I Am Black. No, You Are a Coconut. You Are an Oreo

Since I have been living in the United States, I have taken advantage of Black History Month to read and listen to testimonies from black folks on the courage to overcome and transcend the obstacles black people and minorities as a whole have to overcome to assert themselves in society.

For some people, we black people are always complaining. My response (which I often keep to myself) is to ask them to put themselves in the shoes of a black person for just 24 hours. Just a trivial example: in my building, the doormen don’t say hello to me even though they say it to everyone else. And to make things worse, they call others by their first names.

This 2024 Black History Month, which has just started, is going to be completely different for me. Not just because it’s an election year. I am shaken by the question of identity, my identity. Who am I really? Am I (really) black? For those who know me, I am physically as dark as one can be.

It all started when a dear friend, who is white, made an unexpected remark to me while we were discussing issues of race and white-black romantic relationships. One of his black friends once told him that, although my white friend has dated black people, he only dated “coconuts.” It was the first time I heard the word “coconut” as a qualifier for a black person. I asked my friend what it meant. He answered “Black from the outside White from the inside.” He then looked at me. It was at this moment that it occurred to me that maybe I was a “coconut.”

 ”Am I a coconut?” I ended up asking.
 ”Yes, you are. You are black and at the same time you are very French,” he replied.

I was speechless, stunned.

The term may seem derogatory but what is striking is that it is a black friend of my friend who had used it to describe my friend’s lovers who all had a particularity: they were black and well-educated. They didn’t fit into some stereotypes.

Far from upsetting me, the exchange with my white friend brought back other painful remarks which had been made to me by my mother, my brothers and sisters as well as my cousins a few months earlier, while I was visiting Cameroon for a short stay last April.

One evening, while I was immersed in a conversation in dialect with my cousins, my mother burst in:

 “You can’t understand; you have become too French. You are no longer one of us. You can’t understand,” she addressed me. I felt like I had been hit by a truck. My own mother told me to keep quiet and not get involved in conversations relating to the family, the village and to everything about to the local community. I could give my general opinion on Cameroon but it was invalid, because, according to her, I did not qualify. To qualify, I had to be one of them, which was no longer the case, because I had become French.

As if that wasn’t enough, she pointed out that I now spoke the dialect with an accent. “You have an accent,” she said. “It’s true that you have a thick French accent when you speak,” confirmed a cousin. I had become a kind of curiosity for them.

A few days later, it was my brother’s turn. We were discussing traditional ceremonies, and in particular funeral rites. He and others thought I didn’t understand the importance of some rituals.

 “These are not things you can understand anyway. You’re not from here anymore, let us handle all this,” my brother declared at the end of the conversation.

For my mother, my brother and my relatives, I was no longer really one of them. I was no longer Cameroonian enough, and perhaps no longer African enough. I was French, which, for them, meant that I was Black on the outside and White on the inside. In fact, my mother’s husband put it this way, responding to my brother: “Your brother doesn’t see things the way we do. He has a white approach.”

I had become a stranger to my own people. I was THE stranger. These statements disturbed me. I was bruised. I suffered in silence. I kept that deep inside me. Until this day.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but 24 hours after my friend told me about being a “coconut”, I found myself having dinner with a French friend who was visiting New York for 48 hours. Jean-Thierry comes from a French aristocratic family. He’s “Old France” as we say. While we were having dinner at Gallaghers Steakhouse in the theater district, JT, as I call him, asked me about my recent articles exploring the cultural differences between France and the United States.

 “I read your articles carefully,” he began. “I find them good. I always click on likes and promote them to my network on LinkedIn.”

 “Thank you,” I replied.

 “But why did you say ‘a French in America’? You’re not really French,” he said.

 “Ok,” I replied. “I am a French citizen; I spent a good part of my life in France. I speak and write French better than the majority of the French people. I went to the best French schools and worked for many years for the media, considered a French institution par excellence. So, this is not enough? Tell me what it is to be French?”

He was speechless because he didn’t expect me to challenge the racist undertone behind his remark.

 “What does being French mean to you? To be white, I suppose?” I continued.

 “That’s not what I meant,” he denied. “For me, when someone says they are French, I see more people like Marine Le Pen. Trash white people,” he argued.

Le Pen is the leader of the far-right party.

For black people, I was only black on the outside. I was white from the inside. I was French, which meant to them that I was white. I was not black enough. For some French people, including a close friend, I was not French enough. In the end, what was I?

These episodes pushed me to take a journey into my identity to understand who I am, and above all, to define myself and no longer let my family, my friends or society tell me whether I am black, not black enough, white-headed or not white-headed.

After reflection, I realize that what the three incidents have in common is the definition of what would be black identity or blackness.

In this definition, to be black would mean being monolithic. Hold on one lane, expressing yourself in specific jargon or “Ebonics” in the United States for example, using slang words, having specific tastes. It can sometimes mean behaving in a certain way that reinforces clichés and prejudices, reacting in a certain way.

To be black enough one must then have black friends, frequent mainly black venues, live among and with black people, surround oneself with black people and be particularly interested in everything relating to black people. Dressing in a certain way (very low pants for example), wearing sparkling jewelry (bling). In the West, that would almost mean being from the ghetto and behaving like having been raised in it. Not expressing yourself in correct English. When you don’t fit this mold, you are a coconut, an Oreo or whatever term is used. Being even a little unfaithful to all these precepts makes you a stranger, a traitor to your race. It takes away your identity. Seen from this angle, there is only one type of black.

I don’t really use slang when I speak, not because I don’t want to speak it but simply because I speak the language the way I learnt it. I express myself in long sentences. I finish my sentences, not because I’m a snob, but because that’s the only way I know. I went to elite schools because I worked hard to get into them. I understood that these schools were my passport to a better life; they were my social ladder from extreme poverty to the middle class. I met my friends on my journey, which took me from Africa to Europe and to North America. It turns out that along the way I met white people, Asians, brown and black people. Some of them became dear friends. I didn’t choose them because of the color of their skin but because we saw life in the same way. With some, it was because we had in common that we grew up in poverty and were hungry to get out of it; with others, it was because we were far from our families; our differences brought us closer; and often it was simply because we shared the same values.

I have an eclectic taste, which led me to read “Black Boy’’, a book in which the African American writer Richard Wright details his childhood in the racist south of the United States. I enjoyed reading The Trial, written by Jewish writer Franz Kafka, which depicts the anti-Semitism which is inherent in Western society. I love the Brothers Karamazov by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, a philosophical story about God and morality.

Gandhi, who inspired so many African leaders in their fight against colonialism, is one of my heroes. The Indian apostle of non-violence lived for more than 20 years in South Africa. My other heroes range from Nelson Mandela to the Congolese hero Patrice Lumumba and Samory Toure, the African emperor who resisted colonialism. I am a great admirer of Winston Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle. I have a lot of respect for Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Sun Tzu. Carl von Clausewitz inspired me as much as the tales full of wisdom that the elders in Cameroon often told me. I often immerse myself with pleasure in the books of Senegalese writer Cheikh Anta Diop or the Cameroonian Ferdinand Oyono.

I am attracted by what is different as well as by what is similar to me. Difference allows me to discover, while similarity allows me to question myself.

When I am in the West, I can navigate the upper class comfortably — as a journalist I have covered ordinary people as well as the most powerful in this world. I am also in my element when I find myself in my village, immersed in the forest in the east of Cameroon. There, I blend in with the crowd, regardless of my mother, my brother and my cousins, who believe that I am no longer 100% Cameroonian or African.

To ignore that I have become the sum of my experiences, of my encounters, of my education, is to refuse that there is not just one lane of blackness. There are many lanes, because we all have different experiences. Our experiences are not the same and so much the better! It is this diversity that makes our world beautiful. There is diversity in blackness. Not recognizing this is failing to recognize that identities are multi-dimensional. It also ignores the fact that individuals must often adapt to the environment in which they operate. Which allows them to use their intelligence so as not to lose their footing.

France, for example, allowed me to escape poverty, to develop my abilities and talents, to benefit from the advances of science and to taste the joys of democracy. It also allowed me to solidify the human values in which I grew up and was raised in Africa. Above all, it gave me opportunities to earn an honest living and to be able to help thousands of people back in Cameroon. Of that I am proud. I am a proud French. It is also a way of saying thank you to the country. I feel a connection to France and I know that I share many things with other French people, regardless of their skin color.

Undoubtedly, the reasoning of my mother, my brother and those who believe that I am no longer black enough is that black people have been oppressed by white people through colonization and slavery. Consequently, adopting what is perceived as parts of their culture — their way of speaking, of seeing things, their art, their mannerisms, fraternizing with them — would amount to fraternizing with the oppressor and, in doing so, selling out to the enemy and denying who we are. It can also be seen as a way of me saying “I am no longer one of you” or “I am superior to you because now I belong to the other side. I have put myself in the enemy’s place; I have embraced it”. Telling me that I am less black than them, can be a defense. Casting suspicion on me by calling me a “coconut” amounts to protecting themselves from what they perceive as a threat to their own identity.

Seen from the angle of my own life experiences, I am undoubtedly a “coconut” or an “Oreo.” I must say that I am delighted, because my encounters and my experiences have shaped me; they have made me a better person. They didn’t take away anything from my blackness. Nothing will take away the fact that I am black. There won’t be “not enough” next to me. And it’s probably not because I speak “proper English” or that I frequent places dominated by white people. I speak Black, I speak White. I understand Black I understand White. To reject this, is to reject my journey. It is to deny ME.

As the Togolese poet Paul Akakpo Typamm said in his poem ”Je suis Homme” (I am a man):

Je suis NOIR, noir d’anthracite, noir sapotille,
noir d’ébène, noir de jais, noir de nuit,
Je m’appelle Homme.

It translates to:

I am BLACK, anthracite black, sapodilla black,
ebony black, jet black, night black,
My name is Man.