Cracker (pejorative)

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For other uses, see Cracker.

"Cracker", sometimes "white cracker", is a pejorative term for a white person, mainly used in the Southern United States, but in recent decades it has entered common usage throughout North America.

[edit] Etymology

There are various theories concerning the origin of the term "cracker".

The term "cracker" was in use during Elizabethan times to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack1 meaning "entertaining conversation" (One may be said to "crack" a joke); this term and the alternate spelling "craic" are still in use in Ireland and Scotland. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"

By the 1760s, this term was in use by the English in the British North American colonies to refer to Scots-Irish settlers in the south. A letter to the Earl of Dartmouth reads: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode". A similar usage was that of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, to refer to "Virginia squatters" (illegal settlers) (p. 35).

Spaniards in Florida called them “Quáqueros,” a corruption of the English word “Quaker,” which the Spanish used to contemptuously refer to any Protestant. [1]

Other possible origins of the term "cracker" are linked to early Florida cattle herders (Florida crackers) that traditionally used whips to herd wild Spanish cattle. These cowboys were distinct from the Spanish vaqueros of Florida. The crack of the herders' whips could be heard for great distances when they were used to round cattle in pens and to keep the cows on a given track. Also, "cracker" has historically been used to refer to those engaged in the low paying job of cracking pecans and other nuts in Georgia and throughout the southeast U.S.

One theory claims that the term dates back to slavery in the antebellum South. The popular folk etymology is based on slaver foremen using bullwhips to discipline African and African American slaves, and the sound the whip being described as 'cracking the whip'. The foremen who cracked these whips were thus known as 'crackers'. [1][2][3]

According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "cracker" is a term of contempt for the "poor" or "mean whites," particularly of Georgia and Florida. Britannica notes that the term dates back to the American Revolution, and is derived from the "cracked corn" which formed their staple food. [2] (Note that in British English "mean" is also a term for poverty, with no malice implied.)

Historically the word suggested poor, white rural Americans with little formal education. Historians point out the term originally referred to the strong Scots-Irish of the back country (as opposed to the English of the seacoast). Thus a sociologist reported in 1926: "As the plantations expanded these freed men (formerly bond servants) were pushed further and further back upon the more and more sterile soil. They became 'pinelanders', 'corn-crackers', or 'crackers'." [Kephard Highlanders]

[edit] Examples of historical usage

Peach label depicting a cracker boy with peaches
Peach label depicting a cracker boy with peaches

Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that some crackers "owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated." [4]

In 1947, the student body of Florida State University voted for the name of their current athletic symbol of "Seminoles," out of more than 100 choices. The other finalists, in order of finish, included Crackers, Statesmen, Tarpons and Fighting Warriors.

The October 27, 1863 Battle of Brown's Ferry, in the American Civil War, opened the so-called "Cracker Line".[3] [4]

Crackin' Good Snacks (a division of Winn-Dixie, a Southern grocery chain) has sold crackers similar to Ritz crackers under the name "Georgia Crackers". They sometimes came in a red tin with a picture of The Crescent, an antebellum plantation house in Valdosta, Georgia.

"Cracker" has also been used as a proud or jocular self-description. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, "cracker" was 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. However, the term "white cracker" is not always used self-referentially and remains a racist term to many in the region.[5]

Before the Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta, Georgia, 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. However, it is suggested the name was derived from players "cracking" the baseball bat and this origin makes sense when considering the Atlanta Negro League Baseball team was known as the "Atlanta Black Crackers".

The Florida Cracker Trail is a route which cuts across southern Florida, following the historic trail of the old cattle drives.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Smitherman, Dr. Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. Houghton Mifflin Books, pp. 100. 
  2. ^ Herbst, Philip H. The Color of Words: An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States. Intercultural Press, pp. 61. 
  3. ^ Major, Clarence (1994). Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. Puffin Books. ISBN 014051306X. 
  4. ^ Olmsted, Frederick Law (1856). Our Slave States. Dix & Edwards, pp. 454. 
  • Roger Lyle Brown. Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture Festivals in the American South (1997).
  • Burke, Karanja. "Cracker".
  • Cassidy, Frederic G. Dictionary of American Regional English. Harvard University Press, Vol. I, 1985: 825-26.
  • "De Graffenried, Clare. "The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills." Century 41 (February 1891): 483—98.
  • George Gillett Keen and Sarah Pamela Williams. Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sarah Pamela Williams edited by James M Denham and Canter Brown. U of South Carolina Press 2000/
  • Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988).
  • Grady McWhiney. Confederate Crackers and Cavaliers. (Abilene, Tex.: McWhiney Foundation Press, c. 2002. Pp. 312. ISBN 1-893114-27-9, collected essays
  • John Solomon Otto, "Cracker: The History of a Southeastern Ethnic, Economic, and Racial Epithet," Names' 35 (1987): 28-39.
  • Frank L. Owsley. Plain Folk of the Old South (1949)
  • Delma E. Presley, "The Crackers of Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly 60 (summer 1976): 102-16.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  • Note 1: The word "craic" was itself adopted into modern Irish Gaelic from the word crack.