The secret history of the word "Cracker"
By me The People Perspectives
Jelani Cobb, a historian at the University of Connecticut and a contributor to The New Yorker, wrote about the etymology of some anti-white slurs: peckerwood, Miss Anne and Mister Charlie, and buckra, a term that was once widely used throughout the black diaspora, in the Americas, the Caribbean and in West Africa.
"Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults was first noted in the mid 18th century, making it older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip (not to mention the other brutal arenas where those skills were employed.) Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition, (in some instances, was used in reference to bandits and other lawless folk.)
But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least. "The meaning of the word has changed a lot over the last four centuries," said Dana Ste. Claire, a Florida historian and anthropologist who studies crackers
Ste. Claire noted Shakespeare's King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator.
"What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"
"It's a beautiful quote, but it was a character trait that was used to describe a group of Celtic immigrants — Scots-Irish people who came to the Americas who were running from political circumstances in the old world," Ste. Claire said. Those Scots-Irish folks started settling the Carolinas, and later moved deeper South and into Florida and Georgia.
But the disparaging term followed these immigrants, who were thought by local officials to be unruly and ill-mannered. Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks. But he wasn't sure how it happened.
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| "The Georgia "cracker" is eminently shiftless; he seems to fancy that he was born with his hands in his pockets, his back curved, and his slouch hat crowded over his eyes, and does his best to maintain this attitude forever. Quarrels, as among the lower classes generally throughout the South, grow into feuds, cherished for years, until some day, at the cross-roads, or the country tavern, a pistol or a knife puts a bloody and often a fatal end to the difficulty. |
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| A "cracker cowboy" with his Florida Cracker Horse and dog by Frederick Remington, 1895A "cracker cowboy" with his Florida Cracker Horse and dog by Frederick Remington, 1895 |
References:
Cracker
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761/word-watch-on-crackers
http://upf.com/book.asp?id=CLAIRS05
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/john/full.html
https://www.npr.org/people/182264497/gene-demby
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remington_A_cracker_cowboy.jpg#/media/File:Remington_A_cracker_cowboy.jpg
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