Yesterday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer suspended Diane Abbott from the Labour Party — again. Two years ago, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington was suspended for a clumsy letter to the Observer comparing different kinds of racism. She wrote that while Irish, Jewish and Traveller people could experience “prejudice” similar to that faced by redheads, “they are not all their lives subject to racism.” She later apologized, and was readmitted to the party before last year’s election.

But speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Reflections yesterday, Abbott said she did not regret her letter. “Clearly, there must be a difference between racism, which is about color, and other types of racism,” she claimed, “because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know.” Cue the suspension.

But there is some validity to her argument. While she was totally wrong to downplay antisemitism and other forms of racism — and now seems to admit that anti-Jewish racism does exist — it’s true that there are different types of racism.

In her 2023 original remarks, directed against a comment piece from the writer Tomiwa Owolade about a report showing that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people were among the most racially abused groups, Abbott ham-fistedly used examples of structural racism drawn from America and South Africa, not Britain. Because Britain did not have a formal, institutionalized racial segregation system like apartheid or Jim Crow, those examples undermined the point she was trying to make. There isn’t an “on the other side of the tracks” problem in the UK like there is in America. In major cities, working-class white citizens and black citizens have always lived cheek by jowl. Informal attempts to totally exclude black people from civil society, such as the color bar imported from the British Empire were made illegal before they could become really entrenched.

Nevertheless, Abbott is right to state that anti-black racism is about skin color, or what Frantz Fanon called the “fact of blackness”. In a racist white society, black people can try to assimilate as much they like but the “fact of their blackness” makes racism seem inescapable. In a racist society, their black skin is stigmatised as intrinsically defective. They will always stand out in a white society, and there’s nothing they can do about it unless they try, in a desperate act of futility, to bleach their skin. Some Jews — most British Jews being Ashkenazi — and Irish Travellers, however, are more likely to be able to “blend in”, as they are typically, phenotypically speaking, “white”, or at least “white passing”.

British Jews are generally a successful and well-integrated minority. They are not more likely to be incarcerated, live in poor-quality housing, or have bad health outcomes as black Britons do. Likewise, while Irish people once faced racism and were racialised as an “other” in the 19th century and for much of the 20th century, today they are seen as white British.

All of this is to say that antisemitism, especially today, is of a different character to anti-black racism. In the racist imagination, black people are seen as a lower breed, closer to nature. There is particularly an obsession with black male anatomy, especially as a sexual threat to “our” women, while antisemites imagine Jews as a sinister superpower trying to run the world for monetary gain. It is why, as the Canadian historian Moishe Postone pointed out, antisemitism has a peculiar “pseudo-emancipatory” character.

Racism, ultimately, isn’t simply about skin color, but about any perceived difference, whether phenotypical or cultural, that is essentialised and turned into an ideology. It takes different forms which should not be pitted against one another, given that they arise from different histories and contexts. It is only by acknowledging these differences that we can truly understand and tackle racism.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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