Below is an unpublished letter to the Guardian on the furore caused by a letter from Diane Abbott in Sunday’s Observer.
In the letter she appeared to suggest that there was a hierarchy when it comes to opposing racism. That is wrong. She has accepted her mistake and apologised.
Letters are ephemeral and I dont usually post those (quite a few!) that don’t get published. They are of the moment and when the moment has gone no further comment is needed.
However when it comes to racism and fighting it that is far from the case.
Unfortunately the three letters the Guardian has published are one-dimensional. They include one ‘apologist’. That is someone who does not accept Diane’s apology as genuine and will just keep pressing for more apologies. The benchmark of whether an apology is truly meant is whether or not there is a repitition.
While the issues with Diane’s letter are rightly called out unfortunately no comment is made on a different hierarchy of racism that Keir Starmer sometimes seems to display and indeed did display in his comments on the matter.
All racism is wrong and needs to be actively opposed. There should be no picking or choosing. Diane Abbott’s record on this over many decades is exemplary. That doesnt excuse her letter but neither should it be ignored
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What is lost in the furore over Diane Abbott’s Observer letter (Marcus Ryder 25.4) is that she was reacting to an article that seemed to downplay the impact of anti-black racism at a time when the anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence by racists was being marked. She was wrong to suggest that there is a hierarchy of those who face racism and has rightly apologised for her comments. Unfortunately the comments of Keir Starmer the leader of a Labour Party whose own lack of focus on Islamophobia suggests a different hierarchy at work are no better. All racism must be opposed equally as Diane Abbott has shown many times in practical campaigining activity. Would that her critics were so minded.
Diane Abbot is fortunate in her friends, some of whom have been more ‘apologist’ on her behalf than those critics who seek to hold her to account. Her experience and activism does give her a special understanding of the subtleties and the unsubtleties of racism, her experience of being deliberately misunderstood might have sensitised her to how her public statements would be received. The letter, for me, puzzling, there are no ways in which the extreme violence and subtle discrimination of Black and Jewish communities can be put in competition with each other. We can only take her apology at face value, to do anything else would be perverse or ideological. She is a well educated woman so has to take responsibility for what she says. This should not include elaborate questioning of her apology, but the danger of all apologies is that one’s enemies will always see them as convenient. Diane Abbot is a leader of her particular world view so will be held to higher/different standards of behaviour as ordinary mortals. So yes! “All racism is wrong and needs to be actively opposed. There should be no picking or choosing. Diane Abbott’s record on this over many decades is exemplary. That doesnt excuse her letter but neither should it be ignored” But how do we do the “not ignoring”?
I feel that there is something else underlying all this..the Labour party seems to be sliding to the right and finding any excuse to rid itself of socialists?