The only time I can ever remember hearing “spook” used in the racist sense was in the 1973 British hit song Brother Louie by the band Hot Chocolate. (I believe another band had a hit with the same song in the U.S.A., but the Hot Chocolate version was the original.) This is actually an anti-racist song about a mixed race couple who encounter prejudice from both the black and white parents. “Spook” occurs in a spoken passage which is supposed to be Louie’s farther objecting to his marrying a black girl. I remember being struck by the word because I had never heard it used in that sense before. There is an equivalent spoken passage earlier in the song where the black father of the girl refers to her white boyfriend Louie as a “honky.”
Hot Chocolate were mostly black with, I think, one or two white members (the line-up varied over the years). Anyway, certainly the leader, singer and songwriter Errol Brown was a Jamaican born black man, and, probably most of the other band members were immigrants or children of immigrants into Britain from the West Indies (as were nearly all black people in Britain at that time). In the light of that, I wonder if “spook” was originally a West Indian term, perhaps used by white West Indians to denigrate their black compatriots.
With regard to "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo," I also grew up with the racist version in England in the 1950s and 60s. I was quite surprised to hear the "tiger" version when it was used by my children in 1990s America, and had to suppress an urge to correct them. Certainly when I was a kid I had no idea what it meant, it just seemed like a nonsense rhyme really. (I can remember being puzzled about what "hollers" meant too - it is not at all common in British English, and suggests an American origin for the rhyme.) I doubt whether any of the other kids who I knew who used it ever gave any thought to its racial meaning either. Indeed, I am pretty sure that if my parents had realized the rhyme was racist (or "racialist" as people said then) they would have objected to it. They were strongly against racism in principle, although in practice the issue did not arise, because there were virtually no non-white around in the area where we lived. (It is quite different now, of course.) Of course there were lots of things in British culture at the time - golliwogs, the Black and White Minstrel Show on TV - that in retrospect were horribly racist, but for most of us were really quite innocent at the time, if only because most of us never knew any black people to be prejudiced against. It never even occurred to me that the golliwog toy I had as a child represented a black person, even after I came to know that "wog" was a nasty racist epithet.
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**CurtC**
I thought that the "tiger" version was a new, politically correct substitution. I only found out that the "tiger" version is actually older, in the last couple of years, right here on this message board.
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I certainly thought the same thing? Do you have cite for the "tiger" version being the original? Frankly it sounds implausible. (After all, although it seems quite possible that some plantation dwelling child might think of grabbing a slave child by the toe, who would ever do that with a tiger?) [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe) seems to want to treat the "tiger" version as canonical, but it does not give a clear account of its origin or earliest occurrence, and it dates the "n......" version back to 1888.
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[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe)
From Rudyard Kipling's "A Counting-Out Song", from "Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides," published in 1923:
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee, Mo!
Catch a nigger by the toe!
If he hollers let him go!
Eenee, Meenee. Mainee, Mo!
You-are-It!
Kipling's version is similar to the most commonly reported version of the rhyme among American schoolchildren in 1888.[3] Kipling's version was the most commonly recited version in in the United States and Canada until as late as the early 1970s when even school aged children became aware of the political incorrectness of the poorly-aged wording. The word "tiger" soon became the standard, as parents were quick to correct their children not to use the "N" word.
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If you look at the Wiki page, there is a cite for the 1888 date. It sort of implies earlier in the article that "tiger" goes back to 1855, but it is not made very clear and there is no cite.
[The version I remember using was like Kipling's except that I doubt whether we would have used his spelling, and we did not have the final line. As we used it, you were chosen on the final "Mo."]
