The Cancellation of Diane Abbott

I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that Diane Abbott's ill-advised letter to the Observer might have been political suicide by spy-cop, as she has been wholly marginalised within the Labour Party since Starmer's accession to the leadership and might justifiably have felt that she had no future well before this week. But to step away from the personalities for a moment, it also occurred to me that the cause of anti-racism, of which she has been a high profile advocate for decades, has been notable by it absence in the party's sayings and doings over the last two and a half years with the obvious exception of antisemitism. If there is a hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party it is a peculiarly shallow one, and also one in which membership of the notionally privileged group has not provided any obvious benefit. The purge of the left has disproportionately focused on Jews in a way not seen in politics since the time of Stalin and the Doctors' Plot. 

Of course the real hierarchy in Labour is the dominance of right-leaning white men, with Starmer their emblematic figure (the "top bloke", no less), hence the different treatment of Abbot compared to Steve Reed, Barry Sheerman and Neil Coyle, all of whom were forgiven once they had apologised for their overt racist statements. Their behaviour was arguably worse because they were trading insults, but if there is one thing that the party's unrepentance over the "Asian nonce-protector" slur against Rishi Sunak should tell us it is that bigoted insults are considered perfectly acceptable under the current leader in a way that they weren't before, not only under the previous leader but even under earlier ones. Gordon Brown famously got into hot water for being caught on microphone calling Gillian Duffy a bigot. That he didn't challenge her publicly reflected the way that New Labour instrumentally tolerated bigotry, but what the Sunak advert suggests is that Labour no longer sees bigotry as something to be even privately regretted.

Though it was clumsily-expressed, Abbott's point - that ethnic bigotry and racism are not the same thing - is generally accepted by academics and other experts in the field. It is non-controversial. Where she went wrong was in extending the fomer category to include non-ethnic prejudice, such as against redheads, which had the effect of trivialising the suffering of Irish, Jewish and Traveller victims of oppression. What she didn't say was that this suffering didn't matter, or that it was of a lesser quality, but the implication of a scale in her words led to the charge that she was promoting a hierarchy of racism and regard. That such a charge was made against a black woman by a number of white men did not cause many to pause for thought, while the speed with which the Labour leadership moved to suspend the whip was framed (and obligingly interpreted in the media) as evidence of Starmer's determination to extirpate the virus of antisemitism by preventing any leftwinger standing at the next general election.

The key point to understand is that while all racisms - that is schemas of racial difference - are bigoted, not all bigotries are racist. English contempt for the French or Scots is not based on race. If anything, racist pseudo-histories have been used to distinguish each of those nations internally rather than externally: Norman and Anglo-Saxon, Frank and Gaul, Anglo-Norman and Celt. In theory, you could be racist in the positive sense of simply considering your own race to be superior (i.e. racial chauvinism or ethno-centrism), but in practice racism is always negative in that it insists on the inferiority of other races and uses this claim to justify unequal treatment and even genocide. Race, in the sense of biological essentialism, does not exist, but racism as a concept does. And the foundation of that concept - i.e. what gives it internal (if not logical) coherence - is race science: the belief that those biological essentials are real, that they can be assessed and measured, and that they consistently produce particular behaviours or traits in the people who possess them.

In terms of praxis, the litmus test for whether you're dealing with racism or bigotry is assimilation. If you believe that a group can be assimilated into the "nation" over time, then your present objection to that group's different culture is bigoted. For example, English bigotry against the Irish was based on religious, economic and cultural prejudice but it assumed that the Irish were capable of being assimilated: they simply had to become industrious Protestants and give up hurling. There was no systematic and institutionalised belief that the admixture of one drop of Irish blood would corrupt Anglo-Saxon stock. In contrast, the segregation of the US South and the Apartheid of South Africa were as racist as Nazi Germany's Nuremburg Laws precisely because they believed in the essential and irredeemable nature of race. Of course all such attempts to systematise race fail because race isn't real and the boundary cases that such artifical schemas throw up make a mockery of the precision claimed by the pseudoscience.

The contemporary argument by David Goodhart that "white self-interest" is not racist depends on the idea that cultural differences will never be resolved because multiculturalism not only tolerates but seeks to preserve them. In other words, liberal pieties prevent assimilation. However, it is pretty obvious that this is merely a way of expressing racist sentiments indirectly - i.e. "Those people are different and always will be so they cannot be considered part of the national community". It also ignores that people deemed white may retain significant cultural differences, and that even within the native community constituting the majority of the nation there may be cultural differences that are equally significant, at least in the eyes of some (consider the prejudice against Liverpudlians). While the fiction of multiculturalism (i.e. the strawman beloved of newspaper columnists) has helped justify white self-interest, the biggest boon for racists has been the gradual extension of the concept of racism to the point where people can talk about "anti-white racism" without being laughed at.

This situation has arisen not because conservatives have been effective in moving the boundary but because liberals have adopted what you might call an equal opportunities approach to the interpretation of racism. The original article that Abbott was criticising is a good example of this. Tomiwa Owolade's comment piece took a report on how the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic varied by ethnicity (and which clearly distinguishes between racism and ethnicity in its title) as evidence that racism is "multidimensional", largely by cherry-picking a survey of self-reported "racist assaults". That many Irish and Traveller people believe what they experienced was racist simply reflects the way the term has been universalised. The idea that all bigotries are racism is functionally equivalent to "All lives matter", which occludes the specific nature of anti-black racism captured in the slogan Black Lives Matter. It's a short step from there to acceptance that anti-white racism is a thing.

To accuse Diane Abbott of creating silos that militate against anti-racist solidarity, as Aditya Chakrabortty did in the Guardian, not only attributes a remarkable power to a marginalised backbencher but comes close to endorsing the anti-identitarian line promoted by Kenan Malik and other "post-leftists" for whom race is something to be transcended (a form of assimilation through liberal virtue). You cannot build anti-racist solidarity by accepting that everyone can be a victim of racism any more than you can build solidarity with the disabled by redefining health as a debilitating condition. What creates silos, and implicitly revives the pernicious idea of racial difference, is the particularism in the name of equal opportunity that holds that any and every ethnic group is potentially a victim of racism. This is retrograde because instead of a racist act being interpreted as a reflection of the sociological (and thus political) assumptions of the perpetrator, we become focused on some intrinsic quality of the victim.

One thing the Diane Abbott brouhaha has highlighted is exactly who gets to control the narrative of racism. When she cut her teeth in the 1970s and 80s, it was black academics and cultural critics who were setting the agenda. Since then there has been a shift, marked by attacks on the legitimacy of race as a topic (e.g. the "grievance studies" backlash), and by the rise of "legitimate concerns" (ironically more befitting the "grievance" appellation) and the consequent apologetics for white self-interest advanced by Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin. Both developments have eaten up the bandwidth. The acknowledgement of institutional racism at the Metropolitan Police, the Windrush scandal and initiatives like the Guardian's apology for the slavery links of its founders might suggest progress, but where are we now? Doreen and Neville Lawrence remain frustrated, the current Home Secretary thinks Albanians have values "at odds with our country", and much of the public debate on historic slavery has been taken up with the virtuous contrition of the descendants of slave-owners. Abbott was one of the few black voices able to command a national political platform, and she has long been resented by many for precisely that reason. Her cancellation is not going to help the cause of anti-racism, but then that was never the objective, was it?