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'I don't think black people or Jews should be solely defined by their race'

The writer who sparked the Diane Abbott Observer row on the reasons he is calling out the 'anti-racism' movement

June 22, 2023 09:59
Tomiwa Owolade Fmr76KtWYAApnym
6 min read

I meet Tomiwa Owolade outside Woolwich Arsenal train station in south east London a few weeks before the publication of his hotly anticipated book, This Is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter.

“I like to call this the African Riviera,” he jokes, gesturing at the Thames as he leads me through Plumstead, where he grew up after his politician father took the family to England from Nigeria when he was nine.

"We pass a Costcutter at the end of a long road of Victorian semis. “This is where I came to buy The Times when I had my first article published in the paper, a book review,” he tells me, proudly.

Owolade has come a long way. Today a first-rank essayist and author at just 26 years old, he was at the centre of a big row in April after he wrote an article for The Observer saying that Jews were among the most abused minorities in Britain.

The article prompted Corbynite MP Diane Abbott to write a letter to the paper claiming that Jews could not suffer racism, just prejudice like that faced by “redheads”.

Owolade’s demands that Labour should expel Abbott, made to the JC at the time, marked him out as one of the few — of any colour or creed — with the courage and intellectual nous to call out the Jew-hate that often characterises the “anti-racism” movement.

He rounds on prominent figures in black America — Kanye West, Ice Cube, Whoopie Goldberg and Nation of Islam leaders — who have all been accused of antisemitism. “These people all think that they are being anti-racist.

But the main antisemitic conspiracy theory is that Jewish people are behind the slave trade. They fashion the antisemitism [as an objection] to the pernicious legacy of the slave trade, and when people think about racism against African Americans, that [the slave trade] is the gold standard.

“But Jews were prominent in both the US civil rights movement and anti-apartheid in South Africa, in part because of a shared history of persecution, and the shared enemy, which is white supremacy. It’s a shame that it’s shaken down into antisemitism from those would-be allies.”