Is “Hip! Hip! Hooray!” racist?

I was reading an article “7 Racist Slurs Which You Should Drop From Your Vocabulary” that is gaining a bit of traction on Medium of late. Obviously, something in list form is going to grab my attention and I don’t want to accidentally make a fool of myself while simultaneously hurting those around me.

In the article, it is claimed that “Hip! Hip!” originates from the 1819 “Hep-Hep” riots in Germany. They were heinous pogroms in which Jews were killed, while the rioters yelled “Hep-Hep”.

Something didn’t feel quite right about that one, so I decided to look into it, and SPOILER: this claim is almost certainly false. There are multiple, well-documented examples of its use prior to 1819.

The earliest I could find on Google Books was The Life of Pill Garlick, written by Edmond Temple and published in London in 1813. “The first toast “Success to Pill Garlick lick and his saucy crew,” was drank with nine times nine, hip! hip! hip! and a hoora! The tumult was excessive”

Example from 1813 of how “Hip! Hip! Hooray!” clearly had origins prior to the Hep-Hep riots of 1819.

This is just one of many examples of its usage outlined in Peter Jensen Brown’s detailed blog on the topic. I also found other good discussions around this topic on English Stack Exchange and on WordOrigins.org.

We all need to be careful about throwing around false recounts of history, as it has the dual negative effects of making people feel bad about purely innocent activities while also detracting from some of the real ways in which our language probably could do with a shakeup.

And you, poor reader, have fallen prey to Betteridge’s law of headlines which states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Is “Hip! Hip! Hooray!” racist? No.