theclaud
Reading around the chip
LOL. Perhaps he could do a documentary about this latest development, dressed as Abbott.
When were you last inspired by a British politician?
- Thread starter slowmotion
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LOL. Perhaps he could do a documentary about this latest development, dressed as Abbott.
BoldonLad
Old man on a bike. Not a member of a clique.
- Location
- South Tyneside
Quite. It is clearly much easier to discriminate if there is a visible difference to indentify the group you wish to discriminate against. Where there are no visible characteristics to differentiate, it is necessary to do more research to identify “the enemy”.
As an aside, I am rather surprised at the number on here who are so aware of their “roots”?
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winjim
Welcome yourself into the new modern crisis
As I said before, I'm specifically using Jewish as an example because of recent Labour party history and have no wish to diminish the experience of other groups she mentioned. But saying that a group cannot or does not experience racism is to deny that the group exists as a race, surely?
I think if we're only allowing 'proper' definitions of antisemitism then we risk running into the same sort of problems we get when we try to define race itself.
winjim
Welcome yourself into the new modern crisis
And would you say that's what Abbott is doing? It could be argued that as a potential Home Secretary she almost certainly is.
icowden
Legendary Member
C R
Über Member
And David Baddiel's history re black people is checkered to say the least.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/21/jason-lee-interview-david-baddiel-apology
C R
Über Member
How many jewish people do you meet at the supermarket who look like that? Or rather, how many people do you see in the supermarket who you can tell they are jewish?
monkers
Legendary Member
There are many 'tells' from facial expressions and body language in Jewish culture - many of them are observable even to a non-Jew like me. If I spot these tells, I might think 'possibly Jewish', but without any negative feeling about it.
Jews have been demonised for hundreds of years, driven out their countries, subjected to slavery, genocide and oppression. It's innate that they have an ongoing fear, and that's completely understandable.
When I think of my experiences of what I heard as a kid were that Jews had big noses, the men were all circumcised (and that was funny right), they were tightfisted. Even 'shrewdness' with money was a stereotype that was seen as a negative. There were so many jokes being told around this, because Britain has a problem with structural or systematic racism that we have never managed to deal with.
And if your name is Goldstein or Silversmith for example, you still can't hide. The fact that people feel they have to change their family name in order to stay safe is the 'tell' that racists should learn from?
Not that I think of every facet of every race should be placed beyond criticism. I can level a criticism against Jewishness without being prejudiced against any Jews, and without mentioning Israel (that being the go to trope to attack the integrity of British Jews) It's just something I wish they wouldn't tend to do, and Baddiel does it all the time.
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BoldonLad
Old man on a bike. Not a member of a clique.
- Location
- South Tyneside
Really? Isn’t that a caricature/stereotype?
Ian H
Legendary Member
Without condoning her letter -
View: https://twitter.com/ToryFibs/status/1650402150118305793?t=r1VEiC91_13Ot3SqeEt_4g&s=19
C R
Über Member
Genuine question here, how does Baddiel look jewish rather than say, arab?
icowden
Legendary Member
Yes, but based on the notions that Jews are able to be distinguished from non-Jews by the way they look.
theclaud
Reading around the chip
Abbott's letter was undeniably pretty dire, even to those of us who like and admire Abbott and defend her right to voice opinions about race and racism without being tone-policed by idiots like Baddiel and piled on by various architects of our own Hostile Environment. You'd have thought that writing a letter to the editor, with some likelihood of it being published on account of who you are, was the sort of context in which you might choose your words with care. Nevertheless it's quite obviously not the only context that matters here. Others include Abbott's status as the nation's most racially-abused mainstream politician, the absolute gall of Starmer's overtly racist Labour party in assuming any authority to adjudicate on such matters, weaponization of anti-Semitism in the Labour Right's war on the Left and the authoritarianism that it has ushered in, the content of the article she was responding to (has anyone even mentioned that?) and Owolade's output more generally and its rather subtle pushback against growing anti-racist consciousness.
