General Discussions

[LP]

Been a bit of a silly affair the whole thing really, my wife has a friend whose surname is Coon and she has copped a fair bit of abuse online and even in some business areas since this whole Coon cheese fiasco started and was even contemplating using her maiden name in some circumstances so her kids didnt get bullied.
If its going to be banned and condemned  in commercial life as a word then it probably needs to be banned in public life because it is a legitimate surname and those folk with it should be allowed to change it at no expense to themselves on birth records, legal documents etc if its causing grief to them...

It's so arbitrary, even in the US the name Coon is still used on some brands in various states because it's accepted as an abbreviation referring to Raccoon, which makes the loss of jobs here even worse, stupidly worse.

The whole issue blew up here because a small group used the name controversy on social media to garner support on US based human rights groups,  claiming they were oppressed and abused here in Australia and using the Coon brand name as proof of vilification, they did this only after the Canadians had bought the business not before. Now people are losing their jobs!

The irony is many of the people losing jobs are in regional areas, a large portion of the workforce identify as indigenous!

We keep hearing arguments for not changing something to make things more inclusive, it's just a name, it's just a piece of paper, it's just an old / obsolete law, but it always has real world consequences, and often the "just a crowd" pretty much feck off into the mist after all the damage is done!

I bet in relation to this Coon / Cheers issue, somewhere sometime today or in coming weeks, there will be somebody claiming the lost jobs and redundancies are proof of institutionalised racism, because indigenous people are adversely affected. It may have even already happened.

It's always somebody else's fault!