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COON ALERT HOME PAGE MESSAGE BOARD

12/27/07 Coon Alert: Cooning on the Job

Black professionals are often taught that tapdancing subservience and a renunciation of one’s blackness are required in order to maintain a sense of professionalism in a white workplace. The possibility of alienating co-workers or even being fired is enough to convince many to wear a mask for eight hours a day, five days a week.

As a receptionist, Tameka Jackson becomes as upbeat as a varsity cheerleader while serving coffee to white visitors, yet routinely ignores the black mailmen and mailwomen when they make afternoon dropoffs. In the senate, Barack Obama calls the 50 rounds fired by police in the Sean Bell shooting excessive, but stops shy of using his leadership as a platform to discuss police brutality in the African American community. Neither Ms. Jackson nor Mr. Obama is as guilty of cooning as, say, La Shawn Barber; they are both doing what they must to survive. But there is another way.

The most practiced alternative to wearing the mask is tokenism. In How to Rent a Negro, author Damali Ayo satirizes blacks in the workplace who allow curious whites to make commodities of their hairstyles, musical tastes, and slang. The token’s display of blackness—be it by design or not—caters to the amusement of whites.

Some would argue that a line between blackness and professionalism has to be drawn somewhere, but to do so is to suggest that one is incompatible with the other. Ultimately, choosing to either mask one’s blackness or participate in its exploitation offers no more variety than an election between George Bush and Satan.

Black professionals must police themselves. Masking and tokenism are two sides belonging to the same coin of coonery. Professionalism does not and should not necessitate self-effacement. Ask yourself: "Am I cooning on the job?"

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