In any case what interests the present writer is not the article itself, but Abbott’s letter, and strictly speaking it isn’t quite the letter that interests him, but rather the response to it. First, here is the letter itself:

Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.

It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.

For Macdara, this short letter gives rise to a large set of questions including: how can it bring clarity to the matter to argue that there are two separate but similar categories called racism and prejudice? Is the reference to redheads intended to be comedic? What does it mean to be subject all one’s life to racism; the idea is clear enough—regular racism throughout one’s life—but the wording potentially undermines Black environments as places of respite from racism. Why the jump across the Atlantic and back in time to the post-creation-of-buses but pre-civil-rights USA as the means by which we assess racism in England in the mid-2020s? Similarly, why the jump to electorialism in apartheid South Africa? Do we know anything about Travellers in either of these contexts? In the reference to the slave trade, why the reference to the height of slavery and white-seeming people? 

The questions culminate in the obvious one: why did Abbot even write this? And if we assume that this was a first draft, as she later claimed, does that make any difference whatsoever?