Yes, but the overwhelming problem is that she is wrong.
In what sense?
She didn't claim that the earth is flat, or that the holocaust was made up, or that man made global warming doesn't exist.
Like it or not, there is a genuine complexity here. Abbott is not alone in feeling the way she does, because she is reacting to something that is undeniably real. Someone who looks like Diane Abbott will get treated differently, on an immediate day to day level, from someone who looks like Grant Shapps, because one of them is white and the other is not.
The reason I believe Diane is wrong is not because her definition of race is incoherent, but because there isn't a clear, single definition of race. It's not a coherent or logically sound concept. Accurately defining race and thus racism is a wasted effort because racism doesn't make sense in the first place. The fact that Shapps looks like any other white person doesn't mean a racist is going to believe that he
is just like any other white person. Racists aren't necessarily reacting to anything real.
But how far can we go with this? Is prejudice against gay people racism? Is prejudice against communists racism? What about classism? Those might sound like stupid questions, but in terms of the history of racism they absolutely aren't. Racism used to be a thing basically everyone believed, it was a totalizing system for judging the worth of human beings.
How are any of these forms of prejudice actually different from prejudice against Irish people, for example? There isn't an answer to that.
And to be perfectly blunt, I don't think the people criticizing Abbott are doing it because they want an honest, complex national debate on the meaning and lived experience of racism, because that would mean having to care about forms of racism that
aren't directed against white people, and it seems like noone with any power in the political system has any stomach for that at all.