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

Misstache there is so much to disagree with in your post, I don’t know where to begin.

“Race” pre-1492 was largely in Europe defined on the basis of religion - either you were Christian, you had not yet heard the word of Christ, or, worst of all in this view you had the opportunity to accept Christ but rejected him (Jews and Muslims) which also meant “just war” could be waged against you. Racism in this sense was wielded against Jewish people inside Europe, and Muslim people abroad in the crusades (as well as Moorish Spain.)

If we are talking Middle Ages there was the fall of the Roman Empire, Constantine managing to unite the East and West of Europe, Constantine converting to Christianity and founding the Holy Roman Empire, resulting in the formerly persecuted Christians now being free from persecution, Constantine (and other Christians) being obsessed about getting hold of holy relics, and his mum scouting out holy sites in Jerusalem - for example, the pagan temple of Venus, a Roman site was excavated where ‘Christs tomb’ still sits. The Empire experienced the East/West schism. Mohammed was a warlord and spread Islam by force in the Middle East and into Europe and North Africa during the ‘Arab conquests’. Over in Western Europe, Kings were able to galvanise loyalty through the Crusades to return the sites taken by the Muslims, back to Christianity. For example, the Hagia Sophia had been turned into a mosque.

Lets not forget that Jesus and all the early Christians were Jewish, Jesus focused his attentions entirely on his fellow Jews (apart from a gentile woman who compared herself to a dog getting scraps from under the table, which made him think was fair enough, so he gave her his blessing). The Old Testament is entirely Jewish books.

This Christian/non-Christian scheme is also transferred to African people, justifying slavery. As Locke writes, a captive taken in war can be enslaved, and if is also moral to enslave someone who rejects the word of God - to Christianize them. This justifies enslavement.

It is important to remember that we live in a ‘post enlightenment’ world. Looking back to that time knowing what we know now gives a false impression.

It was through the enlightenment and reason, going through the arguments, that we are where we are today, where slavery is perceived to be wholly wrong (although slavery was never eradicated since it does still persist today). Pre-enlightenment, prisoners of war were totally fair game for slavery. Inequality was baked in through feudalism. The fact that Africans were able to enslave their countrymen and women by the thousands and sell them ‘down the river’ to the Europeans, who were keen to exploit the Americas and needed the manpower, was the reason the slaves taken to America were black Africans, it wasn’t driven by racism.
^^
As we begin to enter the “Age of Enlightenment,” the discourse shifts from souls to reason. Kant argues that man is defined by reason - an important move into secular thinking. But Kant also was immersed in deeply racist literature and travel narratives and also explicitly believed that that reason only belonged to white European men. This begins the creation of a human scale with white men at the pinnacle, and African people specifically as the opposite - lacking reason and humanity, and beast like.

To be fair on Kant, he was probably autistic and lived something of a micro-life, never leaving his town and having such rigid routines that you could set your clock by him going for his daily walk. He would have been unlikely to have ever met anyone black and a lot of the literature around the ‘expanding world’ would have been bullshit - full of tall tales and propaganda to justify morally dubious goings on. He did believe reason to be an end in itself, the pinnacle of human evolvement and not a ‘slave of the passions’ as Hume claimed.

Good post Hathor. And let’s not forget a few of the official Crusades were actually Roman Catholics vs other Christians- Celts, Cathars, Greek Orthodox, & Coptic.

Racism was certainly part of many conflicts during the Middle Ages, but race wasn’t defined by religion alone into say a “Christian” race and a “Muslim” race within Europe and the Middle East/Mediterranean basin.

Especially, once you get outside of Europe. The concept of race also existed in the well studied civilisations of Asia, Africa and the Americas- although with different definitions and dynamics than the Eurocentric view because race is a social construct. The Eurocentric conception of race was largely super-imposed on the rest of the world during the expansion of the European empires- British, Spanish, French and Dutch.

What we have now is a US centric concept of race creeping in to be super-imposed as a form of cultural imperialism.

These racial ideas were also protected onto Irish people, Scottish people, working class whites, miners, Eastern Europeans at various points. Whiteness as we understand it is a recent, late 19th C construction - in response to internal and external threats to Empire - “ whiteness” is expanded to accept Irish people, Slavs, etc. who would previously have also been seen as lower people.
^^
But while Irish etc get absorbed into whiteness eventually

This needs a lot more explaining. It looks like an awful lot of retcon to me.

This Christian/non-Christian scheme is also transferred to African people, justifying slavery. As Locke writes, a captive taken in war can be enslaved, and if is also moral to enslave someone who rejects the word of God - to Christianize them. This justifies enslavement.

Many do not realise that to Locke, “non-Christian” included different Christians. He lived in a time period where the French had a practice of enslaving any noncatholics. They’d been doing it to the French Huguenots for decades- they even closed the borders and any Huguenot caught trying to escape slavery was guilty of treason and executed.
https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/sentenced-to-the-galleys/

Locke was also writing during the Spanish Inquisition, where again, if you a noncatholic you would be enslaved as a heretic to do “penance” for an indefinite time, often the rest of your life (if you recanted your faith as a Protestant- if you didn’t recant you’d be tortured and executed)

How interesting this discussion has become. I am grateful to you Hathor, AP5 and Misstache for taking it a bit beyond the normal beaten track.

What we have now is a US centric concept of race creeping in to be super-imposed as a form of cultural imperialism.

Indeed @AP5Diva - which is a bit bloomin’ ironic to say the least.

What did Chaucer say? “Your chickens have come home to roost”

Would you like a couple links to historical evidence of the Exodus from Egypt? It includes an Egyptian stele unearthed in Thebes that records the presence of a semi-nomadic people called Israel in Canaan in 1208 BC (100yrs after the current estimate for when the Exodus happened)? 🤓

any Huguenot caught trying to escape slavery was guilty of treason and executed.

It’s so insane isn’t it? Mind-boggling.

So important to remember the insane things people can do if we don’t nip things in the bud.

I haven't RTFT but I would say that Diane Abbot is ignorant in the truest sense of the word. She can't see anything beyond her own experience.

I can remember my grandmother telling me that as far on as the late 40's that guest houses down by the docks in Liverpool -where she lived - had signs on their windows saying "no Irish".

There was considerable prejudice in Liverpool against the Irish and this continued for decades.

As I said in my message, I wasn’t giving the full history - I explicitly said it was a capsule. And I wasn’t referring to the Ancient world, I began in the early modern period as we were specifically talking about Blackness and the history of anti-Blackness.

I alluded to Aristotle - the Greeks categorized people into citizens, slaves, and foreigners living within Ancient Greece (metics). (Aristotle himself was an immigrant.) Aristotle’s idea of the Barbarian was people who didn’t speak Greek. So whatever the equivalent of “race” was in that world was defined through language and citizenship as well as freedom status. The Romans expanded the notion of global Roman citizenship - it was Germanic people and Britons who were considered “beyond the pale” while there were many people we would now call brown or Black people who were Roman (Augustine when he goes the Rome worries about his provincial accent, not his colour although his mother Monica is what we would now think of as a person of colour.)

In the pre-contact medieval period, as I explained, “race” is not through colour as such but religion. There’s reference for example to the darker skin of Muslims but it’s not the darkness that’s operational but the fact they are Muslim. And yes, obviously there’s Protestant/Catholic conflict - Protestants for example are often compared to Moors as a slur, and Luther in his turn had an explicit hatred of Islam. Throughout all these periods in Europe, Jewish people are “racialized” (there is no comparison in the pre-enlightenment world for “racism” because the notion of race isn’t active, so we are speaking here figuratively in terms of what the equivalent of race would be in a world before race was constructed as we understand it. Race is a concept specifically of the modern world - it comes about specifically in relation to enslavement, colonialization, imperialism, the rise of “reason” etc. and economic changes “back home” in relation to the changes in the working classes, growing enfranchisement, industrial Revolution etc.)

Obviously to trace this fully would take and does take entire books. I’m trying to write this succinctly and explicitly said so, so it’s a bit frustrating to say “this is a very short and capsule history of complex things” and immediately have people jump in to nitpick as if that makes anti-Black racism not exist.

Locke actually has an important philosophical role in developing chattel slavery:

https://www.woldww.net/classes/Modern/Bernasconi&Mann_on_Locke&racism.pdf

Every time I give links no one reads them and just goes on about critical race theory but here is a good article on Kant. This guy is an extremely respected scholar of continental philosophy, not a “critical race theorist” and he’s from the UK:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/files_mf/rp117_article1_willtherealkantpleasestandup_bernasconi.pdf

Another take:

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32380412/millennium-dialogue-libre.pdf?1391547849=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DDecolonising_the_Grounds_of_Ethical_Inqu.pdf&Expires=1682634339&Signature=XdHEDwZn5r5l8JLy-WGEzuAz-lRWPRWVT1JToZBVzhyK68yBlOdURmtXqcTjXF4cDWJjC8THw5a-qzC6sX~6XrupTvWshPcP560vVxiCG8qDhepnTV0klTuJH7j7idwUZP31Du6U68VN0z7VnvbOryAUuzCTfz5O21tH32OFptT-9qLx3zWhb~kctBpoBS3MuCupfd4e~A9r39B4dpnVNYr1~q0RDLJuDxxW5gmiAX-PRRoEjpekjmFke0KhGuqI1bgU-616jMJRC~aD-SZcJ0nnAGCrOlXkUlQR0WOe8zFbm-nWv6yjp1Q39JEr9jlcDk4ssymzhEo8P7aTGU2wbg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

In terms of the Irish, the Irish were not considered “white” in any meaningful way. They were colonized by England, endured genocide, had language and culture wiped out, were often drawn as monkeys like Black people and so on.

in the US, the Irish are initially transported in indentured servitude and there’s many instances of Irish and African people taking common cause and rebelling. Gradually in the US the ( Protestant) Irish “become white” largely in response to the enfranchisement of Africans and the end of enslavement where the Irish are now used to argue for white workers and white enfranchisement over Africans. Whiteness is a gradual construction - Eastern Europeans “become white” when land is granted to farmers in order to encroach on Indigenous lands. As working class troops are increasingly needed for Empire, Scots, Irish, Welsh etc. “become white.” That doesn’t mean there’s no discrimination, it’s that in the late imperial period whiteness becomes an idea - for example, the “white colonies” such as Australia, NZ, Canada, SA, become a political site of discussion with the idea that bringing them “into the fold” will place a bulwark against “racialized people.” The whole point is that what qualifies as “white” has never been static - it shifts in response to political and social pressures. Boer were not “white”in any meaningful sense for the British during the Boer War, for example, nor were the colonies seen as equal (even Anglo Indians were seen as racially tainted and suspect - often suspected of having Indian blood. Part of the obsession of race was detecting and categorizing these signs of race and labelling people.) The legacies of the Irish being seen as “not white” is in terms like “paddy wagon” and yes, the discrimination against Irish in housing, etc. there remained strong anti-colonial and anti-slavery sentiment in Ireland - Frederick Douglass makes a famous speaking tour of Ireland for example.

The term “white trash” or its equivalents (chav, etc.) are still used to suggest some white people aren’t truly white.

But that doesn’t mean anti-Black racism doesn’t exist - in fact, part of the specific function of anti-Black racism is to divide the white working classes from Black people with the idea of convincing white people their allegiance lies with white elites and not with fellow oppressed Black people (at least you, as a deprived white person, can be better than a n——) and share a white identity.

Again, this is shorthand, not a thesis, which I’m not being paid to write on here. I also find it funny that Britain colonized the world, engaged in the slave trade for centuries, yet continues to believe race and racism only exists in the US, and racism and Blackness are imported ideas.

immediately have people jump in to nitpick as if that makes anti-Black racism not exist

I have been arguing for pages that ‘anti-black’ racism does exist as a specific thing, so I am not guilty as charged.

What I am nitpicking about, is your sweeping statements and the modern lens you are perceiving the past through.

Misstache
Locke actually has an important philosophical role in developing chattel slavery. Your link describes his personal involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. It doesn’t say he had a “philosophical role in developing chattel slavery” nor could he because chattel slavery existed thousands of years before he was born.

Race is a concept specifically of the modern world
I don’t agree. Race has been a concept since records began, but because it is a social construct, the specific aspects of race as a concept have changed depending on the time and place you study.

In the pre-contact medieval period, as I explained, “race” is not through colour as such but religion. No. this was not the case at all.

I am not sure why you post Kant. Yes he reflects a lot of the racist views held by the English in the 18th c. but that is it. You’d find much the same genre of racist commentary about other peoples in travel journals by Herodotus (400 BC) or in Tacitus’ writings (75 AD)regarding the Britons, Gauls and Germans.

Your post is misinformed-

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/

The whole point is that what qualifies as “white” has never been static - it shifts in response to political and social pressures.

I agree with this because it is proof that race is a social construct and it changes depending on time and place, and this includes not only the definition of what is a race, but of any categories of race that happen to endure for more than a decade. White people- it’s never been an unchanging monolith as to what this means.

As working class troops are increasingly needed for Empire, Scots, Irish, Welsh etc. “become white.”
What I don’t agree with is this concept that races go from “black” to “become white” especially not through being conscripted as cannon fodder! That’s a US race concept inherited from ye bad old days that puts black and white as polar opposites on a spectrum and then we argue over how “white” or “black” a race is or is not. This is a regressive concept of race, it’s not modern in any sense.

The term “white trash” or its equivalents (chav, etc.) are still used to suggest some white people aren’t truly white. No! Those terms show classism, not racism.

Kant is the most significant thinker of reason and “universalism.” He’s not just one of many thinkers, he’s absolutely foundational to Enlightenment philosophy. It’s not just “racist commentary” - in fact, many philosophers deny Kant was even racist by the way. Kant is essential to the shift into the idea of universal human reason and his thinking was also entirely underlaid by racist schema. The ideas of Herodotus don’t currently underlie our world. The ideas of the Enlightenment do - comparing the impact of 18th C thought to ancient thought is deflection - we don’t currently have a world that actively divides based on ideas of Athens vs. Sparta. We do have a word still living out the legacy of enslavement and race.

slavery is not the same thing as chattel slavery - slavery existed through history across civilization. The specific laws and social and economic constructions that rendered African slavery generational through Blackness as a mark of inhumanity supported by entire legal constructs (the codification of laws like the Code Noir etc) are much different historically and continue to impact Black people today. Locke specifically writes that a master has “absolute” power over a slave, an important shift in ideas around chattel slavery. That is a philosophical contribution, not just participation in the slave trade.

Every time I give links no one reads them

The two links you gave there are really off putting. They are overly wordy and full of unsubstantiated opinion from the outset. Paying too much heed to that kind of thing, means you can come out with something like this:

“The term “white trash” or its equivalents (chav, etc.) are still used to suggest some white people aren’t truly white.”

And not realise it makes no sense.

I don’t think it is good for the mind to be immersed in academic up-itself theorising.

Irish etc. were never “Black” - Black people existed, were enslaved based on Blackness and dehumanized based on Blackness. Irish didn’t go from “Black to white,” I never said that. I said they “become white” which is much different.

White trash is a classist term that implies some white people are excluded from whiteness - it is both classist and racist together. The term itself uses racial logic - not just trash or even “ghetto,” but WHITE trash indicating that race is central to the term. One becomes “less white” by being poor, “red neck,” “estate,” etc.

Honestly, there’s so much writing on this stuff. It’s not even new or novel.

Notice how when I try to summarize shortly, people poke holes because I didn’t write a dissertation. So then I post links and it’s “oh too wordy and academic.” See how you move the goalposts and I can’t win?

Just admit you’re hostile to Black people talking about race.

@Misstache
Quick question, what did you mean by “In the pre-contact medieval period”?

I wonder if you are thinking that before 1492, Europe was 100% white people….

Gradually in the US the ( Protestant) Irish “become white” largely in response to the enfranchisement of Africans and the end of enslavement where the Irish are now used to argue for white workers and white enfranchisement over Africans.

I just wanted to clarify that I think the Protestant Scottish/Irish (Presbyterians) who immigrated to America in the early 18th C were not disadvantaged people/the equivalent of black people, but prospered there and were the opposite, WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestants).

I’m not criticising you for being wordy. I appreciate the time you are taking to explain. It’s the links you provided that I criticise.

I literally said whiteness is a social construct! That’s the whole damn point of all my posts! I’m not endorsing the idea of whiteness- I’m showing how it was constructed over time. Of course it’s absurd and makes no rational sense. But it also exists.

by the way; the very idea that when I said “become white” people responded by thinking I was saying they therefore were Black exactly illustrates how we automatically see blackness as the opposite pole of whiteness. I never said they were black I said they weren’t considered white, but that gets read as “Black” precisely because of a history that sees Blackness as the “opposite” to white - the idea that underlies anti-Blackness which people are denying exists.