The “C” Word 👥 Shades Of Colour, Racial Terminology And Freedom Of Speech

Barry Gilheany ✍ A psychology teacher who carried a placard at a pro-Palestinian march depicting former British PM Rishi Sunak and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman as coconuts was recently acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence at Westminster magistrates court.

Marieha Hussain successfully defended her actions against the allegation that “coconut” was a well-known racial slur denoting being:

brown on the outside but white on the inside … in other words a ‘race traitor’ … less brown or black than you should be.

Ms Hussain argued that those offended by the use of “coconut” ‘do not actually have any understanding of what this word really means … as it is not their word… not their language’ By “hijacking” and “prosecuting” it, they were “targeting ethnic minorities and their intra-communal language.”[1]

In 2009, a city councillor was convicted of racial harassment for using the “coconut” jibe to describe a councillor from a different party. However, at Ms Hussain’s hearing, the district judge Vanessa Lloyd ruled that the placard was “part of the genre of political satire” and said that the prosecution had “not proved to a criminal standard that it was abusive.”[2]

At the outset, I must state my position on any potentially racially charged words or slogans. It is what Martin Luther King enunciated in his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” when he aspired to live in a United States where his children would be judged not on the colour of their skin but on content of character. The Richi Sunaks and Suella Bravermans as well as other culture warriors of colour such as Priti Patel, another former Home Secretary and Kemi Badenoch, Equalities Minister and current Tory leadership candidate, should be judged on their actions and impact therein and in the case of Braverman, their inflammatory words on immigration issued from the bully pulpit of the Home Office, not on fealty to imagined or culturally constructed obligations to their respective ethno-racial groups.

Although Marieha Hussain would most likely disagree on the grounds that coconut is not my language and that I “didn’t use it, know it, hear it, understand it growing up”[3], racially charged vocabulary should not form part of any civilised discourse, be it Nigel Farage’s expression of doubt as to Rishi Sunak’s understanding of British culture or the far left journalist Richard Medhurst’s “Uncle Tom” jibe at Sunak on Twitter (now he didn’t have to have a BAME background to understand the wounding effect of that symbol) and Ms Hussain’s use of the “C” word.

A far more potent and justified allegation against Sunak and Braverman especially is “racism.” For in stoking fears of “invasion” of the British coast by “small boats”, Braverman’s wet dream of witnessing the first air cargo of refugees bound for Rwanda and by promoting narratives that migrants from certain cultures will not integrate with British norms and values and that they are being catered for in hotels at taxpayers’ expense they perpetuated the ‘othering’ that has been the staple of anti-immigration discourse since the 19th century and of course, the supreme ideological crime – racism. In the case of Cruella, she has made little efforts to conceal her anti-Muslim prejudices, be it Pakistani males or her preposterous attempts to influence the policing of pro-Palestinian “hate marches” when she was Home Secretary. A previous Home Secretary of Hindi Asian heritage, Priti Patel, objected to England players “taking the knee” during the Euro 21 finals in solidarity with Black Lives Matter on grounds of political correctness even after the firestorm of online abuse of Black players who had missed penalties in the shoot out against the winner Italy. No complaints, I hope about white English players “hijacking” something i.e. taking the knee “that as an adult they have any understanding what this [gesture} means.”

Far wider issues around identity, race and ethnicity are raised by the homogenising of and expectation that people of colour follow particular political ideologies as proclaimed by anti “coconut” protestors. There are also serious ethnographic issues by the collapsing of the lived experiences of all communities of colour that some anti-racist practice can be guilty of.

So, while the political left prides itself on its strident commitment to anti-racism, it can be capable of racial microaggressions. The journalist and broadcaster Afua Hirsch cites the experience of a Nigerian friend of hers who ran as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in a staunchly Labour part of London. For her, Conservative ideology resonated with the pull-yourself-by-the-bootstraps and socially conservative values that are characteristic of West Africa. What she found on the doorsteps was that Tory voters while initially surprised by the presence of a young black woman with braids and faint Nigerian accent, would quickly compose themselves to wish her well. However, Labour supporters were furious by their perception of a “betrayal;” “How dare you” was a typical reaction to her. “After everything we have done for your people! This is how you repay us!" As she said pointedly “It was as if, because I an immigrant, they own me.” [4] That vignette tells a thousand tales of how a Tammany Hall style politics coalescing around race and ethnicity can take hold in strata of the British Labour Party and the US Democrats with votes from POC communities being taken for granted and possibly favours being returned to the gatekeepers of these communities with toxic outcomes such as the defence of communal demands for the banning of books such as The Satanic Verses and the policing of dissidents within these communities.

The C word forms part of a thesaurus of insults associated with the dreaded notion of “sell out” in Black, or more accurately Afro or Afro-origin culture. These include Uncle Tom, Coon, Aunt Jemima, House Negro, House Nigger.[5] Other cultures have equally lacerating epithets for those of its members deemed to have transgressed their ethos and norms. Staunch Zionist or pro-Israel Jews often accuse critics of the Israeli state and its treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and conduct of the Gaza war as “self-hating Jews” and, most wounding of all, “Kapos.” Irish people from a nationalist/republican background who are less than totally committed to the ‘cause’ are denigrated as “West Brits” or “Castle Catholics”; people from an Ulster Protestant/Unionist deemed to be insufficiently “loyal” to the Crown and “our wee country” get called “Lundys” or “Rotten Prods” (the appellation given to socialist trade unionists who tried to protect Catholic dock workers from expulsion from Belfast shipyards in 1920). In other cultures, failure to uphold community norms can have terminal or fatal consequences in the case of young women who reject honour marriages, LGTB people who come out or Muslims who reject their faith.

In his commentary on the work of the black British author and schoolteacher, Jeffrey Boakye, Tomiwa Owolade discusses the centrality of being seen as a “sell out” to Boakye’s identity conflict. When his father moved to Britain from Ghana, he suffered appalling racist abuse, not from other black people. He was called a:

jungle man and was mocked for his accent. He lacked the streetwise credibility of black Caribbean people. He was seen as “fresh off the boat.”[6]

Coming from a Black African family, Boake’s upbringing in Brixton was markedly different from the other black people he grew up with. In his book Black, Listed, he writes “I’m not Caribbean. I’m African Ghanian.” He describes the feeling that when growing up in South London during the 1980s, that the cool kind of black identity was the West Indian one, not the African one. He writes that Youth culture, hinged on West Indian, specifically Jamaican, cultural norms that have become ingrained in black British youth culture. This was the blackness of reggae, ragga and dance-hall music. The blackness of the Jamaican patois. The blackness of Bob Marley. But Boakye’s family did not want him to be a Jamaican with all the negative associations they perceived with that identity. They wanted him to be a good Ghanian boy and to be a diligent student who would achieve the good grades that would make his family proud. So, while the black African was a student, the Caribbean a street hustler; the African curled up to authority, the Caribbean rebelled against it.[7]

But for Boakye the ‘key defining characteristics,’ the marker and ‘source of black authenticity’ is ‘the material reality of “poverty.” He writes that ‘there’s an inherent underdog quality to being black that acts as an ideological passport into black identity’ which no amount of wealth acquisition and upward social mobility, in his opinion, can be removed not should “we want to.”[8].

Critiquing Boakye’s anxiety about being a sell out which undergirds his obsession with authentic black identity, Owolade observes what I would call an inverse racism; the sort of racial construct of black people that Norman Mailer came up with in his essay The White Negro. This is the black person as the eternal rebel, always struggling and hustling on the street. Owolade then asks searching questions of fellow Black figures and commentators as to what a “sell out” looks like. Do blacks sell out when they support or vote for conservative parties as the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah suggested when he said that “the strangest animal I’ve ever seen is a black Tory.” Are people who enter into relationships with white people “sell out”? James Baldwin was denounced as a sell out by the Black Panther leader and serial rapist Eldridge Cleaver because Baldwin was gay, and Cleaver saw homosexuality as anathema to “authentic” forms of black masculinity. Black critics of identity politics are sometimes also denounced as coons. Were confirmed African separatist nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X who met white supremacist groups respectively the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party sell-outs?[9]

Such grotesque posturing are the inevitable outcomes of cul-de-sac identity politics which rests on fixed definitions of what it is and what it means to be black or brown or any other ethnicity. As Owolade puts it so articulately it produces a mirror image of the white racism and exclusivism that the gatekeepers of such groups claim to oppose so strenuously. Ethnic groups are plural, not singular – a message that the coconut placard holders need to heed. But crucially, it should not be the function of courts to suppress this debate by censoring the message on the coconut placard no matter how offensive and inappropriate it appears.

The essence of antiracist struggle is solidarity; a solidarity based on our common humanity. It is an ethos which, surprisingly for some, which is articulated in striking terms by an icon of African revolutionary thought – Franz Fanon. For he rejected the very idea of a singular black identity. He sees it as perversely the outcome of racist discourse.

For there’s nothing, a priori to warrant the assumption that such a thing as a Negro people exists. The Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in so far as they were defined in relation to the whites.

Their objective situations differed fundamentally but all were deemed “black” only because of racist categorisation.[10]

Fanon rejected any form of black essentialism. “The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilisation in the fifteenth century,” he stated, “confers no patent of humanity on me. He was not “the man of my past” nor “the Slave of the history that dehumanised my ancestors.”[11]

For Fanon, the beliefs and ideals of Black people cannot derive from their skin pigmentation. “My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values.” His solidarity is not fellow bearers of the inert property of a skin colour but with all those who share his ideals and will defend the rights and dignity of all people.

For every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows. In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color.[12]

That last sentence is the perfect riposte to those who wish to trap people in the prison of group identity essentialism be they “white” supremacists,” past advocates of Negritude or “blackness,” community “leaders” or coconut hunters. It is a statement of Enlightenment universalism which has received such pushback from the identitarians, the culture warriors, the postmodernist, the critical race theorists, and the anti-“coconut” enforcers. But it is not the role of the criminal justice system, government censors or self-appointed spokespersons for the “offended” to determine the legality or otherwise of the term ‘coconut’ as a form of political critique.

[1] 'Acquitted protestor: I’ve no regrets over coconut placard.' The Guardian. Thursday 19th September 2024

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Afua Hirsch (2018) BRIT (ish). On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Vintage pp.119-20

[5] Tomiwa Owokade (2023) This is not America. Why Black Lives in Britain. London: Atlantic Books p.242

[6] Ibid, p.232

[7] Ibid, pp.234-35

[8] Ibid, pp.240-41

[9] Ibid, pp.241-42

[10] Kenan Malik (2023) Not so Black and White. A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. London: Hurst. p.168.

[11] Ibid p.168.👥

[12] Ibid p.168

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.