It's time for sensible conversation about anti-Black racism

From Diane Abbott, to racism at the Euros, to maternal healthcare failings – it has never been more important to call out antiblackness wherever we see it.

All forms of racism are abhorrent, and they are experienced differently. Pic: Steve Eason/Flickr

There is something about Diane Abbott that whips critics up into a breathless frenzy – so quick are they to condemn her, so vitriolic in their assessments, and so frequently willing to stray into the realms of personal attack. The ‘something’ is that she is a Black woman. This is the reason she receives more online abuse than any other female MP in the house of commons, it is the reason Tory donor Frank Hester last year reportedly said Abbott made him want “to hate all Black women” and that she “should be shot”.

This is not to say Abbott has not made mistakes. She has. For the worst of which she has been rightly criticised and held to account – as all MPs should be. The letter she wrote to the Observer in 2023 that got her suspended the first time was poorly thought-out, inaccurate and harmful in its messaging. So when she doubled down on those comments last week and said she had no regrets, adding more inaccurate statements on top (“you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know”, this is often not true), it’s right she is pulled up on this.

And yet the sentiment of the argument she made in defence of her original letter – that there are different types of racism that people experience differently depending on how they are perceived and racialised – is entirely true, and it shouldn’t be controversial to say this. But the overblown, panicked response to Abbott's (admittedly flawed) articulation of this point risks undermining not only the realities of antiblackness, but every lived experience of racism.

In the days since Abbott’s second suspension, Lionesses defender Jess Carter – a woman with Black heritage – called out the racist abuse she has been receiving since the start of the Euros. She said the comments have got so bad she is now taking a break from social media. The England team have said they will stop taking the knee before games in acknowledgment of the need for action that is not simply performative.

Then on Monday, a report into Black women’s maternity experiences by advocacy group Five X More revealed that half of Black women who raise concerns during labour do not receive suitable help, and that they are up to four times more likely to die in childbirth. Women reported being gaslit about their pain and denied gas and air. One woman says midwives told her she should be grateful she wasn’t in Africa to have her baby.

“The system is still failing women, especially Black women,” Tinuke Awe, Director of Five X More tells The Lead. “Black women deserve to be treated with dignity at every stage of their maternity journey and the burden cannot keep falling on them to make the system work.”

While it is both unhelpful and divisive to talk about racism in terms of hierarchies – which was the fundamental flaw of Abbott's comments – there is a way to make this critique without undermining the specific form of anti-Black racism Abbott herself has been victim to throughout her entire career. On ITV News, Robert Peston argued that saying the racism a Black person experiences “is different, for example, from the racism that somebody like me who’s a Jew [experiences]” implies “there’s a hierarchy of racism.” But this is not the part of Abbott's commentary that was inaccurate. Racism experienced by Black and Brown people is different from the racism experienced by minorities whose differences aren’t immediately visually identifiable. In order to understand, validate and, ultimately, overcome anti-Black racism, it's important that we are at least able to state this as fact.

When voices of authority and influence – like Peston’s – undermine the lived experiences of a Black woman, the impact of that will be felt by other Black people. The effect is disempowering and takes us backwards on empathy and understanding.

It also feels somewhat absurd in 2025 to talk about different experiences of racism without a single mention of white privilege. Five years ago, Black people and people of colour patiently, painstakingly, and graciously explained white privilege in the clearest of terms. In articles, reading lists, and social media posts that were fervently liked and shared by would-be allies, it was explained countless times how whiteness, privilege and racism interact. To now act as though those conversations never happened suggests a disconcerting level of collective amnesia that chips away at any progress made in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

It should not be controversial to say that all forms of racism are abhorrent, and that they are experienced differently – for all sorts of reasons, including skin colour. Yet too often, any attempt at honest discussion is derailed by a mental block that shuts down nuance and turns debate into a spiral of defensiveness. At the very least, we need the space to recognise antiblackness as a distinct and specific form of racism. If the longest‑serving Black woman in Parliament can’t be afforded that recognition, where does that leave us?■

About the author: Natalie Morris is our Senior Editor here at The Lead. Elsewhere, she is a freelance writer, journalist and host covering social justice, inequality, health and community, writing in the Guardian, the Independent, Metro, Grazia, Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s the author of Mixed/Other and co-author of Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s memoir Believe.