AD FOR COON CARDS Souvenir Post Cards Chattanooga Daily Times Tennessee 1905

Coon cards were anti-Black, racist picture postcards and greeting cards sold in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. ''Coon'' was short for raccoon, an American mammal; ''coon'' was a commonly used derogatory term for African-Americans. Especially after the turn-of-the-century, "the postcard was wildly successful both as correspondence and collectible" and are thus postcards are valuable sources for cultural historians as both a form of

epistolary literature An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered ...

and for the bank of cultural imagery included in the postcard illustrations reflecting historic popular culture norms and tropes. Coon cards were produced by white manufacturers for white customers and depicted an array of African Americans stereotypes common to the popular media of the day. The caricature was part of the popular appeal of the postcards as "image content was clearly driven by free market forces, rather than the intention to present an accurate depiction of people, places, or things." For example, children were typically depicted as

pickaninnies Pickaninny (also picaninny, piccaninny or pickinninie) is a pidgin word for a small child, possibly derived from the Portuguese ('boy, child, very small, tiny'). In North America, ''pickaninny'' is a racial slur for African American childr ...

eating watermelon or being used as

alligator bait Depicting African-American children as alligator bait was a common trope in American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. The motif was present in a wide array of media, including newspaper reports, songs, sheet music, and visual ar ...

. African American adults were depicted as intellectually and morally inferior to whites and were associated with cakewalking,

fried chicken Fried chicken, also known as Southern fried chicken, is a dish consisting of chicken pieces that have been coated with seasoned flour or batter and pan-fried, deep fried, pressure fried, or air fried. The breading adds a crisp coating or ...

, watermelon, cotton, lack of conscientiousness, laziness, ribaldry, sexual promiscuity, domestic violence, gambling, alcoholism, cannibalism, and farts. Coon cards—which were representative of general racial attitudes of the era and conveyed and perpetuated ideas about "appearance, behavior, and overall identity"—depict Black people as "subhuman, ape-like beasts." African Americans were depicted with "protruding jaws and chins" that aligned their low status in a pseudoscientific racial hierarchy outlined by

Pieter Camper Petrus Camper FRS (11 May 1722 – 7 April 1789), was a Dutch physician, anatomist, physiologist, midwife, zoologist, anthropologist, palaeontologist and a naturalist in the Age of Enlightenment. He was one of the first to take an interest in ...

et al References Notes References Further reading

* * {{Latin phrases Lists of Latin phrases, E ...

. Bug eyes,

pigeon toe Columbidae () is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. They primaril ...

s, elongated limbs, and enlarged extremities contributed to the "simianizing" of Black people in postcard images of the coon card era. These images benefited whites as well as harming Black people by promoting a sense of in-group solidarity among whites and social superiority to an "othered" out-group. Coon cards were used by whites to send routine "holiday greetings, exchanges of neighborhood gossip, expressions of concern for bed-ridden loved ones, and declarations of familial and romantic love." Coon cards are now considered collectible

ephemera Ephemera are transitory creations which are not meant to be retained or preserved. Its etymological origins extends to Ancient Greece, with the common definition of the word being: "the minor transient documents of everyday life". Ambiguous in ...

and a useful tool for studying the

history of racism in the United States History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

. Coon cards are distinct from, but related to, the equally collectible genre of Black postcards, which are postcards produced by and for the African-American community.

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Johns Hopkins University African-American real photo postcard collection
History of postcards in the United States Stereotypes of African Americans Anti-black racism in the United States Postcards Greeting cards

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