Meaning of Coon | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A black person.
   derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur
2. A surname.
3. A raccoon.
   Southern-US, informal
4. a black race traitor.
   derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur
5. A member of a colorfully dressed dance troupe in Cape Town during New Year celebrations.
   South-Africa, informal
6. A coonass; a white Acadian French person who lives in the swamps.
   Southern-US, ethnic, slur
7. A sly fellow.
   US, dated
8. A black person who "plays the coon"; that is, who plays the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

Equivalents

Examples

“And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon! Who let all this riff-raff into the room?”

“1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter IX. "The Sea and the Desert", page 187. He also said that minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no squirrels.”

“How about a glen bong for you and your 'coon?”

“‘Listen, Mr Du Toit,’ he said at last, in an obvious effort to sound light-hearted. ‘Why go to all this trouble for the sake of a bloody coon?’”

“This is especially true when your audience has such high expectations of your playing the coon, and thus providing symbolic assurance that a darker people are contained in their assigned social "place" as "subpersons."”

CEFR level