‘Scratch a relativist and you find a racist’ once said Nick Cohen of The Observer,
and whilst I myself am not that cynical, the distinction is often hard to make when
some of those to whom we might assign the former label give the impression that
they will do anything to mitigate those to whom the latter quite plainly applies;
and with barely a hint of provocation to boot.
Two separate liberal-left commentators last week, in the course of their defences
of Diane Abbott’s—umm, how should we put it?—feckless tweeting, dedicated the
main bulk of their articles to telling us that, in effect, because of historical, social
and political contexts, black-on-white racism cannot be compared to white-onblack. Samira Shackle of the New Statesman writes that:
‘…The hypothetical white Conservative MP referring to "black people" cannot be a
direct comparison. When one racial group is so dominant, both numerically (in
Britain) and politically (worldwide), pejorative language simply does not have the
same power or resonance… Most of those tweeting outrage are white and will not
have experienced the pain that such words and the assumptions that go with them
can inflict.’
Dorian Lynskey, of the blog ’33 Revolutions per minute’, argues similarly
meanwhile:
‘I can imagine a world in which Diane Abbott’s tweet… would be racist. In this
parallel universe Britain is dominated… by an unshakeable clique of black,
working-class women and two black men have just been convicted, several years
too late thanks to an institutionally racist black police force, of the murder of
white teenager Stephen Lawrence. But in this world? Not really… The meaning of
a comment depends on the power dynamic that underpins it.’
The title of the first talks about ‘genuine racism, where the latter’s pronounces a
conflict between racism and what it calls ‘“racism”’, in quotation marks. Well,
this is most troubling indeed. Whilst it would indeed be frivolous, as Lynskey says
elsewhere in his piece, to suggest that Abbott’s case—even if we assume it was an
episode of, err, genuine racism (which on reflection I don’t)—was even in the same
league as that of Lawrence’s killers, where I must insist on moral equivalence is on
the matter of the business of prejudice itself.
This arrant insistence on different—false—classes of racism—racism and ‘“racism”’,
as if we were talking about the distinction between murder and manslaughter—is
entirely unnecessary and potentially quite dangerous. Prejudice against another
based purely on their ethnicity or pigmentation of their skin is equally abhorrent,
whether it’s black on white or white on black or blue on yellow. As Shackle herself
says towards the end of her piece:
‘…Ethnic minorities have a duty to make sure they don't fall into the same trap as
the racism they are working against by making lazy generalisations about "white
people".'
Again it would be preposterous to suggest that white people can know the half of
what it feels like to suffer in the white that blacks have in recent centuries, but if
we set a precedent that says one particular branch of racism is fine because there
is no historical trend of it, it’s not wholly encouraging, is it? I am struck most
poignantly by this point when Lynskey tells us that:
'When I was a teenager getting into hip hop in the late 80s and early 90s, I came
up against the Nation of Islam’s fruity theory (nothing to with mainstream Islamic
teaching by the way) that white people are all “devils” created millennia ago by
the renegade black eugenicist Yakub. It is, strictly speaking, racist in that it
insisted on one race’s superiority over another. It’s also nuts, and if Diane Abbott
came up with anything like that then she’d be looking for a new job. But it had
zero bearing on the way America actually worked. It was a fantasy of
empowerment embraced by some inner-city black people who had very little
power in their everyday lives. It wasn’t cheering stuff for a lefty liberal like me
but it bore no comparison to actual, systemic white-on-black racism. There was no
equivalency.'
And here we have, if not in a single nutshell then certainly in no more than two or
three, the dilemma that has plagued the left, perfectly well-meaning but ultimate
fraught as they are, on this issue if on no other, so relentlessly in the 21st century:
the defence of racist, fascist, far right, fundamentalists simply because they are
no worse than ‘us’—and in this case actually better. What if we were to apply that
same logic to someone just about to commit a murder? Is that murderer vicariously
vindicated because none of their ancestors committed a murder? Of course not. So
why does that change when the hypothetical guilty party—and it has to be stressed
it is quite hypothetic—happens to have black rather than white skin?
At what point does racism that is only racism when ‘strictly speaking’ become
‘genuine racism’? I ask this not because I think white people have anything on the
legitimate race-based grievances of black people or even that black-on-white
racism is any kind of genuine, remotely significant proposition. I ask it because, at
least in my mind, what the Stephen Lawrence illustrates, in quite gory detail, is,
not that white-on-black racism is bad, but that all racism—and one might
extrapolate it to all ‘crime’ where the victim is pursued for things entirely out of
his/her control or at least for ‘offences’ that do not actually harm, and thus should
not be any business of, anyone else—is bad. That, quite plainly, is a lesson some
relativists have yet to learn.