Someone that I know felt it was appropriate to tell my boyfriend that I am a coconut.
Whether or not this was meant to put him off me, I will never know. This somebody has been lingering between acquaintance and friend for the last 2 years now. And if he keeps up this up, he will seriously be on his way out.
(Note: once I've cut you out of my life, it is extremely difficult to get back in. I tend to not look back.)

This person really should know better than to be making such comments. Anyway, I have been called a coconut so many, many times that I am slowly starting to find it rather amusing. The people who make such comments do not realise how stupid they make themselves look. But let's go beyond this. Let's get to what it really reflects. Now to my knowledge, a coconut is a black person, pretending to be white. What does that mean? It means that this person wants to be at a better place than he or she is at that moment. We all know that the residual message from Apartheid is that whites live the good life, everybody else strives to and black people are right at the bottom. So do you really blame that black person for wanting to be a part of the good life so badly that they will act it out in the hopes that it will somehow come true? And anyway isn’t that what you’re also striving for ultimately? Not to have a paler skin colour per se but to partake of the privileges and opportunities and so forth that come with being white?

"...isn’t that what you’re also striving for ultimately? "

Nowadays more black people are being educated, making money and speaking fluent English. Some of us, quite frankly, don’t have to pretend. We don’t need to pretend as though we’re educated because we are. We don’t need to fake English accents because we speak the language fluently. We are not trying to be anything, we are not showing off and some of us have our own things that we’re trying to escape from. We are just progressing in life. This is a good thing and we all should be happy that at least there is some form of progress in the country. We are not disowning our culture and it doesn’t make us any less Xhosa. This progress of course does come with its pitfalls, but is it really necessary to pull the rest of us down just because you aren’t as high up as you’d like? Of course, I do not speak for the majority of the people in this country, let alone this province. I can only speak for myself. Change is a difficult thing, I will admit that. You have no point of reference when you do and choose something that you have never done or chosen before. So you don’t know the outcome and that can be scary. It is easier to fall back on what you know, even if it isn’t progressive.

We need to progress, folks, and this requires a lot of effort. This goes beyond remembering the words of Steven Biko once a year or wishing Nelson Mandela a happy birthday or going on about how “good” life was before the whites came. You cannot pledge allegiance to township life, if you completely hate it. You cannot then attack somebody for moving to the suburbs. It starts with looking at yourself, examining your thoughts and the things that you say.

"It is easier to fall back on what you know, even if it isn’t progressive."

I know exactly why the above-mentioned somebody called me a coconut behind my back. I realised something about him though; something that I had refused to see for the last couple of years. He feels the need to show everyone that he is just as adequate, if not better and gets off on people wanting a piece of him. So he tries to bring me down by making me look and feel stupid. Quite frankly, he can rattle me all his wants. I will never stoop to his level.