Racial Sterotyping

Diane Abbott, the left wing, member of the Labour Party's shadow cabinet has featured on these posts before. Whether she is really fit for a top job is somewhat doubtful in many commentators opinions.

She once again has been seen to hold views that would get a white politician the sack. Her latest outburst was in stating that ''White people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their games". This caused the predictable outrage, but as is usual with the Labour Party, she didn't resign (they didn't have many, if any resignations, in thirteen years of power, despite several cases of ministers abuses being exposed).  However what was missed was that she also stated that "Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better" .... which is something of a condemnation of the black community as well .... predictably, they didn't notice this slight.

Abbot and Stereotyping

She then followed this up by saying that she was “Dubious of black people claiming they’ve never experienced racism. Ever tried hailing a taxi I always wonder?” .... this begs a few questions about the advisability of taxis picking black males late at night, which we would be in trouble for asking, so I'll just point out that black comedian Chris Rock said that "It's not 'the media' that's giving black folks a bad name. When I go to the ATM I ain't looking over my shoulder for "the media", I'm looking for the ....." I can't use the word he used next, but he was pointing out that theres a difference between 'Black folks' and other 'Blacks' that everyone is aware of.    

She has some previous form on these sort of 'race ' comments .... she was of course the Race Relations Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties from 1978 to 1980, but her ideas on race equality seem to have something of a slant to them:

• She once apparently argued that white teachers, especially white women teachers, couldn't deal with black boys who needed a black male role model to control them (presumably because they had no male role models at home ... she is a single black mother herself after her divorce) - So she sent her son to a private school to be taught by a largely white teaching staff.  
• She upset some in the black community when she said that "when it comes to corruption, Nigerians make Jamaicans, and every other nationality in the world, look like mere amateurs".
• In 1988, at a conference in the United States of America, she made a speech in which she said that "the British invented racism".
• In 1996, Abbot commented that at her local hospital "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" were unsuitable as nurses because they had "never met a black person before".
• She referred to Politicians David Cameron and Nick Clegg as "two posh white boys" in May 2010

A fellow Hackney Labour MP Brian Sedgemore suggested that Abbott would "never be taken seriously again" after the private school episode of hypocrisy, but he forgot that Race Politics play big in Labour Party politics, as does tokenism, so she is back in the Labour Executive, losing them votes again.