Racism, minstrels and 'Old Zip Coon'

An etymology of how "coon" came to be a racial epithet ... from stage characters like Raccoon, a black character who sang an early variant of "Yankee Doodle" in an 18th-century American play, and "Old Zip Coon" of minstrel show fame to a well-known and thoroughly vicious (although perhaps unintentionally so) song called "All Coons Look Alike to Me" in 1896. In a word, the stereotype became more racist as the 19th century wore on. At first, in fact, it didn't refer especially to blacks. Social historian David Roediger explains its early origins:

A song like 'All Coons Look Alike to Me' could, quite simply, not have been written before 1848, because human coons were typically white until that point. It is true that Zip Coon and Raccoon strutted on early American stages, but the word coon referred to a white country person, to a sharpster or, in phrases like a pretty slick coon, to both.

To complicate matters, the eagerness of the Whig party to identify with rural white common people led it to adopt symbols like Davy Crockett's coonskin cap and, in the 'log cabin and hard cider' presidential campaign of 1840, to nail coonskins to supporters' cabin doors and to use live coons as signs of party loyalty. Thus Whigs also became 'coons, especially in the speech of Democrats, who cursed Whigs in 'coongress' and Whig 'coonventions', Whig 'coonism' and a lack of Whig 'coonsistency'. The Whigs, to New York City Democrats, were a "Federal Whig Coon Party' -- a slur that, though sometimes seen in historical writing as racist, probably had nothing to do with the Whigs' slightly greater tolerance for antislavery. Instead, the accusation was that Whigs were sly political manipulators, posturing in coonskin as friends of the common man. (80)

But ... but ... the context is important here. Roediger suggests the term "first emerge[d] as a racial slur" on the minstrel stage, probably from Old Zip Coon and "the many references to coon-hunting and eating coons in blackface songs" (80-81)

For an overview of the "coon" stereotype, especially in its later and more dehumanizing manifestations, see Ferris State University sociologist David Pilgrim's webpage "The Coon Stereotype" for the Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University.

Work(s) CitedRoediger, David R. Excerpt from The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. 1991. In The Nature of History Reader. Ed Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow. London: Routledge, 2004. Roediger is described as a "leftist historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign US who specialises in the history of labour, race relations and the South" (79).