Mammy Lammy

To give some context, re-joining the EU is not the formal policy of the Liberal Democrats. Yet Labour's new Shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is so fanatical a re-joiner that he has called Leave voters Nazis, and supporters of apartheid. But I am intrigued at the suggestion that Lammy is black. He was given his parliamentary seat because Tony Blair thought that he was white. 

For the Tottenham by-election, one CV read, "SOAS, Harvard Law School, Archbishops' Council." Blair pictured David Cameron. The other read, "Widow of Bernie Grant." Blair pictured a mammy doll. Guess which one was given the seat. But Sharon Grant is white. And David Lammy is black? Well, is he? Politically, is he, really?

The old term "politically black", while it now looks like a product of American academia, was in fact of British origin, and it came from the streets. It may be worth bringing it back. The young men who were and would be twice as likely as their white peers to be fined for breaches of the lockdown are politically black. People's problems have all sorts of roots, but the roots of theirs at least include the fact that they are not white, or not white enough. Whatever else they may also be, that makes them politically black.

Whatever else we may also be, that makes a lot of us politically black. This is not identity politics. Our struggle is integral and even fundamental to the struggle for economic equality led by the working class, since the roots of the present economic order are in the slave trade, which, perhaps most strikingly, was what financed enclosure here in Britain.

As politically black people, we look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we see which side we look more like, the side that is clearly being violently oppressed and repressed. We have been here before. Today, it is one's attitude to the Palestinian struggle that is the litmus test of one's attitude to the specific phenomenon of white violence against politically black people throughout the world, including in Britain. Mammy Lammy fails that test. There needs to be a politically black candidate for Tottenham at the next General Election, and that candidate really needs to be Palestinian.