Coon—adjacent
"There is a difference between shelter and a mask. One keeps you alive. The other keeps you from living."
I write this as kin, not as cop. I write it because there is a bruise under our good suit, and it throbs loudest on Election Day. I write it because somewhere between the ballot line and the boardroom, between the choir robe and the corporate badge, we learned to mistake proximity for protection. I write this to those of us who would never say the slur, who would never paint blackface, and yet have built a life on the shadow of that caricature—call it coon—adjacent: not the outright performance, but a steady subscription to its logic.
Before the slur was a word, it was a market. Minstrelsy sold an entire country a cartoon: the buffoon, the happy servant, the pretentious free negro who aped refinement. "Zip Coon" swaggered in a tailcoat he wasn't allowed to own. The joke was simple: Black freedom is a costume; tear it and you'll find a clown. That joke purchased policies: chains, codes, covenants, a century of exits for white innocence. The minstrel stage became a legislature, then a zoning map, then a prison wing. What began in burnt cork ends in red ink and razor wire.
I know you didn't paint your face. You learned to scrub it. You learned to sharpen your vowels until an executive said, You're so articulate, and you pretended it didn't land like a brick. You learned to laugh at jokes that mistook us for a demographic problem. You voted with your job. You tithed to respectability and hoped it would pass down like a pension.
This is not a trial; it's an anatomy. Coon—adjacent is what happens when the house is on fire and the man with the bucket says, I'll help you if you sign this. The contract is never written as betrayal. It sounds like law and order, business-friendly, school choice, border security. It scans as neutral, adult. And yet the ledger it funds waits for your nephew at a traffic stop, your sister at the pharmacy counter, your neighbor at the polling station with a closed sign at 5 pm.
