Racism in the modern western world has become the unforgivable
sin. Diane Abbot wrote a letter to the Observer and swiftly had the whip
removed from her. She later apologised and claimed somehow that the letter
misrepresented her thoughts. It read
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.
Race is complex. We ought to be able to write about it
in a way that reflects this complexity. There clearly is a difference between
racism based on skin colour and other forms of racism. Irish people, Irish
travellers and white British people are indistinguishable in terms of what they
look like. They are all descended from the same or similar mixture of
ancestors. But they may experience hatred because of who they are and their
belonging to an identifiable group.
An Irish person can be identified by a name or an
accent an Irish traveller by a lifestyle. Both in Britain and the USA people
from Ireland have been treated as inferior not because of how they look but
because of who they are.
This is similar to the way in which some Scottish
people, including many SNP supporters treat English people who have moved to
Scotland. It’s also similar to how some people in the Central Belt treat people
who are either Protestant or Catholic.
We can debate whether this is racism. After all
everyone involved is the same race. But it hardly matters to the victim if he is
hated because he is Irish, a Protestant, English or a Scot. What matters is the
hatred. Call it what you will.
Being hated because of the colour of your skin is
different from being hated because you are Jewish. A black person walking down
the street in London is visibly black. A Jewish person may be indistinguishable
from everyone else. He may of course wear clothes that identify his Jewishness.
It is true that a Jewish person may not have had to
sit at the back of the bus in the South prior to Civil Rights. It is true that
Jewish people did not face the same discrimination in South Africa during apartheid
as black people did. But this just shows that racism is complex.
Jewish people do not all look the same. It is racist
to suppose that they do. There are Jewish people who look Middle Eastern, there
are Jewish people who look European and there are Jewish people who look
African and from other races too, but this does not mean that hatred of Jewish people
or anti-Semitism is not a form of racism.
Jewish people in the USA, the UK and other countries
faced racism not because of what they believed but because of what they were.
It may not always have been possible to tell by looking at someone whether they
were a Jew, but as Gregory Peck demonstrated in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
merely by adopting a Jewish identity he found himself unable to stay at certain
hotels, unable to get certain jobs and unable to access certain services. If
this isn’t racism what is?
Throughout recorded history there is one group of
people who has been subjected to more deadly racism than any other. It is the
Jewish people.
Deadly racism against Jews did not begin with the
Nazis. There were massacres of Jews in the Middle Ages. Jews were expelled from
countless countries including England. There were continual pogroms in the
areas where Jews settled in Eastern Europe and finally 6 million Jews were
murdered during the Holocaust.
Diane Abbot wants to put black women like her at the
top of the hierarchy of racism. But black people have not been systematically
murdered throughout history because of who they are. It is true that the transatlantic
slave trade involved the deaths of many black people, and many suffered and
died as slaves afterwards. The Middle Eastern slave trade also involved the
castration of many black people. But the idea of slavery was not to kill those
enslaved. A dead slave is worth nothing to its owner. The idea was to keep
slaves alive as long as possible and for those slaves to give birth to new people
who also would be slaves. The fact that there are black people in the USA and
the Caribbean today shows that there was no attempt at genocide. Quite the
reverse.
The massacres, pogroms and finally the Holocaust had a
wholly different idea. The idea was to eliminate the Jewish people. The method
of determining who was and who was not a Jew was based on ancestry. The Nazis
certainly thought that Jews were a race, and it was because they were a race the
Nazis wanted to eliminate them. How then can anti-Semitism not be a form of racism?
Today Jewish people are still faced with the threat of
extermination. Organisations like Hamas, the Iranian Government and others
would prefer that Israel ceased to exist and that few if any Jews lived in what
is now the state of Israel. The Jewish people living there today would either
be expelled or massacred. The same old story all over again. Many people on the far left of the Labour
Party in Britain sympathise with these aims.
Racism is complex. Not all racism is based on
appearance or even skin colour. There are people who identify as black who are indistinguishable
from southern Europeans or people from the Middle East. Jewishness is complex,
but the vast majority of Jews believe they can trace their ancestry to a people
who were first written about in the Tanach [Old Testament].
It is because of this ancestry or race that they have
been subjected to more racism than any other group of human beings. How dare
Diane Abbot compare it to people with red hair.
