Yes, they call me "coconut" too. When teacher Marieha Hussein sent that message with a banner she carried at a pro-Palestinian march last November, it was mocking then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his interior minister, Suela Braverman, for their terrible immigration policies and support for Israel's war in Gaza. The term is also used to disparage people on the left, whose political views are considered too "white".
Because of that poster, where the faces of Sunak and Braverman were placed among coconuts under a palm tree, Hussein ended up in court, accused of racially qualified violation of public order. Last week, the lawsuit was dismissed, as a judge accepted her gesture as legitimate "political satire."
"Coconut" - meaning being brown or black on the outside but white on the inside - is a cheap, tasteless insult, but not the kind that should be in the eye of the state (although Hussein is not the first person to be tried for the word). Both its use by anti-racists and the authorities' attempts to criminalize it raise deeper questions about the control of speech and the nature of anti-racism.
"Laws regulating hate speech must serve to protect us," Hussein said after the court victory, "but this trial has shown that the rules are being used as a tool to target ethnic minorities." Indeed, there is a long history of abuse of those laws to criminalize minorities. The Race Relations Act 1965 introduced the first legal ban on incitement to racial hatred in Britain. Among the first to be sentenced to prison under that law was Trinidadian Black Power activist Michael X.
Black activists in America have long reported that their posts are often removed from social media because their criticism of racism is itself considered racist. Over the past year, we have seen pro-Palestinian voices censored, often not for promoting hate, but for criticizing Israel and even calling for a ceasefire. "People interpret hate speech very broadly," notes American lawyer Genevieve Lakier.
The lesson of that experience is "be careful what you wish for". It is not difficult to understand why many want to ban hate speech. But the elasticity of the concept of "hate" means that minorities and people fighting for social justice can be targeted when the state criminalizes such speech.
However, it is not only state control of speech that should concern us. Many justify the use of terms like "coconut" as political criticism. For Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, it is an expression of "political criticism of those who support white supremacy."
Far from it, such labels serve to avoid genuine political engagement, replacing criticism with offensive labels. To label someone as a "coconut" is to racialize political discussion, to insist that there are certain arguments or ways of thinking that are black or brown and others that are white.
Black and Asian communities are just as politically diverse as whites. There are radicals and reactionaries, conservatives and liberals, racists and anti-racists. The basis for criticism of Sunak and Braverman is not that they "think white", but that their politics are reactionary - on every issue, from immigration to workers' rights, from Palestine to the welfare state.
The lawyer representing Marijeha Husein told the court that anti-racists have the right "to criticize members of their own race for pursuing racist policies." That's true - but why the fetishization of race? The fact that Sunak and Braverman belong to "my race" is not relevant either to their views or to my criticism of those views.
Racializing political views not only obscures the real reasons why the views of people like Sunak or Braverman are malignant, but also makes it easier for individual anti-racists to control the speech of others. Those who challenge contemporary norms in fashion, such as identity politics, or question concepts such as 'cultural appropriation', are dismissed as 'too white'. It is a form of control that allows individuals to take it upon themselves to define what a black or brown person must not say or believe if they want to remain authentically black or brown.
All communities have such controllers. In Muslim communities, for example, certain groups and individuals, usually religious and conservative, insist on demarcating what can be said about the community and what the community can say. Too often such people and organizations are accepted by the wider society as representatives of Muslim communities.
Similarly, Jews deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel, or who campaign for Palestinian rights, are labeled "self-hating Jews" or "Jewish apostates." Thus, the political debate turns into a question of identity and authenticity, a means of delegitimizing critical attitudes as a betrayal of Jewish heritage. Wherever it appears, such suppression of expression should be opposed.
Labeling politics is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon. The right is often even more vehement in denouncing ideas it despises as "woke," which has become a means of marking territory, rather than engaging in meaningful debate. It is the disease of our time.
In the clip, in which he glorifies the use of terms such as "coconut," "house negro," "Uncle Tom," "Oreo," and even "nigger," Andrews invokes Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary, to justified his views. Although he died more than 60 years ago, Fanon has become a central figure in today's culture wars, celebrated by the identitarian left and demonized by the anti-awakening right.
Fanon was a complex, sometimes contradictory thinker, who is not easy to classify as many would like to do today. He rejected the fetishization of race and identity. "It was not the black world that determined my actions," he wrote in the book Black Skin, White Masks, which Andrews praised. "My black skin is not a package of specific values."
For Fanon, racial identity was not important, but political values and social action: "Every time someone contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time someone resisted the attempt to subjugate his fellow man, I felt solidarity with that act." Many could learn today from Fanon's breadth and engagement.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net, translation: M. Jovanović)
Bonus video:
