I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently it was briefly used as a racial slur?
etymonline.com says:
The derogatory racial sense of “black person” is attested from 1945, perhaps from the notion of dark skin being difficult to see at night. Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute during World War II called themselves the Spookwaffe.
Yeah and there is the target lawsuit and stuff as well.
The word spook hasn’t just gotten fictional people in trouble. In 2010, Target apologized for selling a Halloween toy called “Spook Drop Parachuters” — literally miniature black figurines with orange parachutes. And in 2018, an elementary school in North Carolina came under fire when a student came home with “spook” and “gook” ― an offensive term to people of East and Southeast Asian descent ― on his list of vocabulary words to memorize.
I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently it was briefly used as a racial slur? etymonline.com says:
Yeah and there is the target lawsuit and stuff as well.
The word spook hasn’t just gotten fictional people in trouble. In 2010, Target apologized for selling a Halloween toy called “Spook Drop Parachuters” — literally miniature black figurines with orange parachutes. And in 2018, an elementary school in North Carolina came under fire when a student came home with “spook” and “gook” ― an offensive term to people of East and Southeast Asian descent ― on his list of vocabulary words to memorize.