my susy

Here is the historical content of the word "coon"


From the early minstrels. Around 1890, there began a spate of 'coon' songs where the people in question were black, later these shows became the black and white minstrel shows.

The American musical has one shameful chapter in its history minstrel shows. The most popular musical stage shows of the early and mid 19th Century, minstrelsy embodied racial hatred. Both white and black performers donned blackface, and audiences of all colors loved it. Hateful as their content was, minstrel shows were the first form of musical theatre that was 100% American-born and bred.

Minstrel shows developed in the 1840?s, peaked after the Civil War and remained popular into the early 1900s. Minstrelsy was a product of its time, the only entertainment form born out of blind bigotry. In these shows, white men blackened their faces with burnt cork to lampoon Negroes, performing songs and skits that sentimentalized the nightmare of slave life on Southern plantations. Blacks were shown as naive buffoons who sang and danced the days away, gobbling "chitlins," stealing the occasional watermelon, and expressing their inexplicable love for "ol' massuh." In the minstrel show white entertainers put on blackface and "imitated" or "caricatured" slaves in the South and ex-slaves in the North. The distinction is crucial. During Mark Twain's time most white commentary on minstrelsy (including Twain's own remarks for his autobiography) assume its accuracy, its essentially faithful imitation of African-American speech, singing and dancing. Since the Civil Rights Movement, on the other hand, nearly every commentator agrees that the minstrel show "coon" is a racist caricature.

“This old Southern term for blacks derives from the last syllable of the Portuguese 'barracoes' (o has a nasal n sound), the name of buildings that once housed African slaves.”

Panati's Browsers Book of Beginnings, copyright 1984, page 65.

Extract from 'I Hear America Talking' by Stuart Berg Flexner:

" 'Coon was originally a short form for raccoon in 1741... then by 1832 meant a frontier rustic (a white person from the country), and by 1840 a Whig. The 1834 song 'Zip Coon' (better known today as 'Turkey in the Straw') didn't refer specifically to either a White or a Black and the 'coon songs' of the 1840s and 50s were Whig political songs. By 1862, however, coon had come to mean a Black and this use was made very common by the popular 1896 song 'All Coons Look Alike to Me,' written by Ernest Hogan, a Black who didn't consider the word derogatory at the time."

The post that got me into drama

my bus ride on 10/21/10by Rose Angélica Arellano Ramos on Friday, October 22, 2010 at 9:21pm


outside of Mills I see a gas station, this is where I wait for the bus 57 to take me back to the yellow house. I sat there waiting impatiently (of course). a blunt wrapper, taco bell wrappers, a taco bell size small cup, an old gum package, a small empty bottle of jack daniels, brown leaves. It is officially fall in Oakland, CA.


when I ride the bus I think about race. this one time I rode the bus with a coon. It was a black stereotyped caricature made flesh. he stunk up the entire back seat of the bus. a black baggy t-shirt, baggy pants, dreads, cap and one big fat lip hung over like a seperate being. In his hand, he clutched a swisher sweet filled with pot. Self-medicating himself; he was a man in a coma. I wonder if he knew he embodied and played out the role made for him by the current elite. The entire time his head bobbed up and down as we went over potholes and up hills. His eyez down at the ground; glazed over. Life was hopeless and yes, he was a slave still. And so was I. We shared the same bus once and I never saw him again.

Today on the bus we are sardines. We passed by a middle school; beautiful little black girls with chemically straightened hair, probably not even teenagers yet. They laughed with each other, forgetting the burn on their scalps. And I wondered if they'd ever know that they embodied and played out the roles made for them by the current elite. I thought about good hair and white America. I thought about race as the people filled up the bus and all spilled out onto various streets. We passed the high school and it was the same girls laughing.

Next to me a woman was working towards a career in the jail system. She could see how fucked up the system is.


And then my stop comes and I walked home to the yellow house.

Gosh,
     What a good idea!!! After this test, I think I will.