coon

noun

1. (derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur)A black person.

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

2. (Southern-US, informal)A raccoon.

   “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?’”

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

   “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."”

verb

1. (Southern-US, colloquial)To hunt raccoons.
2. To traverse by crawling, as a ledge.
3. (Southern-US, colloquial)To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.

   “There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair.”

   “2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie.”

   ““Advertising” was one problem for frontier women. Another was having to “coon” across a fallen tree that had been felled and limbed to bridge a canyon or gully.”

4. (Georgia, colloquial)To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.
5. To play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.

   “Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters.”

   “If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning.”

   “From the classic toasts to the dirty dozens to the early blues⁵⁰ and now to gangsta rap lyrics—why not consider it all just a bunch of niggers cooning for the white man’s delight and dollars?”

   “Then the warrior appeared, in a manner that was dead serious as a heart attack wearing a baseball cap. Then came the sidekick, a jet black madman dancing, and almost cooning out of the shadows that cancelled him.”

6. (Southern-US, colloquial, dated)To steal.

   “Cooning water-melons [sic.] was a common custom, and young people would go out at night on such parties. To prevent any raids on our melon patch Grandfather set a trap alarm—which brought disaster.”

   “He kept on buying and selling horses, he said, sometimes paying for them in bogus, and sometimes cooning them. It was true he helped Malcolm Burnham break into Fred Able’s store”

   “In the summertime, at night, in addition to all the other things we did, some of us boys would slip out down the road, or across the pastures and go “cooning” watermelons.”

   “Tris and his gang loved to prowl around at night, “cooning melons,” as Speaker put it in a 1920 interview. By all accounts, young Master Speaker was a handful.”

name

1. A surname.