pickCherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice‘s wonderful cultural history of raccoons joins 99 others in the growing Reaktion series, all of which focus on a single species. It‘s well-researched & lavishly illustrated—but in the extensive chapter on etymology, the author has avoided including violent & degrading imagery that exemplifies the racist “coon” stereotype. My big takeaway is the reason raccoons are thriving: neophilia. They love new things.
Given that the English word raccoon comes to us directly from the Powhatan arakun, the inclusion of Meeko the raccoon as a sidekick is one of the few legitimate nods to historical accuracy in Disney‘s Pocahontas. […](Pocahontas was a child when she briefly met Smith, she was later kidnapped by the English & subjected to sexual abuse, the English killed her Powhatan husband & her ‘marriage‘ to Rolfe was anything but consensual.)
We so often expect an animal to behave like a docile little human in a fur coat, and such expectations are rife with dangers for both species, although raccoons obviously get the worst of it.
it‘s really, really important to me that Rocket Raccoon … is not a cartoon character, it‘s not Bugs Bunny in the middle of The Avengers, it‘s a real, little, somewhat mangled beast that‘s alone. There‘s no one else in the universe quite like him, he‘s been created by these guys to be a mean-ass fighting machine.
—Director James Gunn
(Internet image … baby Groot… 😍)
The heaviest raccoon on record was a domesticated northern raccoon named Bandit, who weighed an astonishing 34 kg (75 lb) when he died in Pennsylvania in 2004.
Even their physical characteristics seem designed to polarize: one observer sees adorable impishness in the black facial pelage, banded tail and hunched back, whereas a less generous viewer sees a masked cartoon criminal sneaking around in a striped prison uniform.
Raccoon | 
