Yes, I’ve been called a “coconut”. Maleeha Hussain wrote it on a sign she held up at a Palestinian protest last November to condemn the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman for their unpleasant immigration policies and support for Israel’s war on Gaza. But the term has also been used to denigrate left-wing people whose political views are deemed too “white”.
Hussain’s sign, one side of which showed the faces of Mr Sunak and Ms Braverman superimposed on a coconut beneath a palm tree, was charged with a racist public order offence and summoned to court. Last week she was acquitted, with the judge finding the sign legitimate “political satire”.
“Coconut” is a cheap and offensive insult — brown or black on the outside but white on the inside — but it is not something that should be policed by the state (though Hussein is not the first person to be put in court for using it). Anti-racists’ use of the term, and attempts by authorities to criminalize its use, raise broader questions about the policing of speech and the nature of anti-racism.
“Hate speech laws should be there to protect us more,” Hussain reflected after his victory. “But this case shows that these rules are being used as a weapon to target ethnic minorities.” Indeed, hate speech laws have a long history of being used to criminalize ethnic minorities. The 1965 Race Relations Act was the first British law to legally prohibit incitement to racial hatred. One of the first people to be convicted and jailed under its provisions was Michael X, a Black Power activist from Trinidad.
Black activists in the US have long complained that their posts criticising racism are frequently banned on social media because they are deemed racist. And over the past year, we have seen pro-Palestinian voices censored, often not for inciting hatred but for criticising Israel or calling for a ceasefire. “People are interpreting the category of hate speech very broadly,” points out US legal scholar Geneviève Laquié.
The lesson of this history is “be careful what you wish for.” It’s easy to understand why many want to ban hate speech. But the flexibility of the concept of “hate” means that when states begin to criminalize such speech, minorities themselves, and those fighting for social justice, can become targets.
But it’s not just state policing of speech that we should be concerned about. Many people defend the use of words like “coconut” as a political criticism. For Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, it’s express “A political critique of those who support white supremacy.”
But far from being political criticism, these labels serve to avoid true political engagement and replace criticism with derogatory labeling. Labeling someone a “coconut” racializes political debate, asserting that there are arguments and ideas that are specific to black and brown people and arguments and ideas that are specific to white people.
The reason to criticise Sunak and Braverman is not because they have a “white mindset” but because their politics are reactionary.
Black and Asian communities are just as politically diverse as white communities: there are radicals and reactionaries, conservatives and liberals, racists and anti-racists. I criticise Sunak and Braverman not because they “think white” but because their politics are reactionary – on every issue from immigration to workers’ rights, Palestine to the welfare state.
Hussain’s lawyer, Rajiv Menon KC, told the court that anti-racists have a “right to criticise people of their own race who pursue racist policies”. That’s true. But why fetishise race? The fact that Mr Sunak and Ms Braverman may be “of the same race as me” has no bearing on the views they hold or my criticism of those views.
Racializing political views not only obscures the real reasons why the views of figures like Sunak and Braverman are unjustified, it also makes it easier for some anti-racists to police the speech of others. Anyone who challenges fashionable contemporary norms like identity politics or questions concepts like “cultural appropriation” can be dismissed as “too white.” This is a form of gatekeeping that allows some individuals to monopolize the right to define what black and brown people can say and believe in order to remain authentically black and brown.
Every community has its gatekeepers. For example, within the Muslim community, certain groups and individuals, usually religious and conservative, claim to distinguish what should be said about and by the community. Too often, these individuals and organizations are accepted by the wider society as speaking for the Muslim community.
Similarly, Jews who are perceived as insufficiently supportive of Israel or who speak out for Palestinian rights are labeled as “self-hating Jews” or “non-Jews.” This is a way of turning the political debate into one of identity and legitimacy, and a means of delegitimizing critical voices as a betrayal of Jewish tradition. This type of censorship needs to be confronted wherever it is.
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The politics of labeling is not exclusive to the left. The right is often even more vehement when it denounces ideas it despises as “woke.” It has become a way of marking territory rather than a means of meaningful debate. It is the ills of our time.
In videos that extol the use of monikers like “coconut,” “house negro,” “Uncle Tom,” “Oreo,” and even “raccoon,” Andrews calls on Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon to justify his views. Though 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-woke right.
Fanon was a complex, sometimes contradictory thinker, not easily categorized as many try to do today. What he rejected was the fetishism of race and identity. “It is not the black community that dictates my course of action,” he wrote in Andrews’s much-praised book, Black Skin, White Masks. “My black skin does not embody any particular set of values.”
For Fanon, it was not racial identity that mattered, but political values and social action: “Every time a man contributed to the triumph of the dignity of the spirit, every time he said no to attempts to subordinate his fellow man, I felt a sense of solidarity with his action.” There is a sense of openness and engagement in Fanon’s writings that modern man could learn from.
Kenan Malik is a columnist for the Observer.
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