What the Diane Abbott metastorm was really about

Let's call this what it is. It's pretending.

It’s not easy being white. Apart from the power, control, jobs and everything, it’s a pretty tough life. Every now and then, people make sweeping generalisations about us, as white people, and we’re going to have to pretend to be offended, even though we’ve never really suffered the wrong end of prejudice in our lives.

With the best will in the world, if you’re not white, you don’t know just how hard that is to fake.

People have told me there was a Twitterstorm about yesterday’s comments from Diane Abbott MP. I didn’t see such a thing unfolding before me, but then that might be because I don’t follow people on Twitter who make a career out of pretending to be upset by things that haven’t actually upset them.

I saw a storm about a storm — a metastorm, maybe. What I have found is a few of the same old faces saying that this was racism, because they decided it was, and ooh wouldn’t the lefties have been having kittens if it was the other way around?

Let’s call this what it is. It’s pretending. It’s not genuinely being offended. It’s artifice, completely made up in order to get a bit of publicity for people’s vexatiously contrarian columns and to get their godawful faces on television.

If you’re genuinely wounded by Diane Abbott’s comments, I pity you. You’re beyond saving. It’s a wonder we white people manage to stay in control of everything in the world ever if we’re so bloody sensitive — we should be sitting in a cupboard crying all day about what the nasty lady said about us.

But it’s not genuine hurt; it’s the sensing of a mistake by a political rival, and the careful depiction of a representation of what these woeful human beings think being offended actually is, in order to capitalise on that.

Those of us on the left who enjoy the physically challenging combination of handwringing and self-flagellation might speculate that, whatever the rights and wrongs of Abbott’s tweet, one simply shouldn’t generalise about race, or anything like that. Well, as a general rule, that is probably the case. It wasn’t the brightest thing for an elected official to say.

However, as far as the miserable, inane, dumbed-down wreck of a political discussion that was the Abbott saga this week, it just goes to show how we still can’t be grown-up when talking about issues such as race and racism. A single tweet from an MP, and kaboom — it’s enough to get the same old faces whooping and hollering the same old garbage, the same old lies.

“If it had been the other way around,” is the general thrust of these arguments. Well if it had been the other way around, it would have been the other way around. If it had been the other way around, everything would have had to have been the other way around. We would have to be living in a country where black people dominated and white people didn’t; where black people had all the jobs but spectacularly untalented black columnists would be writing about how unfair it was, somehow.

As well as all that, you have to suspect that if it had been the other way around, the same faces so outraged and appalled by Abbott’s comments would be finding ways to justify what had been said, to claim that it wasn’t really all bad.

All this comes in a week when we’ve been seeing the horribly real consequences of actual racism, with two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence having been brought to justice. This pointless charade about Abbott would be a tacky sideshow at the best of times; in the context of seeing what real racism does, it’s even more pathetic.