Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Let’s calm down about Amber Rudd’s ‘coloured’ gaffe

If you want to see the detrimental impact political correctness has had on our society, you could do worse than examine the scandal swirling around Amber Rudd today. Rudd is being mauled for using the undoubtedly antiquated word ‘coloured’ to describe Diane Abbott. On Radio 2, she referred to Abbott as a ‘coloured woman’. Cue fury. ‘Told you the Tories were racist’, everyone is saying, to such an extent that Rudd has now issued an apology. But here’s the thing: when she used the word ‘coloured’, Rudd was speaking out against racism. She was condemning it. Does the context of people’s words, their actual meaning, count for nought now?

It seems so. Apparently it doesn’t matter that Rudd was defending Diane Abbott. She was discussing the abuse politicians receive when she said:

‘It’s worst of all if you’re a coloured woman. I know that Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of abuse.’ 

She clearly wasn’t using ‘coloured’ in a derogatory way. She was not using it to denote Diane Abbott’s or anybody else’s inferiority. On the contrary, she was making the opposite point to those people in the past who loved to segregate white people and ‘coloured’ people — she was saying people should not be mistreated on the basis of their skin colour.

And yet still she is hounded and shamed. Still she is accused of being racist. Even though she was challenging racism! A similar thing happened to Labour defector Angela Smith a couple of weeks ago. On BBC 2’s Politics Live, Smith was saying that racism is bad. Half way through her comment she sought to illustrate the racist outlook by saying that some people judge others by the colour of their skin, looking down at them as having a ‘funny tinge’.

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