The varieties of racism

In an American television chat show broadcast in February 2022 Whoopi Goldberg argued that the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism: “The Holocaust isn’t about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. … These [i.e. perpetrators and victims] are two groups of white people.”

Challenged for making such a claim, Goldberg refused to back down. Instead, she was even more explicit:

“The Nazis had issues with ethnicity, not race. Because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. These are two white groups of people. You’re missing the point.”

When it was pointed out to Goldberg that the Nazis measured the noses and heads of Jews to ‘prove’ that they were a race, she responded:

“They did that to black people too. But it doesn’t change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on the street. You could find me. You couldn’t find them. That was the point I was making.”

In fact, of course, the Nazis were able to find – and murder – six million Jews. And it was not difficult to tell a Jew on the street. They were obliged to wear a yellow star. And they were confined to the streets of the ghettos in which they were imprisoned prior to the death camps.

The outrage triggered by Goldberg’s comments may or may not have been followed by Labour MP Dianne Abbott. But if Abbott did follow it, she certainly failed to learn anything from it. Instead, she has followed in Goldberg’s footsteps

In April of this year Abbott sent a letter to the Observer headed “Racism is black and white”. It is not clear if the header came from Abbott herself or from the editor of the letters page. Either way, it certainly summed up the contents of the letter.

The opening sentence rejected the idea that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people” suffer from racism. What they experienced, the letter continued, was prejudice, akin to that experienced by white people with red hair.

To ‘prove’ her point, Abbott pointed out that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people did not have to sit at the back of a bus in pre-civil rights America, that they had the vote in apartheid South Africa, and that there were no “white-seeming people” manacled on slave ships.

Unlike Goldberg, Abbott apologised immediately and unreservedly (albeit attributing the “errors” in her letter to the fact that it had been no more than “an initial draft”).

Neither Goldberg nor Abbott are Holocaust-deniers. Both of them are black, both (especially Abbott) are anti-racist activists, and Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, has been the victim of a sustained flood of racist abuse – far more abuse than any other MP.

And yet both Goldberg and Abbott denied the racism of the Holocaust.

Explicitly so in the case of Goldberg. Implicitly so in the case of Abbott. Otherwise she could not have excluded Jews from the category of victims of racism and have likened their experiences (i.e. genocide) to those of white people with red hair.

‘Mistaken’ is the word used by some commentators to describe and explain Abbott’s letter. And that is certainly the gist of Abbott’s own explanation: “The errors arose in an initial draft being sent.”

But this is not a credible explanation: Whoops! I was in a rush to send a letter to the Observer and ended up forgetting about Jewish genocide, Roma and Sinti genocide, and the anti-Irish racism which my political allies on the Greater London Council campaigned against in the 1980s.

As with Goldberg’s statements, something more fundamental was in play in Abbott’s letter. And that something – as summed up by the header of Abbott’s letter – was that they both saw racism simply as “black and white”.

Racism is what white people with power inflict on black people. And if Jews are classed as white, then they cannot fall into the victim side of that white-black racist dichotomy. As Dave Rich put it in his book “Everyday Hate”, published just two months before Abbott’s letter:

“In today’s identity politics, race is largely determined by skin colour, and Jews are largely perceived as white. In today’s racial politics racism is seen as the domination of people of colour by white people with power, and most Jews are lumped in with all other people who present as white.

"Being Jewish doesn’t match ordinary notions of race or ethnicity because the Jewish people comprise an ethnic or racial group in which you will find Jews of every skin colour and ethnic appearance (which further confounds the assumption that all Jews are white).

"If anyone tells you that antisemitism is not racism because Jews are not a race – with the implication that if it isn’t racism, then it doesn’t matter as much – they really have missed the point. Jews have been treated in racist ways enough times in the past for it not to matter whether antisemitism meets today’s definition of what racism is.”

Goldberg’s statements and Abbott’s letter are the logical consequence of what has been termed “the colonial model of racism”:

Racism is equated with the racism of the colonial era, when it served as a rationale for slavery and imperialism. The slave traders, the slaveowners, and the European colonial powers were white. Their victims were black. Racism was black and white.

But this model was inadequate even at that time. Irish people in Ireland and Irish emigrés to
Britain and America, for example, were certainly victims of racism. So too were Jews, especially in eastern European countries.

Today, as Abbott’s letter demonstrates, the colonial model of racism excludes racism which targets non-black minorities. The model also fails to allow for how racism can evolve and reconfigure itself over time, racialising new groups and thereby transforming them into new victims of racism.

One recent corollary of the colonial model of racism has been the emergence of a virtual competition for recognition as the victims of ‘real’ racism. It is this notion of competition which seems to underpin the latter part of Abbott’s letter.

Unsurprisingly, the examples she gives do not back up what she appears to be arguing. Instead, they serve to emphasise the weaknesses of her basic argument.

Abbott writes that there were no “white-seeming people” manacled on slave ships. But in the seventeenth century around 100,000 Irish were shipped to the West Indies to work on the sugar plantations (although some historians have quibbled whether this was outright slavery or ‘only’ indentured servitude).

Irish, Jewish and Traveller people did not have to sit at the back of a bus in pre-civil rights America, Abbott continues. But as Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein wrote in response:

“Jews didn’t have to sit on the back of the bus. It’s certainly true in my mother’s case, because she wasn’t actually able to sit on the bus at all. Jews [in Nazi Germany] weren’t allowed to have any kind of vehicle and had to walk everywhere.”

Abbott also writes that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people had the vote in apartheid South Africa. This is surely true (insofar as there are Roma and Sinti communities in South Africa). But also irrelevant to the more basic fact that, as a recent report of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe states:

“A history of discrimination and persecution has pushed the Roma and Sinti to the margins of society, making them one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged minorities in Europe. Many continue to face widespread racism and discrimination.”

More fundamentally, the notion itself of competition is simply wrong. To quote Finkelstein again:

“My mother was in Belsen concentration camp. My father was [imprisoned] in Siberia. People used to ask them about their experiences. And my mother always used to say: It’s not a competition. That is exactly the mistake Dianne Abbott made in order to emphasise, understandably, her own experiences and those of other black people.”

The notion of racism embodied in Abbott’s letter was an afront to Roma and Sinti people and to Irish people as much as to Jewish people. But in recent years that notion of racism has had particularly negative consequences specifically for Jewish people:

- If Jews are white and therefore cannot be victims of racism, then, logically, when Jews complain of racism they must be making such complaints in bad faith and with some ulterior motive.

- If these bogus complaints of racism are given extensive coverage by the media, then, logically, this can only be because of the control over the media exercised by Jews as some kind of shadowy collective.

- If Jews are white and if racism is reduced to colonial white oppression of blacks, then, logically, Israel is a latter-day manifestation of nineteenth-century settler colonialism. The 90% of Jews who see the existence of Israel of part of their own identity are therefore complicit in colonial oppression and dispossession.

- It is for the purpose of stifling legitimate criticism of Israeli settler colonialism (including the ‘legitimate criticism’ that Israel should be forcibly destroyed) that Jews falsely smear Israel’s critics as antisemites.

And that is a perfect encapsulation of the controversy about left antisemitism which peaked during Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Corbyn, it was argued, had been an anti-racist all his political life. He therefore could not possibly engage in antisemitic ways of thinking. Accusations to that effect, as the Morning Star put it, were a smear “to prevent a rare parliamentary champion of the rights of the Palestinian people from achieving the highest political office in Britain.”

Or as the then Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey put it:

“This is nothing more than a cynical attempt to manipulate antisemitism for political ends because it is all about constantly challenging Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The idea that there is an antisemitic crisis within the Labour Party is absolutely offensive but it is being used in order to challenge Jeremy Corbyn.”

Abbott herself argued along exactly the same lines. In an interview with Andrew Marr in 2016 she angrily declared: “It’s simply all a smear against ordinary party members. It is a smear to say that the Labour Party has a problem with antisemitism.”

In response to Marr’s argument that something in the politics of a section of the Labour left incorporated elements of antisemitism, Abbott took the Corbyn line that it was merely a problem of a few bad apples which were in the process of being weeded out:

“200,000 people have joined the Labour Party. You’re saying that because there have been twelve reported incidents of hate-speech online that the Labour Party is somehow intrinsically antisemitic?”

Just as Corbyn was unable to physically see the crude antisemitism which jumped out of the Mear One mural “Freedom for Humanity” (until someone pointed it out to him and he took a closer look), so too Abbott was incapable of seeing politically what was antisemitic in left antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Unfortunately, Abbott’s letter demonstrates that in the seven years which have passed since her interview of 2016 she has learnt absolutely nothing from the political arguments about left antisemitism.

The indefensible crassness of Abbott’s letter should be a belated wake-up call for those sections of the left which have consistently apologised for, or even propagated, left antisemitism to go back to square one:

To think through the politics which underpins Abbott’s letter, to think through why someone with a genuine decades-long record of fighting racism could end up writing such a letter (even as just an “initial draft”), and to think through the whole concept of left antisemitism.

Unfortunately, there is precious little sign of that happening.

Much of the British left’s coverage of Abbott’s letter has emphasised the hypocrisy of Starmer in withdrawing the Labour whip from Abbott, given the contrast between his prompt action against her and his lack of action against other manifestations of racism inside and outside of the Labour Party.

All this is well and good and are valid points to make. So too is the demand that the whip be restored to Abbott. Even some of Corbyn and Abbott’s most vitriolic critics – such as John McTernan and Ruth Smeeth (Anderson) – share that opinion.

But it is also all beside the point. It is an evasion of the political issues embedded in Abbott’s letter which need to be challenged. And on that front the response has been one of abject failure.

According to Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), an organisation which has no purpose in political life other than to trivialise and deny the problem of left antisemitism:

“The withdrawal of the whip from Diane Abbott is yet a further attack on our freedom to debate very important issues in the Labour Party. Her original letter was not antisemitic and the way some critics have rounded on her as if it were is cynical and unhelpful.”

“Debate very important issues in the Labour Party”? As in: Was the Holocaust really an act of racist genocide? The most damning criticism – in fact, the only criticism – which JVL has to make of Abbott’s letter is that it should have been “drafted with more care.”

According to a typically long and tedious article in Socialist Appeal, which can always be relied upon to eschew reasoned argument in favour of demagogic political crudity:

“Regardless of the letter’s contents, it is clear that the right wing have been waiting for such an excuse to push out Abbott… As ever, Starmer and the Blairites are cynically weaponising the issue of antisemitism.

"The right wing’s hysterical smear campaign over antisemitism has always been just that: a manufactured crisis, designed to drive Corbyn and his supporters out of the party. Plenty of evidence exists to show how the Blairites and the capitalist press whipped up a frenzy over Labour’s supposed ‘antisemitism crisis’ under Corbyn.

"We say: Solidarity with Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, and all the victims of the Labour purge! For those with a genuine desire to end racism and oppression: join the Marxists!”

So, the response of Socialist Appeal to the outrage triggered by Abbott’s letter is simply to ignore the letter itself: “Regardless of the letter’s contents ….”

The Socialist Party (SP) does not lag far behind their former comrades in Socialist Appeal. And it certainly shares the latter’s predilection for long and tedious articles which completely miss the point.

The most damning criticism which the SP can muster of Abbott’s letter is that it was “controversial” and “takes the wrong approach”. But, the SP emphasises, “Abbott is not a racist or an antisemite.”

Sidestepping the actual politics of Abbott’s letter, the SP asks the question: “What should Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and other left MPs blocked from standing for Labour do at the next general election?”

Their answer: They should be “part of forming a workers’ list, alongside striking trade unionists and other ousted Labour MPs.” This would “get the backing of important sections of the trade union movement and also be a concrete step towards the building of a new and independent working-class political voice.”

A systemic failure to understand antisemitism, it would appear, is no obstacle to the creation of a new workers party.

Counterfire, which suffers from the delusion that it provides a home for a new left intelligentsia, responded to Abbott’s letter with an article by Kevin Ovenden, a one-time SWP member who then acted as a paid bag-carrier for George Galloway before alighting on Counterfire.

Abbott’s letter, Ovenden concedes, was “misguided and wrong”. The letter was “mistaken in saying that only black people can face racism.” But by the end of his article Ovenden downgrades his criticism of the letter to it being no more than “ill-considered”.

The bulk of his article is taken up by a lengthy historical discourse on anti-racist campaigning in Britain in recent decades.

Ovenden contrasts a Golden Age of anti-racism in the 1970s and early 1980s, when there was a united and all-embracing anti-racist movement. But this unity was disrupted by the “baleful influence” of “sectional and separatist politics”.

What is needed now is a return to that lost unity – “the broadest unity in action against racism and the far right.” In fact, writes Ovenden, “the biggest and tragic mistake behind the letter was to lose touch with the potent sense of unity.”

But Ovenden’s historical narrative omits any consideration of Jewish experiences of the anti-racism which he lauds.

Such as the attempts to ban Jewish Student Societies in the early 1980s in the name of anti-racism (because their members were Zionists and ‘therefore’ racists), backed by Ovenden’s former comrades of the SWP.

Or the provocative demagogy of Ovenden’s former employer George Galloway, who declared while Bradford West MP that, in the name of anti-racism, he would make his constituency “an Israel-free zone”, a no-go area even for Israeli academics and tourists (because Israel was a racist state).

Or the ‘anti-racism’ which has institutionalised the delegitimisation of Israel’s right to exist and the equation of Zionism with racism and fascism as political orthodoxies, with Counterfire and Ovenden being to the fore in championing such ‘anti-racist’ orthodoxies.

Or the ‘anti-racist’ denunciations of Jewish complaints about left antisemitism as a conspiracy to undermine Corbyn – a true anti-racist – in which Counterfire and Ovenden have likewise both excelled.

The anti-racist unity which Ovenden advocates in his article cannot be achieved without recognising and rectifying that political record. Instead, Ovenden simply passes over all these matters of historical fact.

As Dave Rich puts it in “Everyday Hate”:

“Britain is full of people who say they are genuinely opposed to racism but don’t recognise or understand antisemitism. … All this effort to reduce racism in our society will fail if it doesn’t include antisemitism, and it is impossible to tackle antisemitism if people can’t recognise it.”

And then there is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Despite repeated references to Abbott’s letter basically being a bit of “a mistake”, the SWP does at least identify and grapple with the core problem in the letter:

“Abbott wrongly argued that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people do not face racism. To argue, as she did, that no-one whose outward appearance is ‘white’ faces systemic racism is a terrible and facile mistake. …

"She will doubtless understand the way our rulers constructed ideas of ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’ as a deliberate divide and rule strategy. She knows that historically, not all people with fair coloured skin were deemed ‘white’.

"Abbott’s Observer letter is a poor mistake, and needs rebutting.”

But what the SWP’s fails to do is to go beyond this level of criticism and analyse how Abbott’s “terrible and facile mistake” has left her incapable to date of challenging the kind of left antisemitism and denials of antisemitism promoted by the SWP itself.

In fact, the SWP manages to look two ways at the same time.

It is critical of Abbott’s failure to recognise Jews as victims of racism. At the same its annual Marxism Festival will be hosting an array of speakers who share that failure and, even worse, have a record of propagating antisemitic tropes and narratives:

Noam Chomsky: “The British establishment came down on Corbyn with a ton of bricks, with false, deceitful propaganda about antisemitism, all exposed as lies… Then came the enormous establishment attack, across the board, right to left, with deceitful lies, all since exposed, about charges of antisemitism.”

Ken Loach: "I hadn't tangled with the Zionist lobby before (the controversy about the play ‘Perdition’ in 1987). What is amazing is the strength and organisation and power of their lobby.” More recently: “It’s funny these stories (about antisemitism in the Labour Party) suddenly appeared when Jeremy Corbyn became leader. The aim is to destabilise Jeremy’s leadership.”

Lowkey: “Nothing is more antisemitic than Zionism … Israel is a terror state, they’re terrorists that terrorise… You say you know about the Zionist lobby. But you put money in their pocket when you're buying their coffee. Talking about revolution, sitting in Starbucks."

Jeremy Corbyn: A person whose consistent inability to recognise and understand left antisemitism speaks for itself and, albeit indirectly, has now been highlighted by Abbott’s letter.

This is the kind of thing which makes the SWP so special.

In April you can sell a paper which rightly criticises Abbott’s failure to understand racism in general and antisemitism in particular. Then, in July, you can attend a rally and applaud speakers who are so politically confused that they equate ‘anti-racism’ with apologising for, or even promoting, left antisemitism. §