Diane Abbott and the politics of bullying
Putting others down is a reaction to shame, writes George Pitcher, but the gospel offers a way to break that cycle
I have a confession to make. Back in the Nineties, when I ran a business, I indulged in some Christianity versus Judaism banter with my friend and colleague Ben, a Jew. We did it in plain sight, some of it on all-staff emails, when he said he’d be taking off a Jewish holiday and I’d reply I presumed he’d be in at Easter then. That sort of thing.
It was intended to be and – I dearly hope, anyway – taken to be self-mocking and satirical of such attitudes. At its heart, it was meant to suggest how ridiculous it would be if one really held these views. I suppose I thought that was hilarious.
I wouldn’t do it or think that now. Partly, to be brutally honest, I wouldn’t do it because it would get me into a lot of trouble. But I wouldn’t think it was funny now, in the way that I thought it was best to mock and laugh at racists then, because I know that making an absurd caricature of racism can reinforce its dark reality without necessarily undermining it.
Bullied become bullies
And, anyway, mockery is a weapon of the bully, not just the satirist. The bully will add violence and humiliation to it. Psychotherapists tell us that the bullied very often become bullies themselves because they attempt to regain some status from their shamed position. It’s like being on a see-saw – the only way to regain pride is to put someone else down.
“Bullying” is far too trite a word to use in the context of antisemitic violence and persecution. But understanding the mind of the bully does help. Because there may have been something of that see-saw status consciousness in the letter that Labour MP Diane Abbott wrote to The Observer, published last Sunday. It claimed weirdly that only people of colour can be victims of racism, while antisemitism is a consequence of mere prejudice, in the same category of victimhood as people with red hair.
Grotesque race hatred
That it’s such a bizarre claim shouldn’t blind us to why Abbott, who has suffered grotesque race hatred herself, makes the category mistake of claiming a hierarchy for racism. It’s the consciousness of status speaking: I am a black woman and, as such, have a unique experience of racism.
It’s an insecurity that feeds a desire to hang on to an exclusive status. For that matter, it may well have motivated Justice Secretary Dominic Raab’s alleged bullying of civil servants. Here are highly educated, privileged professionals (as he sees it) frustrating him in doing his job. Solution? Shout at them and humiliate them. Bullying is to kick down on the see-saw.
The Christian narrative tells me that there was some of that in my oh-so-clever and satirical email exchanges with Ben nearly 30 years ago. I really don’t think I was consciously trying to humiliate him. But, in truth, there may have been some status anxiety in there. To remedy that, it may be helpful to examine what Christian humiliation looks like.
We think of humiliating people as an active verb. On the shame/pride see-saw, it’s about putting them down, so that we can be up. Or, passively, we feel humiliated by being put down by someone else. But that isn’t what the noun, humility, is really about.
Get off the see-saw
Nor is humility about self-effacement, putting oneself down. Nor is it the vanity of the ever-so-’umble Uriah Heep, virtue-signalling humility. No, the real thing is to get off the see-saw, to break the exchange of shame and pride, in which my pride depends on another’s shame, and claim a different kind of power.
It’s to join the other person at their end of the see-saw, at their level (and now, incidentally, unable to move). It’s to say that I’m no longer playing this game.
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul draws attention to a God who empties himself of his divinity into humankind in incarnation, “taking the form of a servant”. We might note too that it’s in his silence that the temporal authorities fail to humiliate the Nazarene (a Jew before Roman imperial power, of course) in his Passion.
His silence
The High Priest of the Temple demands that he joins his see-saw by offering a defence. So does Pontius Pilate. But, as Rowan Williams writes: “His silence, his complete presence and openness, his refusal to impose his will in a struggle, becomes a threat to those who have power – or think they have power.”
In our power-plays, how potent this could be. If a black politician (as Abbott didn’t) told other victims of racism that she felt their pain. Or if another politician (as Raab didn’t) kept his own counsel in the face of pompous senior civil servants. Or, for that matter, if I’d wished Ben a happy Day of Atonement, rather than making clever-dick jibes about Easter holiday entitlements.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
A version of this column appeared on PremierChristianity