Yes, I’ve been called a “coconut”. When Marieha Hussain wrote the word on a placard she carried on a Palestine march last November, it was to deride Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, the then prime minister and home secretary, for their obnoxious immigration policies and their support for Israel’s war in Gaza. But it is a term used also to disparage those on the left whose political views are deemed too “white”.
Hussain’s placard, one side of which depicted the faces of Sunak and Braverman superimposed on coconuts under a palm tree, landed her in court, charged with a racially aggravated public order offence. Last week she was cleared, the judge accepting it as legitimate “political satire”.
“Coconut” – meaning being brown or black on the outside but white on the inside – is a cheap, distasteful term of abuse, but not one that should be policed by the state (though Hussain is not the first person to find herself in court for using the word). Both its use by antiracists and attempts by the authorities to criminalise that use raise wider questions about the policing of speech and the character of antiracism.
“The laws on hate speech must serve to protect us more,” Hussain reflected after her court victory, “but this trial shows that these rules are being weaponised to target ethnic minorities.” There is, in fact, a long history of hate speech laws being used to criminalise minorities. The 1965 Race Relations Act introduced Britain’s first legal ban on the incitement of racial hatred. Among the first to be convicted, and imprisoned, under its provisions was the Trinidadian Black Power activist Michael X.
Black activists in America have long complained that their social media posts are frequently banned because their critiques of racism are themselves deemed racist. And over the past year we have seen pro-Palestinian voices censored, often not for promoting hatred but for being critical of Israel, even for calling for a ceasefire. “People are interpreting the category of hate speech very, very broadly,” as the American legal scholar Genevieve Lakier has noted.
The moral of this history is “be careful what you wish for”. It is not difficult to see why many want to ban hate speech. But the elasticity of the concept of “hate” means that, when the state gets to criminalise such speech, minorities themselves, and those fighting for social justice, can be the target.
It is not just policing of speech by the state, though, about which we should be concerned. Many defend the use of a term such as “coconut” as political criticism. For Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, it is to express a “political critique of those who support White supremacy”.
Yet, far from being a political critique, such tags serve to avoid genuine political engagement, replacing critique with the casting of insulting labels. To brand someone a “coconut” is to racialise 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 as politically diverse as white communities. There are radicals and reactionaries, conservatives and liberals, racists and antiracists. The reason to criticise Sunak and Braverman is not because they “think white” but because their politics are reactionary – and on every issue from immigration to workers’ rights, from Palestine to the welfare state.
Hussain’s lawyer, Rajiv Menon KC, told the court that antiracists had the right “to criticise members of their own race for pursuing racist policies”. That is true – but why fetishise race? The fact that Sunak and Braverman may be of “my own race” is relevant neither to the views they hold nor to my criticisms of those views.
Racialising political views not only obscures the real reasons that the views of figures such as Sunak or Braverman are iniquitous, it also makes it easier for some antiracists to police the speech of others. Those who challenge fashionable contemporary norms such as the politics of identity or question concepts such as “cultural appropriation” can be dismissed as being “too white”. It is a form of gatekeeping that allows some individuals to appropriate for themselves the right to define what a black or brown person may say or believe to remain authentically black or brown.
All communities have their gatekeepers. Within Muslim communities, for example, certain groups and individuals, usually religious and conservative, insist that they should demarcate what can be said about a community and by a community. Too often such individuals and organisations are accepted by wider society as representative of Muslim communities.
Similarly, Jews who are deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel, or who campaign for Palestinian rights, get labelled “self-hating Jews” or “un-Jews”. It is a way of turning political debate into a matter of identity and authenticity, a means of delegitimising critical views as a betrayal of the Jewish heritage. Wherever it appears, such speech policing needs to be confronted.
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Politics by labelling is not exclusive to the left. The right is often even fiercer in denouncing ideas it despises as “woke”, which has become a means of marking out territory rather than of engaging in meaningful debate. It is a disease of our times.
In a video extolling the use of labels such as “coconut”, “house Negro”, “Uncle Tom”, “Oreo”, even “coon”, Andrews calls on Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary, to provide justification for his views. Although he died more than 60 years ago, Fanon has become a figure central to today’s culture wars, celebrated by the identitarian left, demonised by the anti-woke right.
Fanon was a complex, sometimes contradictory, thinker, not easily pigeonholed as many seek to do today. What he rejected was the fetishisation of race and identity. “It was not the black world that laid down my course of conduct,” he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, a book lauded by Andrews. “My black skin is not the wrapping of specific values.”
What mattered to Fanon was not racial identity but political values and social action: “Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act.” There is an openness and sense of engagement to Fanon’s writing from which many today could learn.
Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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