Is 'coconut' a racial slur or something more complex?

Term used on protest march to describe PM and Braverman

- NADINE WHITE

Widespread debate is raging over a police investigation into a woman at a pro-Palestine march who was spotted carrying a poster that depicted Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as “coconuts”.

The image has fuelled a row over whether the term is a racist slur, as the now-axed home secretary came under fire for repeatedly stoking racial tensions with inflammatory rhetoric about marginalised communities. Some argue that it is not comparable with the “N” or “P”-words, which have been used to dehumanise Black and South Asian people for centuries.

But “coconuts” has been used as an insult to describe people from minoritised communities who are perceived as having white sensibilities – implying that the person is brown on the outside but white on the inside.

For decades, people from marginalised communities have been prosecuted using supposedly anti-racist legislation. In 1967, the British state charged Black rights activist Michael X, then renowned as “the most famous Black man in Britain”, with inciting racial hatred under the same act designed to protect these communities from discrimination.