A new government of the tongue

By Colin Grant

Do you know any ‘coconuts’? Do you even know what a ‘coconut’ is? Perhaps you’d rather not say. And is there a difference between a brown person suggesting that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman are ‘coconuts’ and a white person trolling Diane Abbott as a ‘nigger’?

Marieha Hussain, a brown woman, recently appeared at Westminster Magistrates court, charged with a racially aggravated public order offence after a photo of her placard at a pro-Palestine march last year – depicting a coconut tree with images of Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman pasted on it – was circulated on social media. Was her trial justified? No.  Is it possible to mount a defence for Hussain? Yes.

The first task is to call out and resist the bad faith interpretation of law that led to Hussain’s prosecution –  an attempt,  under the camouflage of protecting the vulnerable from racial abuse, to govern the tongue (even in the use of visual language) and to intimidate those who have the temerity to protest. Secondly, the legal language of racial aggravation is a crude bludgeon in need of the kind of finesse that cultural critics like Jeffrey Boakye might offer. 

Indeed, it’s a shame that Black, Listed, Boaykye’s satirical encyclopaedia of sixty terms that have been used to describe brown and black people over the years, was not introduced into the court as an exhibit for the defence. The entry ‘coconut’ makes an appearance in the chapter ‘Internal Insults’ along with ‘Blick’, ‘Bounty’, ‘Battyman’ and ‘Sellout’. These ‘internal insults’ (which may previously have only been fully recognised by other brown and black people) are now sufficiently familiar externally to land Hussain in court. But to what degree are they terms of racial abuse and does it matter who is using them?  

I’m familiar with ‘coconut’. It’s a word that has been levelled at me over the years by other black people who thought I wasn’t black enough; that I was too ‘white-minded’. The insult mostly elicited a shrug from me. The last time I heard the term was a decade ago when, to underline the truth of the assertion of my coconut status, it was pointed out that I also worked for the BBC or as one accuser put it, the ‘Bomboclat Broadcasting Corporation.

When I was a child growing up in Luton I got used to hearing my mum, Ethlyn, call a fellow West Indian and neighbour ‘white-minded’. She said it with pity and as a statement of fact, also adding that he was ‘boasty-mouthed’, ie. boastful. Had the term ‘coconut’ been more widely used in the 1970s, Ethlyn might have tried it out for ‘Mr Boasty Mouth’, but even ‘Bounty’ (its progenitor), a chocolate bar that is white on the inside, brown on the outside, hadn’t yet surfaced as a slur. In any  event, had Ethlyn used the term ‘Bounty’ or ‘coconut’, her intention would have been the same as her use of ‘white-minded’, namely to point out the betrayal that one black person believed was displayed by another’s fawning admiration of white people. 

In using the phrase ‘white-minded’, my mother was making a political point not dissimilar to that suggested by Hussain’s placard. The placard pointed to the perception that right-wing brown politicians were acting against their ‘bredren’ and ‘sistren’, and that these politicians were willingly being used, because of their phenotype, by the Conservative party as a buffer from accusations, for example, of racism. And by doing so, were betraying their ‘bredren and sistren’

I don’t imagine the term ‘coconut’ has been much used against Diane Abbott, but ‘angry black woman’, a derogatory expression, has often been directed at her. That phrase also makes the cut in Black, Listed. In a handful of paragraphs, Boakye exposes the myth and caricature of the angry black woman ‘with a tendency to go nuclear at any given moment at any provocation’ as an age-old fundamental injustice ‘towards dehumanisation of black femininity’.

Black, Listed’s premise is to dig into these terms to unearth the domain assumptions and unconscious trains of thought that lie behind them. Boakye’s crisp and succinct analysis is one of the book’s strengths. It’s divided into eight categories ranging from ‘Loaded terms: Blackness in the white gaze’ (subcategories include ‘chocolate’, ‘lunchbox’ and ‘suspect’), to ‘Outlaw accolades: The black masculinity trap’ (riffing on terms such as ‘Gangsta’, ‘Rudegyal’ and ‘Roadman’). 

At the start of the book, Boakye cleverly and mischievously devises a chart, a kind of periodic table of terms used by and about brown and black people. So, for instance, W is ‘Wog’, Fm denotes ‘Fam’ (as in family), ‘Pt’ stands for Pengtin (an attractive or objectified black woman) and ‘Ct’ is Coconut (a self-loathing black person – black on the outside; white on the inside).

We all resort to abbreviations, don’t we? They’re shorthand and can be a code to allay offence. But common terms usually drop off the radar once they’re registered as offensive to modern sensibilities. Medical school in the 1980s presented a bewildering selection of acceptable terms written in patients’ notes which would raise eyebrows today. ‘FLK’ for example appeared when the physician couldn’t quite work out what was odd about the child in front of them. The child would be flagged up simply as a ‘FLK’, (Funny Looking Kid).

Black, Listed builds slowly to the section on the most vile word, ‘nigger’, with some nervousness. It does a neat job in skewering Quentin Tarantino, who in his frequent use of ‘nigger’ in films such as Pulp Fiction is ‘exploiting its shock value to add barbs to his art while goading us with his audacity. ’Better still, Boakye contrasts Tarantino’s juvenile approach to ‘nigger’ with the sophisticated stage show of the African American comedian Chris Rock’s ‘Black people vs. Niggers’ – an intense and angry take-down of the archetypal ‘nigger’ – which Boakye likens to ‘an in-joke with a Code 5 level security pass – you simply cannot play unless you are black.’

Don’t worry, though. Boakye ensures that liberal readers, no matter their colour, are given a pass to the black culture explored in his book. Turning back to Britain he plays it safe, focusing first on the racist language (’What, what nigger?’) of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence, before diving more deeply into the world of online haters whose anonymity allows their daily abuse of Diane Abbott with the word ‘nigger’.

There’s no faulting Boakye’s description of the digital trolls who ‘scream their pixelated abuse.’ But his treatment of  such an incendiary subject seems tame. It’s as if he’d thrown the grenade but forgotten to remove the pin; he doesn’t disturb the comfort of the virtuous readers. To get a real sense of the traumatic legacy of the abuse suffered by someone like Abbott, it’s more enlightening to read her memoir, A Woman Like Me.

Nonetheless, Black, Listed is a provocation and reminder of the nuances of the language of blackness that ought to be required reading for the judiciary. Boakye’s book makes the case for satirising protestors such as Marieha Hussain to be given a ‘Code 5 level security pass’.  Luckily, it wasn’t needed this time to throw out the baseless charge against Hussain for her depiction of people about whom my mother would say, ‘Cha, dem jus’ too white-minded.’

Photo of Zak Ove’s Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness, courtesy of the artist