Coon

Coon has had an unpredictable semantic history, largely but not exclusively confined to the United States. Supposedly derived from raccoon , the abbreviated form was current from at least 1742. Originally a term for a white rustic, from the 1820s it was used of a cunning or remarkable man, as in the description of Davy Crockett as “a right smart coon” (M. St. C. Clarke, Sketches of Crockett 1832, 144). Two minstrel songs seem to have initiated and consolidated the association with blacks, the first in 1834 being “O ole Zip Coon.” By the Civil War it was being generally used as a term of derogation for blacks, as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): “Well, Tom, yer coons [escaped slaves] are fairly treed” (130). H.L. Mencken quotes the curious story of Ernest Hogan, a black, who wrote a song in 1896 under the stereotyping title of “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” apparently not regarding the word as offensive, and was “amazed and crushed by the resentment it aroused among his people” (1963, 386). As the song increased in popularity and provocation, so it greatly accelerated the currency of the term, which is now taboo.

In its British currency coon has become an ethnic insult for a black person, although like wog , it is often used more generally of a person of color. Thus Philip Larkin wrote in a private letter, “Thanks for the postcard from Coonland [Morocco]” (1992, 690). In Australian English it has been used disparagingly to refer to an Aborigine, at least from about 1899: “Australia is a elova fine place for coons, and the blacker and uglier they are the better they seem to be treated” (1905, from Truth , Sydney, 24). The strangest survival is in South Africa, where the term traditionally refers to the Cape Colored revelers who celebrate the New Year holiday in “the Coon Carnival,” with blackened faces in the minstrel style, elaborate costumes, parades, and dancing. Although originating in the emancipation of the slaves in 1838, the first recorded use is only in 1924. The black-and-white makeup supposedly explains the derivation from raccoon . Although the derogatory meaning of coon is also current, it has failed to displace this special celebratory sense.