Faisal Bodi argues that minorities should not shy from using communal vernacular to express political dissent, despite the decision to prosecute Mareiha Hussain

I have a very personal interest in the case against Mareiha Hussain. This week, the 37 year-old schoolteacher was charged with a racially aggravated public order offence for holding up a satirical banner depicting PM Rishi Sunak and ex-home secretary Suella Braverman as coconuts.

Her prosecution brings back memories of another inquisition much closer to home. In 2006 I was excommunicated by the Guardian, for whom I had been a guest columnist for several years, after I hurled the same pejorative at a fellow commentator. It made me the UK’s first ever victim of coconut abuse.

I had told Sunny Hundal that he was a “coconut by name, coconut by nature”, in reference to both the Anglicisation of his birth name – Sundeep – and his nauseating fawning to white supremacist political narratives on issues of race and faith.

According to the Guardian, I had crossed the line separating legitimate criticism from racist slurs.

The summary dismissal came as a shock if only because “coconut” is routinely used by people of colour to describe those in their communities who affect or assume the attitudes and behaviours of white people. But here, for the first time, it was being weaponised by a supposedly liberal newspaper against the very people who coined it and whom it served.

“Coconut” is a racial metaphor used by South Asians to describe someone who is brown on the outside and white on the inside. At its most inoffensive, the term – interchangeable with Bounty bar or brown sahib – denotes someone who has become too assimilated or acculturated to the dominant “white” culture.

But it’s when the term is deployed in a political sense that controversy arises. Nobody has an agreed definition of coconut nor is there a socio/psychological typology. In communities of colour, it is something that is intuitively understood more than strictly defined. In practice, coconut recognition is a process of social conditioning, an acquired knowledge by which we can instinctively differentiate between those who are loyal to the struggles of our sub-group and those who want nothing to do with them, or worse still, have crossed to the other side.

Essentially, there are two grades of coconut. The first type (Grade B) is someone who has internalised racial inferiority and who downplays or denies his/her own heritage in a bid to get ahead. Anglicising one’s name or using skin whitening cream to appear lighter and more “British” would land you in that category.

While I can’t excuse this kind of “coconut”, they are less dangerous than the Grade A’s who use their elevated position to attack their own community. They are typified by Sunak and Braverman, both fruits of the same diseased tree who eagerly provide a veneer of acceptability for white supremacism. They are traitors to people of South Asian heritage in the UK, as well as much of the Global South, who oppose the slaughter in Gaza and are themselves victims of structural racism.

The claim that “coconut” is a racist smear doesn’t hold much water. It problematises an expectation of conformity to a “minority ethnic” loyalty or standard, in much the same way that some nationalist Britons expect fellow whites to be patriotic or some Zionist Jews denounce their anti-Zionist co-religionists as “self-hating Jews”. It goes without saying that none of these analogous examples are called racist, let alone prosecuted as such. Expecting a certain political response from members of your own ethnic group on the grounds that it is being victimised is hardly racism, as it is normally understood.

Seeking to criminalise “coconut” is nothing and everything to do with racism. It is politically motivated and serves two purposes. Firstly, it perpetuates the Islamophobic narrative of “hate marches” led by extremist Muslims, a mainstay of political/MSM commentary ever since the first pro-Palestine protests in October. It is also intended to send the message to everyone who supports Palestinian emancipation that the authorities will not hesitate to instrumentalise the law to silence them.

Similarly, I don’t think the Guardian’s decision to drop me was anything to do with racism, either alleged or actual. Over the seven or so years I’d written for the publication, I had built a reputation for being an outspoken anti-Zionist and champion for Palestinian rights. In particular, my argument for the dissolution of Israel as an ethno-supremacist state – Israel simply has no right to exist – marked me out as a target. In the same way that Belle Donati and Sangita Myska have been chopped by their respective news networks for not toeing the pro-Zionist line on Gaza, I too had become too much of a hot potato.

If I was Hussain I’d be celebrating a moral victory. Regardless of the outcome of her case, the attempt by the state to appropriate and weaponise communal language has only succeeded in amplifying the linkage between white supremacist Britain and the racist, genocidal ideology of Zionism. It has also exposed the fragility and desperation of a state struggling to control the narrative on Palestine.