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Cracker (term)

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"White cracker" or simply "cracker" was originally a pejorative term for a white person, mainly used in the Southern United States. In recent years (as of 2006), the term has gained some currency as a proud or jocular self-description. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, the term "Cracker" is now used informally by some white residents of Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations. (The term "White Cracker" is usually not used self referentially and remains a slur.) Usage of the term "Cracker" generally differs from Hick and Hillbilly, because Crackers reject or resist assimilation into the dominant culture, while Hicks and Hillbillies theoretically are isolated from the dominant culture. In this way, the Cracker is similar to the Redneck.

As an insult, cracker was and is used most frequently in the South, especially in Georgia and Florida. It is invoked typically against poor, white Americans without formal education and of rural backgrounds.

However, today the term is commonly used as a racial epithet against white people throughout the US, regardless of socio-economic status, ethnicity or geographic origins.

Etymology

There are various theories about the origin of the term "cracker." The term has been traced to the 1760s, when it was used by the Earl of Dartmouth to refer to frontiersmen who were "great boasters." It may be derived from the Gaelic "craic," meaning "entertaining conversation."

A folk etymology claims the term cracker originated from piney-woods Georgia and Florida pastoral yeomen's use of whips to drive cattle. The word then came to be associated with the cattlemen of Georgia and Florida.

Other theories include references to cracking a whip over oxen when driving cotton to market, the 18th century practice of cracking corn to make liquor, or to poor whites having had to crack their grain because they couldn't afford to take it to the local mill to have it ground. Others suggest that "cracker" derives from the white overseers who cracked the whip to intimidate black slaves. There may also be another possible origin - the first residents of Georgia were British convicts. In this setting the word takes on an illegal or criminal context. The term was used by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species to refer to "Virginia squatters" (illegal settlers).

Politics

The Florida Cracker Trail is a route posted across southern Florida by the Florida Department of Transportation.

On August 20, 2000, Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge reported that Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager, called George W. Bush a "white cracker" while talking to New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

In recent years, members of the American Left from the West Coast and New England have taken to calling Christian Conservatives as "Crackers" presumably as some sort of insult.

Pop culture

When used in pop culture, the term "white cracker" or "cracker" is sometimes intended to be humorous, though the distinction is not always clear.

The rustic lives of crackers were the topic of the novels of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Before the Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta, the Atlanta minor league baseball team was known as the "Atlanta Crackers." The team existed under this name from 1901 until 1965. They were members of the Southern Association from their inception until 1961, and members of the International League from 1961 until they were moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1965. Ironically, an Atlanta team in Negro League Baseball was known as the "Atlanta Black Crackers."

Curtis Mayfield uses the word "crackers" twice in his cautionary anti-racist anthem "If There's A Hell Below (We're All Going To Go)" - once in the opening spoken introduction ("Niggers, whiteys, jews, crackers/If there's a hell below...") and once in the first verse ("Blacks and the crackers, police and their backers.")

In the John Boorman film Deliverance, Lewis, played by Burt Reynolds, derisively refers to the rural people they encounter as being "crackers," implying that they were slow-witted hillbillies who lived in a world much different from that of him and his friends from a southern city. (However, a northerner would be just as likely to call Lewis/Reynolds a cracker.)

In the 1984 movie "Tank" starring James Garner, the white, southern sheriff was derisively referred to as a "cracker" multiple times.

An example is found in the popular American satirical cartoon television series South Park. One episode features the character "Chef" (who is black) planning to get married. The white children from the grade school where he works as a cook are at his home, waiting to see him to warn him off the marriage. While they wait on the sofa, Chef's elderly black father, as he is telling them a long-winded story about the Loch Ness Monster, refers to them as "little crackers" - something that Chef affectionately addresses the show's main young characters as in the show's first episode. Chef also refers to many people in South Park as "crackers" in several other episodes.

In the film O Brother Where Art Thou?, the upper class white character "Pappy" O'Daniel, candidate for the Governor of Mississippi and host of the radio show "Flour Hour", meets a lower class and uneducated white character as he arrives at the radio station for his program. Pappy is told that he can make $10 for singing into a can inside, whereupon he snaps, "I'm not here to make a record, you dumb cracker."

Musician Matthew Shafer uses the stage name Uncle Kracker (the second word being an obvious, and clearly intentional, misspelling of "cracker"). Stand-up comedian Chris Rock frequently uses this racist term on his performances.

See also

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