The words bias, prejudice and bigotry have long existed in the English language. From the middle of the last-century onwards, the more recent term racism was designed to point more precisely to the structural and historical condition of the Black experience—of peoples who in various combinations were once owned and colonised; whose original lands, culture, languages, extended social structures and more were taken by force; and who, in modern society, have little or no collective institutional or financial power to combat their ghettoisation in, predominantly, the lower reaches of Western class systems.
Against the background of this definition being—with some minor international variations—a long-established norm, Black British MP Diane Abbott wrote the following open letter responding to a young Black journalist in the UK’s Observer newspaper:
Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from ‘racism’. They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.
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.
In response, Abbott was subjected to an orchestrated campaign of abuse from the apartheid colonialist Israel lobby supported by the UK corporate news media. The career opportunist, and therefore self-proclaimed Zionist and pro-Israel propagandist, Labour Leader Keir Starmer suspended her and even intrusively described her sentiments—which were an ethnic in-house conversation between a mature Black MP and a younger Black journalist—as anti-Semitic.
Incredibly, this happened regardless of Diane Abbott’s status as the undisputedly most racially abused politician in the history of Britain’s parliament. Incredibly, it happened around three weeks after Black Briton Chris Kaba was shot dead in South London by police—the latest in a long line of BLM deaths at their hands. As if making Abbott’s point, the moral panic mobilised against her for a supposed ‘misuse’ of language was given greater prominence than Kaba’s killing. And it bears repeating that there is no Jewish equivalent to BLM deaths at police hands.
Read the article by Gavin Lewis in Arena Magazine.