I like listening to Taylor Swift; I love period dramas; I am enormously proud of my blackness – and I have been called a “coconut” more times than I can count. To be called a “coconut” – a person who is “black on the outside and white on the inside” – is to be told that having defiantly forced your way into a space previously inaccessible to you as a result of racism, unconscious or otherwise, you are no longer permitted to return to your community. You are now a traitor. It operates under an assumption that “blackness” is a small singular box of identity, not a vast sprawling landscape of experiences and intersections. That is not to say that being a “race traitor” is an entirely redundant concept. There are lots of ways people of colour can do harm to their own communities – by working for political groups with a proven track record of race- and class-based discrimination, for example.
My grandmother grew up with no money in 1930s Jamaica and was one of only two people in her year to pass the exams necessary to train as a nurse. She was bookish and studious and, for her, literature and education were her liberators. She moved to London as part of the Windrush generation in 1952, and bought a house in Clapham in 1973, where she raised and educated a family. I have always been very proud of this. As a child, sitting at the feet of my grandmother, the books thrust into my hands were treated simultaneously as treasures and weapons, and the scholarship I got to an all-girls private school was an achievement, a prized opportunity. It was only when I became this person, a proud product of the environment so many had worked hard to create, that I felt the sting of that word.
