Racist? Should Diane Abbott resign?

She's in a position, even though she is in the Shadow Cabinet, she should be made an example of...

Yep get rid of her, doubt Ed will have the balls though.
 
Edrof said:
Just reading up on Wikipedia about her:

...
On 4 January 2012, Abbott tweeted that "White people love playing 'divide and rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism" which led to accusations of racism.[40] After being informed by the Labour Party that the comment was unacceptable she apologised for "any offence caused by" the comment and stated had not intended to make generalisations about white people.[41]

...
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The original post just had "White people love playing 'divide and rule' as the quote, which is a generalisation and probably would justify an apology as it is about race, rather than a throwaway subject where generalisations are made day in day out.
However it is the second part of the tweet given on Wikipedia I find more of an error of judgement and offensive:
'We should not play their game'
Coming from a politician whose party is committed to promoting and embracing Britain as a multicultural society I think that part of the quote more worthy of disciplinary procedure.
 
simulatorman said:
Mountains out of mole hills. She’s put her mouth or is it foot in it again. That’s really nothing new. She’s apologised and time to move on.
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I disagree sim.

She rears her head up and brings race into matters than do not need rave bringing into them such as the Labour leadership race. Her bizarre method of tackling or speaking out against racism seems to be via the medium of cloaked racism, hypocrisy and positive discrimination.

Racism and equality is a two way street and she should be treated exactly the same as any other who makes a disparaging comment about someone of another race. It's a fact that if that comment was white to black then the fallout would have been immense and Diane Abbot's comment was black to white, disparaging and she should be dealt with accordingly.
 
Derek W said:
Wonder when stan the man will comment on this 'colour' row :rolleyes:
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Of course he won't the blokes a grade A ******* muppet who just loves to hear the sound of his own voice and make himself seem more important than he is.

One person who I really cannot stand :p
 
simulatorman said:
Why are you branding her a racist for a silly comment?
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If I said all asian folk are suicide bombing terrorists, a simple generalisation, then I would be rightly branded a racist. She is a racist, she publicly makes racist comments, a bit stupid really for a politician, obviously in my opinion only.
 
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If a White person was to generalise about black people that way, he'd be banned for 8 games with a 40k fine.

Oh wait...

I can hear the Yehaw's spouting out already.
 
Yes definately. Just goes to show she isn't the lefty angel she would have us believe after all.


EDIT: Obviously I realise, lefty , angel and an ugly fat women don't sit well in the same sentence.
 
Impy77 said:
Coming from a politician whose party is committed to promoting and embracing Britain as a multicultural society I think that part of the quote more worthy of disciplinary procedure.
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I agree and goes a way to show the hypocrisy of it all. But there's no such thing in this situation, it's a resign from the front bench and keep quiet until the next election. Why is she even on the Labour front bench? Because of her towering intellect or articulate ways? Or because Labout need's a black person and that's the best they can get :D
 
Adam said:
Absolutely, racism is a two way thing and you don't need to be a minority to be offended. Stupid thing to say. If I said something similar about black people at work I'd be dismissed instantly.
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This is such a dumb statement.

"One common response was “Imagine if a white person had said something like this.” Well we’re back in the parallel universe. “If this was a white MP saying black people like dividing white people they’d be out in five minutes,” claimed the opportunistically quick-on-his-feet Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi. It would also make no sense whatsoever, because such a thing doesn’t happen in the real world. The meaning of a comment depends on the power dynamic that underpins it. If a black comedian makes a joke about white people, or a gay comedian about straight people, the audience knows that (a) they don’t mean everybody and (b) they are coming from an underdog position. They are punching up instead of down."

I am astounded it has taken a music journalist to get this one right.

http://33revolutionsperminute.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/racism-vs-racism-why-diane-abbott-was-right/

33revolutionsperminute. said:
I can imagine a world in which Diane Abbott’s tweet that “White people love playing ‘divide and rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism” would be racist. In this parallel universe Britain is dominated, politically and economically, 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.
I don’t want to get into the ridiculous mob mechanics of Twitter outrage, which can be as bad on the left (witness pandagate) as it is on the right, except to note that the “gotcha” strategy is a surefire way to ensure that no politician ever expresses themselves on social media except in the bloodlessly inoffensive style of Ed Milibot’s feed. It seems we desperately want politicians to drop the platitudes and speak openly, except when they do, in which case they need to apologise and resign.
What this absurd flap demonstrates is the desperate longing of some privileged people to wear the rags of victimhood. Any whiff of black-on-white racism, like misandry and heterophobia, is an excuse for these delicate souls to downplay the dominant prejudice and argue that there is a level playing field of bigotry or, on the crazier fringes, that there is a “war” on white people/men/straight people/motorists, etc. Coming so soon after the Lawrence verdict, Abbottgate is a nasty attempt to pretend that, hey, there’s racism on both sides now. A black man gets knifed to death by a white mob; a black MP writes a carelessly worded tweet about white people. It all evens out.
Predictably Abbott has felt compelled to delete the tweet, though not the rest of the conversation which produced it. But apart from the careless oversimplification — she should have said “white people in power” or “certain white people” — she was right. In her initial qualified apology she clarified that she was referring to 19th century colonialism when, to take just one example, the Belgians colonising modern-day Rwanda strategically favoured the Tutsis over the Hutus and sowed the seeds of attempted genocide a century later. But you don’t need to go back that far. The US government’s efforts to disrupt the civil rights and Black Power movements are a textbook example of divide-and-rule. It is what dominant powers do. To read her tweet as an indictment of every single white person in the world requires either paranoia or malice. Most of all it means denying that power matters.
One common response was “Imagine if a white person had said something like this.” Well we’re back in the parallel universe. “If this was a white MP saying black people like dividing white people they’d be out in five minutes,” claimed the opportunistically quick-on-his-feet Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi. It would also make no sense whatsoever, because such a thing doesn’t happen in the real world. The meaning of a comment depends on the power dynamic that underpins it. If a black comedian makes a joke about white people, or a gay comedian about straight people, the audience knows that (a) they don’t mean everybody and (b) they are coming from an underdog position. They are punching up instead of down.
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.
That’s an extreme example. Abbott’s comment is both reasonable and historically accurate. One group that her oversimplification did ignore, unfortunately, is the large number of white working-class people who are at the bottom of the social heap and don’t have the power to divide and rule anything. But they’re not the people falling over themselves to express their outrage. Well-positioned commentators like Guido Fawkes and Toby Young are, and they are deliberately misinterpreting her comment in order to score political points, with the (hopefully inadvertent) by-product of fostering racial tension among those who will only encounter it second- or third-hand. Because when a white person gets a chance to brand a black person racist, especially in the wake of the Lawrence verdict, they give themselves permission to pretend that privilege and power and the kind of deep-seated racism that ruins people’s lives are things that don’t exist anymore.
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hurfdurf said:
This is such a dumb statement.

"One common response was “Imagine if a white person had said something like this.” Well we’re back in the parallel universe. “If this was a white MP saying black people like dividing white people they’d be out in five minutes,” claimed the opportunistically quick-on-his-feet Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi. It would also make no sense whatsoever, because such a thing doesn’t happen in the real world. The meaning of a comment depends on the power dynamic that underpins it. If a black comedian makes a joke about white people, or a gay comedian about straight people, the audience knows that (a) they don’t mean everybody and (b) they are coming from an underdog position. They are punching up instead of down."

I am astounded it has taken a music journalist to get this one right.

http://33revolutionsperminute.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/racism-vs-racism-why-diane-abbott-was-right/
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That is such a dumb statement.

The world outside of her statement has absolutely no bearing on it. She said an obviously racist statement, that is all there is to it. Nothing more.
 
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