The Coconuts Of London

Derek Laud( does not fit the stereotype)



Talking about race shouldn’t be off limits for whites says Andrew Anthony …This was quite an interesting a piece trailing a forthcoming book from the Guardian Comment is free. I have tried to grab the bones of it doing a sort of new mania digest …

"Race is a is a no-go area for whites and perhaps we should do more . We have allowed race to become a self-perpetuating problem. ‘Black’ means more than skin colour. We can see this from the pejorative slang term “coconut”, meaning someone who is black on the outside but white on the inside .Liberal anti-racists carry around a set idea of what being “black” entails: physically strong, non-academic, in some way anti-authority and of course promiscuously heterosexual. Anyone who does not fit expectations is less ‘black‘. I have thought about this imprisoning idea of blackness .Society has become less racist in the past forty years, employment opportunities have increased, but Afro-Caribbean boys do even worse at school than before .
Liberals blame a new subtle racism. Paradoxically they are right . The racism that I witnessed came mostly from within black communities ,where low expectations and cultural stereotypes were often aggressively enforced. Then there was the kind of “well-meaning” racism, no less restricting, in which I had been complicit.
I recall an interview I did with a political aspirant called Derek Laud (later to achieve a greater profile as a contestant on Big Brother). In 1997 Laud was the prospective Tory candidate for Bernie Grant’s Labour stronghold of Tottenham. He dressed like an Edwardian gentleman, spoke in a camply posh voice, was a member of the Monday Club, and an enthusiastic fox-hunter. I said that it must have taken a great deal of willpower to ignore his own racial identity in the homogeneous environment of the Reform Club, where we met.
“This is your problem,” replied Laud. “You clearly think of me as being black.”
At the time, I thought this was a tragicomic case of self-denial. And I quickly pointed out that he was indeed black. To which he said: “I never wake up in the morning and look at my face and think: ‘Gosh, I’m black.’ ” This confused me .It was agreed by every approved authority on the matter that the way to liberation from racial prejudice was to “get in touch” with your racial identity. But what has that turned out to mean?
Urban black youths are sold a ubiquitous imagery with the crude repetition of a 50 Cent album. This self-dramatising idea of blackness has helped to create a debilitating mental ghetto and limiting as the real ghettos taking shape in our cities.
One way of correcting this situation, which almost everyone in theory agrees upon, is to challenge racial stereotypes. In which case there can be few greater challenges to the Afro-Caribbean stereotype than Laud: gay, camp, sardonic and Tory. The British African pressure group Ligali dismissed the “gay pseudo intellectual”, after his Big Brother appearance, as a “prime example of cultural disinheritance”. . The truth is, however, that until people with black skin can reject and select their own culture they will never truly be free. The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence is published by Jonathan Cape on September 6"

I have cut this by about a half without losing any sense so the book promises to be the bore of the new Millennium . I have been saying for ages that Black people are not a group any more than white people are . They rarely agree and they are increasingly not defined in this country by Colour .Mrs . N and I socialise a fair bit with black chums and most of then could be called coconuts if you wanted to be irritating about it . It is typical of Liberal to announce as a magical discovery something that ordinary Londoners have known for a very long time and typical of the estrangement between do-gooders and the object of their intellectual charity.


Nonetheless now we are finally starting to hear some sense from the bleeding hearts what implications does this have for race policy in view of the eruption of gang violence reported in the Standard this evening. The answer is clear stop pandering to this silly image black youth like to wear. No special treatment , no “ understanding" special problems . No dealing with self appointed community leaders who have a vested interest in separation. Same as everyone else is the key including the even worse performing white working class boys .

I would suggest a sort of three month boot camp for all English youths as a little National Service . The immense good it would do deprived blacks can only be matched by the immense good it would do for Etonians . I doubt we will hear any politicians telling us the truth though …oh sorry we did . Patrick Mercer !