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

Fat people too - although the discrimination is not necessarily life long.

Erm - did you actually read the sentence you responded to there?

hearing the wacky stuff about ‘whiteness’ is very illuminating.

Ooh, you’re right. I misread the sentence.

The problem I have here is the concept of "whiteness". I think it's something you are imposing. Yes, people's view of the Irish changed, and they started to see them as belonging rather than other. That doesn't mean they acquired "whiteness".

I find it interesting that no-one on this thread challenges the idea that Black people exist (also a construction post-enslavement) but talking about the formation of the idea of white people is “wacky” and CRT. Where do you think the idea of white people as opposed to different European ethnic groups come from? What do you mean when you talk about white people? If you accept there’s an idea of people who are white, where and when do you think that came from? Would talking about a white person make sense in Ancient Greece? Why does it make sense now and you know what we’re talking about when we say white people? How did that happen in your view? How did people move from being different ethnic groups/geographical
/tribes etc to being what we understand as white if you reject the idea that whiteness was an idea that had to be formed? It’s not something natural or inherent. It’s an idea that came into being. How is it nonsense to account for that? And if there was a point where it made sense to people to describe someone as white, why is it “wacky” to understand the ways that over times various groups get considered as white? It’s not some eternal idea, there was a process of creating the idea of white people as a group, which at points excluded various groups and came to include them. Or do you think white people don’t actually exist in a way that means anything and if so why do you recognize Black people exist but think whiteness is somehow what? Just normal? Just humanity?

For example, I don’t think too many on this board would argue against the idea that “non-binary” is a recent category that describes people that wouldn’t have made sense to people 100 years ago. Being gender non-conforming always existed but the idea of “Trans” as it exists now as a descriptive category is new. Why is it suddenly crazy to also understand that race underwent a similar process of creation and that categories of white, Black, Asian, etc. become legible at particular historic points? You would all know how to identify a white person today yet resist the idea that at some point that idea is created. Saying whiteness is constructed isn’t accepting that race is real. It’s the opposite, understanding how a particular way of categorizing people emerges.

I think what is happening on this thread is people are confusing the idea that “people who are African always existed” with the idea that “at some point we begin to define people of African descent as Black and that becomes a racial category.” And of course it’s a category that is socially constructed - in some places mixed race people are separate racial categories, in others part-Black is Black and so on. The point is about the meaning we begin to assign to those physical characteristics and the way they become indicators of “race.” That idea did not exist through history. So people keep arguing saying “people always looked white!” and therefore saying it’s nonsense to talk about when it became meaningful to describe a group of people as white and what that meant politically and socially. A person from a Germanic tribe in the Ancient world may have had blond hair and blue eyes but if you ran around describing them as “white” then it would literally make no sense to anyone. It wasn’t a concept that existed. It comes to exist. It seems implicitly in this thread people see race as something that belongs to other people, but white people just are. This is the essence of racialized thinking in fact - white is just normal, neutral and natural, and everyone else is “raced.”

Sorry to multiple post but before I’m accused of being American, I’m of Caribbean heritage - you know, one of those countries where somehow England colonized and enslaved and oppressed the Black population on the basis of race even though race only exists as an American concept. Weird how they just managed to enslave Black people and bar Black people from prestigious schools, jobs, clubs, neighbourhoods all while having absolutely no concept of race or racism at all! Must have just been random.

I was born in the UK, where, oddly since ideas about race only exist in the US and are imported, the local children somehow knew who to call racial slurs and beat up on the playground. We actually moved away in part due to the dozenth time my autistic brother came home bloodied and beaten from the boys on the playground stomping him out and calling him racial slurs while they chased him home, odd though, they must have all been Americans.

It is an assumption that we all think of whiteness in the ways you describe. I don’t. when I said that race doesn’t exist I meant it. And I repeat for those who missed it that racism however is all too real.

i haven’t time to write an essay on it but I agree with most of the ideas you voice so eloquently.

There was quite a lot of discussion a few pages back about the idea of “blackness” and a generalised agreement that it’s a broad brush superimposition. People tend to feel cautious about going here because it feels like a trap being set in which to seize you and label you ‘racist’.

In my own memory I can remember the concept of ‘blackness’ developing in the UK.

When I was a kid I remember that people were told that previous generations had been referred to using words which relate to the ‘Niger’ region of West Africa and that this was offensive “n-gro” and people used the word “coloured” to be polite, but that was deemed offensive, as was the word ‘black’. It was after activists reclaimed the word ‘black’ it was seen to be the ‘acceptable’ word on the written page, but I still don’t think it is acceptable to use in real life - BaME and other variations tend to be used.

I am in agreement with you about the dual idea you expressed a few page back of conceptually one pole needing its opposite, so through the notion of “blackness” comes the notion of “whiteness”, (and I would add that with this there is a hierarchy good/evil, male/female spirit/body -notions that have justified some dickish behaviour though pontificating upon this ‘duality’) it was after that where you went off piste, into some wacky ideas.

A person doesn’t tend perceive themselves according to a label until they are in a territory where they are not the default. So I didn’t really think of myself as ‘white’ until I was in the minority and people were whispering “mzungu”.

This is an interesting thread. The historical (and lots of other) stuff is way over my head but can I ask, referring to the US (CRT?) how come Hispanic people are not seen as ‘white’ when the Spanish were arguably just as bad as coloniser’s as the British. I get it’s because they are generally poor, but so are lots of ‘white’ people. I wonder if eventually we will do away with concepts of race and it will be oppressor (rich) and white (poor). CRT basically seem to be using the word white for those with political and monetary power, yet that is rather arbitrary in a modern world, isn’t it?

Why apologise for calling CRT wacky? I can think of a few other epithets to go with it, e.g. racist.

Shakespeare has Portia say that she will not marry the Ethiopian because of his colour (hue). It's an interesting line since the Ethiopian is the only man who professes love for Portia (in love I do deserve her) but she rejects him for Bassanio, who wants her money. A flaw in her, for in a similar situation Desdemona marries Othello, who is 'other' (but a Moor, so very likely not black). Suggests that the idea of 'colour' is around by the sixteenth century.

Sorry, also misread sentence.

Would talking about a white person make sense in Ancient Greece?

That is an interesting thought. I was wondering whether, if it had not been ‘whiteness’ that had been valued, its cousin ‘blondness’ might have been? And if so if added value had been accorded to being blond?

Even to this day even among white people, blond people may be favoured over the darker haired.

This is an interesting story from Bede about Pope Gregory 1 (St Gregory the Great 540-604) having come across some Anglo-Saxon slave boys in a market and asked if they were Christian. On hearing they were Pagan he had bemoaned the fact that such beauty was not Christian.

Non Angli, sed angeli, si forent Christiani.– "They are not Angles, but angels, if they were Christian".[71]

Aphorism, summarizing words reported to have been spoken by Gregory when he first encountered pale-skinned English boys at a slave market, sparking his dispatch of St. Augustine of Canterbury to England to convert the English, according to Bede.[72]

He said: "Well named, for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven."[73]

Discovering that their province was Deira, he went on to add that they would be rescued de ira, "from the wrath", and that their king was named Aella, Alleluia, he said.

Image 19th C mosaic from Westminster Abbey

Thinking about possible ancient connotations of lighter and darker skins, this passage below is interesting.

At this time perhaps paler skin meant someone who had not had to work in the hot sun in the fields and was therefore more like a ‘princess’.

From “The Song of Songs” KJV Bible:
www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Solomon%201&version=KJV

5 I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

6
Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother's children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.

So,
To clarify, yes I agree the race categories of white, black, Asian and so on were developed within Europe and around 200yrs ago and then bolstered with the pseudo science of social Darwinism.

However, even this concept does not lead into the concept of whiteness that you have been asserting. The idea that certain white ethnicities were ‘not white’ whenever they are being oppressed by racism and then in times where they were less racially discriminated against, they then ‘become white.’ The historical fact is that they’ve always been white and viewed as white.

Your concept of “whiteness” is a fundamental shift from defining races, because it creates a category of white people who consist of those white ethnicities who happen at that time and place to not be racially discriminated against. Of course, no such change in concept is applied to any other race category, only the one for white people, which is a bit racist as it assumes that anyone not white will always be a victim of racism and a certain subset of white people will never be a victim of racism (or all white people if you adhere to the prejudice ideology).

Im not sure you did not mean to imply that only Black people were enslaved and racially discriminated against? I’ve been saying all along that race is not a new concept - you’ve claimed it is only a modern concept- it isn’t. Humans have categorised ethnicities into races and been racist all down through recorded history and likely before. It’s the idea that racism has always been according to exclusion from “whiteness” that is ahistorical and frankly not even the case today.

In the US Hispanic people were originally considered white. From the day Hispanic was added to the census, it was added as a subcategory under white.

They first appear in the 1930 census as “Mexicans” and the instruction was to not list race, this is in line with how other foreign immigrants were added earlier- ie Chinese. In 1940 Mexicans are gone as a category but census takers were instructed by the federal government to include Mexicans under the white category. However, if a Mexican was a Native American, they’d be listed as a Native American- many tribes straddled the US Mexico border.

From the next seventy years under the white category, there’d be a question as to Hispanic descent.

In 2000, that changed and Hispanics were put in the “other race” category instead of staying in the white category. Mostly because of the belated realisation that most Hispanics are mixed race (Mestizo in Mexico) and you can also be black and Hispanic or Asian and Hispanic.

Yes, tanned skin (not to be confused with naturally darker skin) was for most of history and in most civilisations associated with lower class individuals within a race. Because most civilisations had the lower classes working outdoors doing manual labour, farming and so on.

The reason people don't like the way you are talking about whiteness isn't because they are too dumb/racist to understand that race is socially constructed. It's because ideas like the Irish or Slavs "becoming white" is imposing an inappropriate category on people and ways of thinking in the past. It's very much the CRT approach of looking at everything through one lens, race, and collapsing all other categories, class, ethnicity, etc, into it, not to mention ones that people used to have that we don't really.

The ancient Greeks thought mainly in terms of being Greek, or not. Which is really a very common approach for peoples around the work. Are you one of us, or one of them?

As far as Pope Gregory, you have to remember that the Romans of Italy were fairly dark haired at that time with a Mediterranean kind of complexion., and therer were plenty of people in Italy from all across that region and from North Africa.

The slaves he saw were really physically striking, not because there was some preference for blondness, but because they were so very unusual and different looking. Not just blond, but also quite tall compared to typical Romans.

When you get to skin colour associated with a slave class, it gets more complex and varied. In Ancient Greece and Rome, pale skin + blonde hair was associated with slaves because the slave trade for them was mostly from the Slavic countries- which is incidentally the root of the word slave.

In the Islamic empire in early medieval times the skin colour associated with a slave class was red. The slaves were called “red skins” because that is the colour most white peoples go when taken from the north and then put to work in the sun in the Middle East and North Africa. They get sunburned. The Islamic Empire also had black slaves (East Africa Slave Trade), but because they were multicultural, they had more free black people than they had black slaves and so black skin was not associated with slavery.

In the Americas & Europe from Renaissance to 20th c. due to the transatlantic slave trade by Europeans, the skin colour associated with slaves was black. As it’s the most recent one in history for Americans and Europeans - and we are admittedly Eurocentric so that’s what we have inherited going forward into modern times. Yes, as mentioned upthread not all slaves at this time in Europe and the Americas were black, some were also white, but because the majority of free people were white that skin colour was not associated with being a slave. Only a small minority of black people were free and the racism towards them was horrendous.

Scrolling leaves, you’d probably be interested in John Blanke, trumpeter for Henry VII. https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/john-blanke/#gs.wju71v

AP5Diva · Today 11:11
Scrolling leaves, you’d probably be interested in John Blanke, trumpeter for Henry VII. https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/john-blanke/#gs.wju71v

Thank you very much. I had not known about him and that certainly is very interesting.

DemiColon · Today 10:56

(Re discussion of the possible value accorded to being blond historically.)

As far as Pope Gregory, you have to remember that the Romans of Italy were fairly dark haired at that time with a Mediterranean kind of complexion., and therer were plenty of people in Italy from all across that region and from North Africa.

The slaves he saw were really physically striking, not because there was some preference for blondness, but because they were so very unusual and different looking. Not just blond, but also quite tall compared to typical Romans.

I think Sappho described Helen of Troy as blond and blue eyed.

Then the Renaissance painters seem to have had golden blond hair as an ideal even though most Italians must have had dark hair.