If only Diane Abbott had a job! Then we wouldn't all have to describe her as "Corbyn's former lover"

“Corbyn’s former lover” and the “left wing Labour who once had a fling with Jeremy Corbyn”. This is how The Telegraph saw fit to describe Britain’s first black female MP, Diane Abbott, in news about a traffic scheme today. In one swift sentence, her shadow ministerial role disappeared, and she was reduced to a joke.

This kind of dismissal of Abbott is no new trend; it’s part of a wider racist, sexist web in which one of our country’s most prominent politicians is routinely dismissed.

Abbott has been a Member of Parliament for 28 years. She’s currently Shadow International Development Minister and did a brief stint as a shadow Health Minister under Ed Miliband. She’s spent her life campaigning on gender, race and LGBT issues when they were far from popular causes; it was Abbott who first uttered Stephen Lawrence’s name in the House of Commons back in 1993.

In the past two elections she’s worked hard at a consistency level to massively increase her majority. But scan through Twitter, take a brief glimpse at the media, or ask friends and acquaintances their thoughts on her and you’ll find that she’s discredited as “not credible” and attacked at every turn. Ultimately, she is judged much more harshly than she would be if she were a white man.

Take Abbott’s supposed relationship with Jeremy Corbyn. This rumour has been used as just another stick with which to beat the Labour leader. The two seasoned politicians have been mocked endlessly for their presumed romantic dalliance; while allegations about David Cameron and a dead pig’s head rarely go further than jokes, the Abbott/Corbyn rumour persists in a much more sustained way.

The underlying message is: Corbyn isn’t a serious politician, and his alleged relationship with a black woman over thirty years ago cements this belief. Essentially, racist and sexist stereotypes of Abbott are being used to avoid and stifle serious political debate.

But this isn’t where the discrimination ends. Often news stories (and in this instance, the word “story” as a fictional piece writing often fits the bill) featuring Abbott are accompanied with a picture of her looking “angry”. When rumours circulated in September that she had a spat with newly-elected MP Jess Phillips, in which the latter admitted she had told the former to “fuck off”, new outlets ran pictures of Abbott looking angry and Phillips looking calm.

This bought into the Angry Black Woman stereotype, where women of colour are reduced to nothing more than negative and rude individuals with a rage problem. What they say ceases to matter. No matter that Phillips later apologised for her behaviour; the pictures said everything. Abbott, the Angry Black Woman, and her Angry Black Woman behaviour, was to blame.

The word for this double discrimination is misogynoir. Diane Abbott isn’t just spurned for being a woman, she’s attacked and ridiculed for being a black woman. In our society, minority ethnic women – in particular black women – are at the bottom of the social pile: discriminated at every stage of the recruitment process, one of the groups hit hardest by cuts and told magazines won’t sell if they’re on the front cover.

This outrageous double discrimination persists because too few are willing to realise that we’re all implicated in this system of oppression and we need to scrutinise our own subconscious prejudices.

Indeed, it’s not just the right who dismiss Abbott. As some leftwing progressives declare their commitment to equality, in the next breath they’re labelling Abbott as “scary”. What frightens them is not her views - which they, by all means, are free to disagree with - but that she is a black woman who’s unashamed to speak her mind. The way they voice their disagreement is a dead giveaway to this prejudice.

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership victory has reminded us of the extent to which politicians on the left are routinely criticised by the media for challenging conventional wisdoms. But it should worry us all that there’s a special kind of vitriol reserved for Diane Abbott.

Subconsciously people don’t expect a black woman to be at the forefront of challenging the status quo, so they go out of their way to undermine her in an attempt to put her back in her box. The message is: if she’s not going to conform, she shouldn’t be there.

In a society where so many people claim to want change, this couldn’t be more wrongheaded. And as long as we dismiss her as nothing more than a “former lover”, we ignore the benefits her work – and her visibility – offer to us all.