David Lammy shared an abusive letter he received, telling him that as a black man he should be "grateful" to be in Britain.
Labour MP David Lammy has made some of the most impassioned speeches in Parliament about the threats of deportation faced by members of the Windrush generation.
But his resolute standing against that injustice has turned Lammy into a target for xenophobic hate mail.
The backbencher shared a picture of a recent letter he received on his Facebook account today. The sender is kept anonymous but the overall hateful message is perfectly clear.
The openly racist correspondence reads:
“Be grateful that we have taken you as a Black Man and given you a Life here, as we have done for all those Black People who Came to Live here.[sic]”
Lammy is the child of Guyanan parents, who came to Britain as part of the migrational wave from Commonwealth countries into Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.
The MP for Tottenham followed the publication with a statement saying that he would continue speaking on behalf of his parents’ generation.
Lammy also tweeted:
“And let me be clear, following the 1948 Nationality Act my parents and the Windrush Generation were invited here as British citizens. Learn your history. Citizens have been retrospectively renamed as “immigrants” as a result of legislation & policy pandering to far-right rhetoric.”
Last year, an Amnesty International poll found that Lammy’s fellow Labour MP Diane Abbott received 45% of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the weeks before the snap election. Most of them containing sexist and racist comments.
The same study found that black and Asian female MPs received over a third more abuse on the social media platform than their white counterparts.
Joana Ramiro is a reporter for Left Foot Forward. You can follow her on Twitter for all sorts of rants here.
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