists. It did not work that time but in general people are more likely to listen to those who they perceive as friends.

In terms of race and genetics - it’s only really important when it comes to medicine and ensuring that all people get the best screening and treatment for them, so Jewish women will likely benefit from earlier screening programme and black (and other ethnic minority) children with leukaemia and other blood disorders will benefit from more bone marrow donors from their own ethnic heritage on the donor register.
Genetics will be a massive part of medicine in future and humans will have to be vigilant in making sure it doesn’t stray into eugenics,
(just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do something!) which is where international human rights and national equality laws come in.

It’s like the Sex Matters ethos on sex and gender - sex matters but only in specific, limited circumstances (medicine, law, single sex spaces). The circumstances where race matters are even more limited because single race spaces are not a useful or fair thing (although free association still applies, obvs).

With that in mind I thought I’d see how anti semitism is categorised in UK law (or E&W law in the devolved bits) and it seems that Jewish people can be protected on both Religion and Race grounds, so I suppose it would depend on the particular incident of civil discrimination or criminal act committed (and the perps intent/motivation)?

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CDP-2019-0042/CDP-2019-0042.pdf

Obvs redheads are not covered by the protected characteristic of Religion nor the protected characteristic of Race, and Gypsy, Roma & Irish Traveller people ARE covered by the protected characteristic of Race, so at the very least an MP of Diane Abbott’s standing should realise that her take is completely out of step with the law in the country in which she is a law maker.

There are no easy solutions because the Left has become so immeresed in the politics of group identity with its hierarchies of oppression - especially amongst the younger generation. Every group is pitted against another.

How can such thorny issues and perceived conflicts of interest be dealt with? Cancellation and 'wrong think' thought crime is not the way forward - but certainly seems to be the new mode of action for the Labour Party - and this has impacted upon Leftists, Jewish people, and women who want to protect their sex based rights and repel gender identity theory.

Cancelling Dianne Abbott will not make the issue go away. Is the Labour party even capable of grasping the nettle that is inherent in such perceived conflicts of interest? Admitting that there are conflicts of interest in the first place would go some way to providing a platform to seek solution.

There's an archived copy here: https://archive.ph/WjxlS

Where is this data from? What about White Jews or Black Jews? Where do they fit in the percentages? Which box do they go in?. Your post doesn't make any sense and is just espousing a stereotype of wealth and Jew.
Why have you even posted this? I can't actually comprehend how you think it's helpful.

@TheBiologyStupid thank you

the Left has become so immersed in the politics of group identity with its hierarchies of oppression - especially amongst the younger generation.

This.

My impression is that other young people are then getting tired of "special" people. Having to keep up with the language rules, having to wear your rainbow lanyard, having to have training and other workplace activities scheduled around prayer times, accepting that your manager has to tread carefully with the staff member who is quick to use the race card.

Almost all will want to be kind and believe in supporting colleagues who face challenges, but may have started to ask "what about me?" There is a risk that intersectionality will lead to more intolerance rather than less. We have all worked with colleagues who carry huge burdens. One that immediately springs to my mind was a very junior and elderly Bangladeshi lady who had been divorced and then abandoned by her family. My black colleagues, and my white colleagues (like the one married to a man who was an chronic gambler) had their different challenges, but would have probably named her as the one we individually went out of our way to be kind to. Overcoming prejudice and intolerance cannot be done by proclaiming victimhood for an entire group. DA herself will have encountered problems (the treatment of any female politician is usually pretty poor) but equally she has benefitted from privilege.

I would love to see a debate between DA and Kemi. I suspect that intersectionality is a reason why female politicians from ethnic minorities who reject the idea, do so well in the Conservative party.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, I've only skim read the thread, but I was under the impression that a significant reason that, in particular, people of Ashkenazi descent are so closely related (and subsequently known to be more affected by certain genetic conditions), is because of a "bottle-neck" event that occurred in the population around 600-800 years ago. Likely to have either been the result of disease, disaster, or possibly persecution, with the result that they believe that all living Ashkenazi people today are descended from just 350 people.

MtDNA evidence for a genetic bottleneck in the early history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population | European Journal of Human Genetics (nature.com)

Ashkenazi Jews Have Become More Genetically Similar Over Time - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Ashkenazi Jews Descend From 350 People, Scientists Say - Science & Health - Haaretz.com

I guess another point is what is race?, I would argue being black afro caribbean or White British is a race. Being Jewish is a religion, although it originated in one part of the world inter-marriage means not every Jewish person can trace their roots to common ancestors (my godmother for example is Jewish, but converted when she married)

The Roma people can be traced to common ancestry in India, s could be classed as a race, whereas a lot Irish Travellers simply upped sticks from Ireland when times were tough and became itinerant workers, so they are a social group, but white Irish by race.

So Abbott is potentially correct to distinguish between racial prejudice and other prejudice, but it was a point that probably didn't need making, almost prejudice one upmanship - and given Labours recent history, incredibly stupid.

Under UK law both Irish Travellers and Jewish people are covered by the protected characteristic of ‘Race’.

So regardless of what race is and how it is defined, Diane Abbott’s opinion is at odds with UK Equalities Law (civil) and Hate Crime Law (criminal).

Wasn't aware of that fair enough, I stand corrected - I'm just a layman in such matters, as a politician, she should have known!!

So if this was "only a 1st draft" can we see the final one please?

Whatever she was trying to say she made her point very clumsily. I remember reading a black person saying once that they would be friends with people who were ostensibly white but who received prejudice because they were immigrants and couldn't speak the language of the host country. Once they and their children did learn to speak it they were accepted (especially their kids who spoke with no accent) in a way that a black person never was. The point was that black skin marks a person out and of course they carry that their whole life. Another example: a non black working class person can be upwardly mobile in a different way to a black working class person simply because their skin colour means that they can be integrated into white middle/upper class more easily (of course there are nuances).

What Abbott said was also problematic because there are black jews.

Which leads to the point that Jewishness isn't a race, is it? It is a religion (is that right? I don't pretend to know about these things), but I suspect that many people also view it as a race so the discrimination faced by Jewish people can be construed as racism.

Ultimately, there shouldn't be a hierarchy of racism - for example, I can't stand the way David Baddiel goes on about how Jewish people are more hard done by than other discriminated against groups because their plight is underplayed. I always wonder why, instead of setting one group against another, he doesn't just get on with highlighting growing anti-semitism in a way that is respectful to the other groups.

There’s an issue here that there are contradictions across various progressive ideas.

On the one hand, you have class analysis, where distinctions are made to recognise and examine oppressive/exploitative power relationships.

• The most clear distinction of classes is between the sexes because, rooted in biology there are clearly two - male or female.
• Obviously social classes are another axis - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But this is getting less and less clear with social mobility and as working life changes, (and you need to murder the upper class and evict the peasants to boil it down to these two), furthermore, how does the Indian caste system sit with this? Nonetheless it is still possible to crudely overlay the idea of working class, middle class and upper class, as a way of getting a meaningful understanding of the social class power dynamics.
• Then there is the idea of ‘race’, as in , distinct categories of the appearances of people, through, for example the genetic mutation which led to paler skin, straighter hair, and a prominent bridge of the nose in what is now known as Caucasians. Just like social class, ‘race’ is not a neat category as sex, but you can crudely overlay the idea of ‘races’ to analyse certain power dynamics resultant from historical events and persistent ideas about race resulting from them.
• Then there is ethnicity/tribe/nation. Groups of people with shared language, belief, culture, genes who may be competing for territory and become either exiled, or, occupied and oppressed, possibly assimilating, if they don’t win (but ideally there’ll be a King Alfred the Great-style peace agreement so it is possible to live side by side).

On the other hand you have a counter-movement to refute and undermine class analysis of inequality, it often seems to be promoted by those who have the ‘upper hand’ in any class analysis and by taking the name of the movement it counters ie- calling itself feminism, left-wing, civil rights activism. The arguments are:

• Classes and categories and words alone are the root of the problems of apparent inequality, if we stopped calling men, men and women, women, sexism would stop, if we stopped talking about ‘race’ then racism would stop, etc.
• We all experience the world subjectively through our own senses and our interpretation of what we sense, therefore there’s no such thing as objective reality. Each person is free to define their own reality and no one person’s reality is more real than the next. The only inequality to fight against is the claim that one person’s perception is ‘more real’ than the next.
• Cannibalisation of the rights movements of a weaker/more oppressed group through forced teaming. For example, privileged, physically strong men claiming they need the same special protections from men that women fought for, because they too are ‘feminine’, like women, or someone born into a high-caste family, complete with servants and a superiority-complex, using the plight of enslaved Africans to claim oppression by white people, based on their darker skin tone.

Then to confuse the ‘class-analysis- counter class analysis’ even more there is identity politics. Endlessly subdividing human beings into ever greater strings of words to describe ourselves, so class analysis is impossible, whilst borrowing arguments from both class analysis and counter-class analysis. All that is left is a treacherous minefield where everyone is bound to cause offence and need to be ‘corrected’ constantly.

My feeling is that Diane Abbot fell foul of all of this. She wanted to be able to make a class analysis of ‘race’ separated from the analysis of the dynamics of competing ethnicity/tribe/nations.

As DA was drafting her response to the article in the Observer did she not once pause for thought and wonder how Starmer would respond?

She's already seen how he's handled Corbyn

Since, apparently, we are all out of Africa that's not surprising. But this is off thread. Diane Abbot has suggested by implication that the prejudice Jews (or Roma, who were also murdered by the Nazis) face is no different from that experienced by redheads. That's a racist suggestion and shows a total lack of understanding of recent history. Totally tone deaf as well.

She implied it, one presumes intentionally. Otherwise she might like to proof read a bit more carefully.

Exactly! It’s fine for normies not to know much about equalities law but Diane Abbott is a literal lawmaker, plus her London constituency includes part of Stamford Hill, home to the second largest Haredi (ultra orthodox) Jewish community outside of Israel (New York is the largest):

http://www.hackneymagazine.com/amp/jewish-communities-hackney/

Abbott’s constituency (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) is extremely diverse and she’s tasked with representing ALL of the residents in parliament.

It’s a spectacular fail really (and a shame, because she really was an important trailblazer so it’s disappointing to see her mess up like this).

It really is a shame but she only has herself to blame. Like you I am baffled that someone in her position could make such an horrific mistake.

It’s fine for normies not to know much about equalities law but Diane Abbott is a literal lawmaker

The Equality Act was introduced by Labour as well, when Diane was and MP. She knows this stuff, she must do

I’m putting it down to her diabetes. It isn’t much talked about but people with diabetes sometimes have surprising mental lapses.