That got us thinking about the very long list of foods that double as shorthands for racial betrayal. Banana and Oreo, sure. There’s Twinkie, which does the same work as banana. There’s apple, leveled at Native Americans who are allegedly white on the inside. And there’s coconut, which is a sort of an all-purpose, you’re-white-on-the-inside epithet for all manner of brownness — Desis, Latinos, Afro-Caribbeans.
Freddie Boswell, our colleague who went to school in the United Kingdom, said that the folks across the pond have their own term for this: Bounty Bar, as in the coconut-filled chocolate bar. According to the Racial Slur Database — isn’t the Internet amazing? — black police officers in England apparently get this one a lot.
(The list of creative food slurs winds on and on. When we asked our followers on Twitter to share their stories, folks were sharing random fruits and vegetables that’d been used to mark them as something else. Kat says that this would all be so much easier if we just used variations of potatoes for everyone. You know, “Yukon gold potatoes” for Asian folks who are charged with being insufficiently Asian or “red potatoes” for similarly situated Native Americans who ostensibly want to white. Gene thinks this is artless and makes us all vaguely British.)*
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