Long before Hackney North first elected Diane Abbott as its MP, my mother was a teacher in one of its primary schools. As a small boy I sometimes went with her, on long journeys by bus and train and across the wooden bridge over Clapton Pond, chanting about the billy goats gruff. Trip trap, trip trap.
Visiting her staffroom was almost a whistle-stop tour of the British empire, with teachers from Jamaica, Trinidad, Nigeria, Pakistan, Cyprus and Ireland. All, I think, first-generation immigrants to the UK and all women – and all aware that those two things meant they wouldn’t get the money or the promotions they deserved. So they organised. My mother was in her trade union’s black caucus, which spoke for “all teachers who face racism”. This was London in the early 1980s, where the streets still echoed to the Anti-Nazi League’s chant of “We are Black, We are White, together we are Dynamite”.
This was Abbott’s world, too. She came up through the Labour movement’s Black Sections, activist-organised groups open to all historically oppressed by colonialism, be they African-Caribbean or Bengali or Cypriot. To fight racism then was to recognise that its victims looked different, spoke many tongues and had a tapestry of histories – but that they faced obstacles in common and could only beat them together.
That was a vital political schooling for Abbott and so many others. At its best, it was leftwing, alive to the complex play of class and sex alongside ethnicity, and universalist. While often more confident, today’s racial discourse is narrower and less radical. Apart from the direct shock of stupid and crass remarks made by Abbott this week, one of the most troubling aspects of both the arguments made and the reaction to them is that they indicate some of the worst aspects of this discourse.
To counter her argument that the “prejudice” experienced by Irish, Jewish and Traveller people is not a patch on the “racism” suffered by black people, I cannot improve on the letter from someone whose family left a city in Poland where more than 99% of Jews were exterminated for their race and whose experiences of British antisemitism includes having Nazi insignia brandished in their face. As the anonymous writer says: “To compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible.” Quite.
The other theme of her argument is about the white privilege enjoyed by, say, Irish people, which flies in the face of a long history in which ethnic groups are sometimes deemed to be white and other times not. As Kenan Malik notes in Not So Black and White, Irish immigrants to 19th-century America were described as “niggers turned inside out”, while in England the social reformer Charles Kingsley labelled them “white chimpanzees”.
There is much to criticise here, and yet some of Abbott’s most ferocious critics are very low on shame. Not so long ago, the Sun ran a column by Katie Hopkins comparing migrants to “cockroaches”; naturally enough, this week it ran an editorial decrying racism. It was joined by former MP John Mann, who once published a pamphlet giving advice on how to “remove any gypsies and travellers [sic]”. Also spotted this week, fretting no doubt sincerely about antisemitism, was Boris Johnson, who is possibly modern journalism’s best-remunerated user of racist language. Piccaninny, anyone?
Compare the blond Etonian to Britain’s first black woman MP, and you see how racist and sexist 21st-century century Britain remains. No matter how great the sin, how brazen the deceit, how lethally complacent the politician, he gets to come back again and again, and fills his pockets while doing so. Abbott can’t even enjoy an M&S mojito on the tube without it becoming a major scandal. She has faced racial bullying – including from within her own party – that would have broken others. Little of that is remembered, and none of it helps. Given the right class, ethnicity and comportment, some people can get away with a million “mistakes”; others aren’t allowed to make one.
That is the context for so much race politics: a “gotcha” culture where an unpopular person’s misbehaviour or genuine error counts for more than actual policy, and an approach to race that prizes diversity over equality, and representation over transformation. This is aided and abetted by some within the ethnic minorities themselves who pursue what David Feldman, the director of Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, calls “competitive racisms”. A couple of years ago, the Muslim Council of Britain published a report looking at how it could emulate the takeup of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism by coming up with its own hard and fast definition of Islamophobia. A couple of weeks ago, neocon thinktank the Henry Jackson Society published the “first national study into the discrimination facing Hindu youth in the UK”, what it naturally calls Hinduphobia.
Not only does this make legalistic what should be political battles but it also, as Feldman says, “turns racialised minorities against each other, with each group thinking it can make gains on its own”. In other words, anti-racist politics ends up resembling the strategies and practices of the racist societies it seeks to change.
Let us end with a more hopeful story. It begins with a young man of Pakistani parents standing outside a mate’s house in the dark, chucking tiny pebbles at his window. It is 1984, and Mukhtar Dar needs to wake up his friend because they are driving to Orgreave to join the miners’ picket.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Waiting in the minibus are others from the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement, formed to defend their families and homes from the far-right thugs who enjoy Paki-bashing, a sport they play with fists, knives and petrol bombs.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
Finally! Out he tumbles, eyes still crusty with sleep. But when they reach the picket line, a miner says, “What the fuck are the Pakis doing here?” In an interview in Tribune magazine, the activist Dar recalls his mate’s reaction. “Shit man, you get me up at five in the morning … [for] this racism?” Dar says, “Bro, we can see the bars and some of them can’t.”
Even if some white miners are racist, he explains, their communities share much with the Asians of Sheffield: both are tight knit, working class, suffering in the slump and victimised by Margaret Thatcher. The same goes for the Irish and the African-Caribbean communities. “Even though we organised autonomously, we saw our struggle as one.”
To strain a hand beyond the bars of one’s cell is human. But freedom, the real freedom to – as Nina Simone once said – live as fearlessly as a child; that will only come when we dismantle the entire prison.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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