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

What's this got to do with FWR?

Good point

Good point

Among whom? British Victorian scientists? We were never the global authority on race.

Have you even looked at how different countries in the recent past and today define and collect race data on their census questionnaires?

You can be any of those ethnic groups and have red hair etc.

I thought living in London would make Diana Abbott worldly but it seems not.

I suppose a female, Black politician (who are like hen's teeth) getting the whip removed is a feminist issue.

She also has no idea of the history of slavery if she can say that at the height of slavery no white people were manacled in slave ships. Clearly knows nothing about the Barbary Pirate trade which lasted much longer than the Triangular Trade.

What a load of utter shit

No, Caucasians never included Indians. They were called Dravidian or Sinalese by the scientists who used the term Caucasian.

My understanding (based on reading but not a high level of expertise) is that 'race' a social construct so there's never going to be a technical or correct number of races. The obvious example of that is that North Americans view Latino as a different race to white, even a person of 100% European Spanish heritage. In Europe we would never view Spanish people as a different race to e.g. French people.

Is this linked to Black Lives Matter and the idea of white privilege.

There is a danger that defining people's experience by skin colour becomes racist in itself.

One of my DC has an anecdote of a student activist (a privately educated South Asian girl from an affluent background) in their tutor group lecturing them all on white privilege and how white people do not understand prejudice because they have not experiences. Cue a very evil look from the working class Derry girl. The poor activist was completely unaware that there were tensions in N Ireland.

I think that forming a hierarchy of prejudice does no one any good, and risks encouraging victimhood. I don't think we need it in order to fight racism, and prejudice, whatever the basis.

Also, people look visibly different at first glance if they are black among Caucasians so they will be vulnerable to racism based on that first glance, it’s difference from prejudice rooted in information about a person’s ethnicity which you can’t know by just looking.

I think this is what she might have meant. It’s not very clear, though.

Maybe we need sub words of 'disablist' as well depending on what your diagnosis is to help open up and make the issues clearer to understand and therefore tackle when talking about hate speech.

I cba to get you better sources than Wikipedia right now, however, it does confirm what I was taught https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race

usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.[6][7]

Also, people look visibly different at first glance if they are black among Caucasians so they will be vulnerable to racism based on that first glance, it’s difference from prejudice rooted in information about a person’s ethnicity which you can’t know by just looking.

Orthodox Jews tend to be easy to spot...

That isn’t their ‘race’ though, it’s their religion

I have a family member who is a big fan of DA and has said almost the same thing to me. It is nonsensical.

Many many synagogues. Her constituency is home to the largest Hasidic Jewish population within a square mile in Western Europe. There a huge amount of anti-Semitic abuse in in her constituency and all the Jewish schools have security on the front gate.

Theres no excuse for her ignorance despite her pleading that her letter was ‘only’ a first draft. If the offensive comments were going to be deleted in the second draft, she’d only have a salutation and sign off left in it!

I think over all it is ridiculous- I can see what she was trying to say, but I think she hasn’t thought it through.

And I have no idea why she thought it needed saying.

I think it’s undeniably true that black and brown people experience a particular type of prejudice that Jews/Irish/ Romani don’t

Somewhere, in the spew of nonsense that she wrote, is a reasonable point - the black people experience a particularly consistent form of racism because they are always obviously black, whereas Jewish/Irish/Traveller people are not always easily 'othered'.

You can argue how true that it is, and how important it is, but I don't think it's unreasonable to make that argument.

What is totally, mind-bogglingly, unbelievable is to go on to suggest that those other groups don't experience true racism. One word, Diane - Auschwitz. If gassing people for being an 'inferior' race isn't racism, what the fuck is?

I think she’s just fanning the flames 🔥

And there was me thinking that semites were people of middle eastern origin, including Jews.

Hence anti-semitism.

Wiki also confirms what I am saying and that is the fact that there was never any scientific or technical consensus on the number of races
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

• “The "three great races" according to Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1885–90. The subtypes are: Mongoloid race, shown in yellow and orangetones
• Caucasoid race, in light and medium grayishspring green-cyan tones
• Negroid race, in brown tones
• Dravidians and Sinhalese, in olive green and their classification is described as uncertain

The Mongoloid race sees the widest geographic distribution, including all of the Americas, North Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the entire inhabited Arctic as well as most of Central Asia and the Pacific Islands.

True. I would imagine that a huge percentage of hate crimes in her constituency would be against the chasidic Jews.

It does seem like she doesn’t take them seriously in that statement.