Thanks to years of campaigning, one feature of ‘progressive politics’ is that changes in legislation have sought to promote equality of opportunity for women of all ethnicities.
But Frank Miller, very rich donor to the Tory party in the U.K, thinks, like Bill Ackerman of the USA that Black women cannot possibly occupy a high position on merit alone. To such Whyte men, we are fair game.
The UK’s Equalities Act 2010 for example, outlaws discrimination based on gender, race, sexual orientation and thus seeks to address systemic marginalisation and oppression.
Such attempts do some levelling out of the skewed playing field in the professions, from education, to law, and politics. Thus, over the past forty or so years, such laws have enabled a few women of colour to ascend the hierarchy of whyte patriarchal power.
But it seems that even the few who through sheer grit, outstanding talent and courage achieve some degree of power and public visibility… what too oftne happens? They are too much of a threat to the comfortable bigotry of some powerful Whyte men.
We are seeing a backlash in both the USA and the UK that is vicious, personal, and vindictive.
If people call out such Whyte men for their vicious racism, they always, like your average sociopathic or narcissistic partner, whine excuses such as, their comments have been taken out of context, or that they were really only joking.
Here in the UK, when Tory donor Frank Hester said that looking at Diane Abbott “makes you want to hate all black women” his comments were extreme. Yet they were hardly out of the ordinary.
Likewise, isn’t it revealing that the parliamentary colleagues of Diane Abbot, generally failed to address the racial and gendered nature of the comments ? The U.K’s super-rich prime minister Rishi Sunak, responded only belatedly and after pressure from ministers, admitting the remarks were racist. Despite being Brown, and having parents who were migrants from India, clerly his allegiance is with the super rich, like his father-in-law.
Whatever you thinnk about Abbott’s long and steady work, representing her voters in a borough of London, this is more than a story about a single individual.
This sort of behaviour reveals the pathological levels of hatred towards women of colour whose accomplishments surpass the average citizen.
All politicians in the UK are facing increasing levels of violence, harassment and abuse. Data from the representative audit of Britain survey shows that in 2019, 49% of parliamentary candidates indicated that they had suffered some form of abuse, harassment and intimidation while campaigning. This is a rise of 11 percentage points compared with 2017.
However, evidence also shows ethnic minority women face exceptional dangers in public life.
Variation in experiences of harassment and intimidation is enormous: 63% of ethnic minority women candidates reported experiencing abuse compared with 38% of ethnic minority men, 34% of Whyte men and 45% of Whyte women.
Let’s just think about that for a moment. It means that in addition to fulfilling the requirement of their job, women of colour are having to cope with much higher levels of threat, ranging from a general undermining and invalidation, to open, blatant abuse.
On the terrain of politics, the intimidation experienced by ethnic minority women also can originate from within their own political parties. Muslim women in both Labour and the Conservatives have spoken up about this problem.
On top of this, Black women experience specific forms of anti-Black racism combined with misogyny. African American scholar Moya Bailey coined the term “mysogynoir” to describe this phenomenon in the US, but the UK also abounds with examples. For example, in 2016, Dawn Butler, another black woman Labour MP, revealed that she had been mistaken for a cleaner by a fellow MP. She said this was just a single example of “so many incidents” in Parliament.
I can relate: as a lecturer of Indian heritage, teaching at a college, I was often mistaken for a student. I then started to dress more formally, such as wearing quite formal dark-coloured suits — my name badge on its own, clearly did not suffice!
There have been calls for the Conservative party to return the millions of pounds in funding it has received from Frank Hester.
And although headlines often ostensibly celebrate “diversity” in politics, campaign press coverage also subjects minority ethnic women to extreme scrutiny. This renders figures such as Abbott hyper-visible, at the same time as the Press is generally, exceptionally negative in tone and narrowly focused on ethnicity and gender.
While black and minority ethnic women in professional roles are uncomfortably visible, the ethnic minority citizens — especially women, that all MPs are supposed to represent actually face a crisis of representation in parliament.
We are very rarely spoken about in Parliamentary debates, and when we are, it is usually by Whyte men and in relation to an extremely narrow range of issues, such as female genital mutilation and trafficking. There is less debate about how race and gender permeate many other aspects of women of colour’s lives.
Taking Black and Ethnic Majority women MPs Seriously
While Frank Hester’s comments are therefore deeply concerning, they should not be viewed as an exception. Racial and gendered inequalities permeate British politics, and they hurt black and ethnic minority women the most. Commented Diane Abbot concerning the nasty comments form Frank Hester:
“For all of my career as an MP I have thought it important not to live in a bubble, but to mix and mingle with ordinary people,” she said. “The fact that two MPs have been murdered in recent years makes talk like this all the more alarming.” Diane Abbott
When his comments were exposed, Hester admitted that he had been “rude about Diane Abbot in a private meeting several years ago “but insisted that his comments “had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”. Abusers always deny the obvious and fall back on the usual excuses such as they were not serious/it was a ‘gaffe’/ they were ‘only ‘joking’.
In fact, Hester’s apology itself reveals the rising levels of open abuse and incivility, as well as racism and sexism that are ocurring in what we can only say are the fake democracies of the West.
Abbott and others have shared iin public that they are frightened since the murder of two M.P’s in recent years. Being verbally abused and mocked, is an additional harmful burden to bear. What I found really sad was that so few women rasied their voices in her defence.
My Pollyanna inner self is getting crushed.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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