re: Is the term coonass offensive?

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wish my grandparents were still around to explain why, but back when they were kids and my great grandparents were alive, it used to be used like the "N" word towards Cajun french people.

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Despite the insistence that the term has nothing to do with raccoons, it is not unlikely that “coonass” evolved simply as an expression of the doubly racist notion that Cajuns were even lower on the social scale than “coons,” a disparaging term for African Americans. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for the name of an animal to be used as a disparaging name for an ethnic group stereotypically known for eating that food. This is why the English call the French “frogs,” just as the French sometimes refer to the English as “les rosbifs” (roast beefs). African Americans and Cajuns alike have been known to eat, among many other things, raccoons, and “coonie” has also been used to refer to Cajuns. In fact, several versions of the “coonass” license plates and bumper stickers have included a rather graphic illustration of the animal and anatomy in question.

There are several more or less obtuse and convoluted theories concerning the etymology of this expression which did indeed have a certain amount of currency in the recent past. (One, having to do with the notion that Cajuns wore coonskin caps during the War of 1812, is way off-base for several reasons: frontiersmen from many places wore coonskin caps; and the term was not widely heard until the 1940s or ‘50s.) Some have used it as a term of endearment, even as an expression of cultural and ethnic pride in an attempt, I suspect, to take the sting out of what was once undeniably intended to be and taken as an insult, much in the same way that some African Americans use the racist epithet “ni99er” among themselves to try to disarm that hurtful word. As James Dormon explains in his book, The People Called Cajuns: An Introduction to an Ethnohistory (Lafayette: USL Center for Louisiana Studies, 1983; p. 87):

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