zip-coonhttp://www.oed.com/dictionary/zip-coon_n%3Ftab%3Dmeaning_and_usezip coon, n.
First published 2021

zip coonnoun

U.S. offensive (now chiefly historical).
  1. 1833–
    (The name of) a stock character in minstrel songs and performances portraying a black man represented as a self-important buffoon who is excessively concerned with appearing fashionable, or who overestimates his intelligence or status; (hence a derogatory name for) a black man characterized in this manner.
    The character of Zip Coon (performed by white actors in blackface) is often portrayed as imitating the behaviour and attitudes of white people, with whom he is unfavourably compared.
    For a similarly derogatory portrayal of black men originating in a similar context, see Jim Crow n.1 A.1b.
    In quot. 18331 as a pseudonym used to sign a letter on the subject of the abolition of slavery in the South.
    1. 1833
      Zip Coon.
      Georgia Tel. (Macon) 31 July
    2. 1833
      Jim Crow has a rival at the south, in the person of one Zip Coon.
      Boston Morning Post 31 October
    3. 1834
      O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler, Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler.
      Zip Coon (sheet music)
    4. 1847
      The custom of calling..colored men Sambo and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are lords of all.
      E. C. Stanton, Letter 1 May in E. Stanton revealed in Letters (1922) vol. II. 16
    5. 1850
      Do these precious moralists pretend that the appeals for purity, freedom, and temperance, by Lucretia Mott, Dr. Elder, Charles Burleigh, and Henry Wright are clearly immoral, while Jim Crow dances and Zip Coon songs and brandy-bibbing plays are unexceptionably moral?
      Liberator (Boston) 12 July 110/1
    6. 1884
      The Journal as usual blows off on the subject of the tariff, a subject it knows as much about as the famous ‘Sip Coon’.
      Fort Wayne (Indiana) Daily Gazette 15 May 4/1
    7. 1975
      A swaggering, cigar smoking Zip Coon is punched ‘precisely on the middle brass stud which confined his frilled shirt bosom’ by a white man to whom he has refused to yield the sidewalk.
      S. A. Hirsch, Uncle Tom's Companion (D.A. diss., State Univ. N.Y. Albany) 27
    8. 2015
      It wasn't so much the racist ridicule as the lack of imagination that I found insulting. Where were the zip coons? The hep cats? The mammies?
      P. Beatty, Sellout xxii. 246

zip coon, n. was first published in March 2021.

zip coon, n. was last modified in September 2024.