Civil rights activist Audre Lorde once said that discrimination “[comes] in all shapes and sexes and colours and sexualities”, and that, among those who fight for liberation, “there can be no hierarchies of oppression”. A self-professed black lesbian feminist, Lorde understood, long before intersectionality became a buzzword, that “any attack against lesbians and gays [was] a black issue [and] any attack against black people [was] a lesbian and gay issue”. She understood the dangers of supporting a narrative that pits one marginalised group against another – something that, it appears, British Labour MP Diane Abbott does not.
Abbott’s recent letter to the Observer has sparked controversy, with her claims that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people” face prejudice similar to redheads but are not subject to “racism”. While many, including political journalist Robert Peston, have condemned the false equivalence and her apparent minimisation of the Holocaust, I was struck by the not-so-thinly-veiled assumptions about race and ethnicity. Abbott – who has since “wholly and unreservedly apologised” and was suspended by the British Labour Party – conflates ethnicity and race by assuming that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people” are all monolithically white, and therefore incapable of experiencing multiracial identities, conflicting allegiances, and multiple different forms of discrimination, all at the same time.
While it may seem pedantic, the oversight is a crucial one, since it oversimplifies and undermines the interconnectedness of oppression – an interconnectedness to which Lorde once urged us to stay awake. What about non-white Jews, who have been estimated to account for 15 per cent of young American Jews? And what about the 57,850 people who, like me, identified as black Irish at the 2016 census?
When I lived in England as a black woman, I was – as many minorities are – often twisted to fit other people’s fantasies of me as a sassy, unintelligent, hypersexual creature. And yet, at the same time, I was an Irish woman, routinely subjected to a completely different set of ethnic tropes, some of which were more absurd than offensive. Through some eyes, I belonged to a race that lived off a diet of Guinness and potatoes, and who, though friendly, were more than a little backward and regressive.
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My experience has taught me that racism is neither neat nor clear-cut. And yet, voicing these ambiguities can often feel like a betrayal of one or more of the social groups to which you belong. Mixed-race American cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote, “Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract colour categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimising each other, while any of us searching for grey areas and common ground get devoured twice.” We all lose when, as a society, we are quietly discouraged from searching for these “grey areas” and intersections.
Simplicity, and to some extent comfort, are the enemies of honest dialogue. Just as the boundaries between these supposedly discrete and separate identity groups are porous and ill-defined, so too is the very concept of race itself – the supposedly clear differentiator in this instance between the Irish, the Jews and the Travellers on the one hand, and the black people, on the other.
Scientists widely agree that race is largely a social construct with almost negligible biological differences. As such, it is anything but fixed or binary; it remains fluid, even context specific. During the second World War, Hitler’s goal to exterminate the Jewish people was based not on a trivialised form of prejudice but on the staunch belief that Jews constituted an inferior race. Making rules as to who can and cannot be subject to racism is, some might argue, as arbitrary as the concept of race itself.
And yet, as tempting as it might be to write off Abbott’s comments as entirely misguided, there is a grain of truth in what she said. Not all racism and/or discrimination is the same; our experiences are shaped by different historical and cultural contexts. Black Americans, for instance, continue to endure institutionalised racism stemming from a long history of slavery and Jim Crow laws. These experiences are distinct from the ethnic, cultural and religious discrimination faced by other marginalised groups, who have been shaped by their own unique histories and tribal narratives. Jews living in Ireland continue to face discrimination. Maurice Cohen, the chairman for the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, just last year reported the use of “anti-Semitic tropes” by members of the Dáil and the Seanad.
Even anti-black racism – itself a rather vague, nebulous term – is not a one-size-fits-all category. Racism against black people has different roots, different ways of manifesting itself, and a distinct sociopolitical context in Ireland compared to the UK or the US, although we frequently borrow loose-fitting narratives that belong to different places.
Nevertheless, there is one constant across all forms of anti-black racism which might be said to differentiate it from “white racism”. The fact of being hypervisible in white societies strips the black diaspora of the choice to maintain their anonymity by blending in, at least superficially. Without the possibility of dissolving into the majority at first sight or so-called “passing as white”, this hypervisibility can leave black people especially vulnerable to racist attacks.
If we examine Abbott’s words closely, we can detect a subtle, or maybe not so subtle, thread that resonates in many of our identity-centred political debates. Some describe it as “competitive victimisation”, but I reject the notion that it arises from a desire for martyrdom or a delusional victim complex. Rather, I see it as an almost inevitable outcome of many marginalised groups all vying for a limited resource: the world’s fickle and divided attention.
In today’s world, visibility is a precious commodity when it comes to enacting social change. No matter how legitimate and real our grievances are, if we are not perceived as “the most oppressed” or “the least understood”, our voices risk being trivialised, forgotten or silenced. When we create hierarchies of oppression, we end up undermining our own efforts by diluting our solidarity and thus, our potential for collective resistance.
While it is important to recognise that our lived experiences are vastly different, we have much to gain from acknowledging the shared dimensions – those grey areas. Instead of dividing and conquering ourselves, we have the potential to unite and gather strength by focusing on the shared roots of our marginalisation: the societal norms and institutions that teach us to be different means to be less than.
Niamh Jiménez is a freelance mental health journalist studying for a qualification in humanistic and integrative psychotherapy.