Cracker (term)

For other uses, see Cracker.

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

Usage

The term "cracker" was and is used most frequently in the Southern U.S., especially in Georgia and Florida. Since the 1870s, a nickname for Georgia is "The Cracker State".

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, cracker culture is similar to redneck culture. [1]

"Cracker" has also been used as a proud or jocular self-description. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, "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. However, the term "white cracker" is not always used self-referentially and remains a racist term to many in the region.[2]

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 crackTemplate:Fn 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 ... that deafes 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).

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

Other possible origins of the term "cracker" are linked to early Florida cattle herders that traditionally used whips to herd wild Spanish cattle. The crack of the herders' whips could be heard for great distances and 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.

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. (Note that in British English "mean" is a term for poverty, not malice.) [3]

Examples of usage

Label depicting a barefoot boy eating peaches from a straw hat, clearly being referred to as a cracker

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

The October 27 1863 Battle of Brown's Ferry, in the American Civil War, opened the so-called "Cracker Line".[4] [5]

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.

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".

Popular culture

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

A puppet named "Colonel Crackie" played the stereotypical Southern gentleman in the children's television show Kukla, Fran and Ollie which aired on NBC from the late 1940s to the late 1950s.

Curtis Mayfield used 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 John Boorman's 1972 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.

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

In the 2000 film O Brother Where Art Thou?, the upper class white character "Pappy" O'Daniel, candidate for the Governor of Mississippi and sponsor 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."

When Florida State University first initiated its football team, the student body voted on the team name — the Florida State Seminoles was the winning name, while the second-place vote was the Florida State Crackers. [6]

In the television program Six Feet Under, when the main character David is eating with gay friends in episode "In the Game", he daydreams of proud gay black men, wearing tuxedos, being presented on stage in a fashion similar to beauty contestants. Within this row is himself, the only Caucasian, naked and terrified, wearing a sash labelled "Mr. White-Ass Cracker".[7]

Politics

The "Cracker Party" was a Georgia based political party, which dominated city politics in Augusta, Georgia for much of the 20th century. [8] [9]

In 1964, as Nation of Islam spokesman, Malcolm X gave a speech at a Harlem rally, and referred to some members of the U.S. Democratic Party as crackers.[10] [11] He claims in his autobiography that he told military examiners that he couldn´t wait to organize some black soldiers and get his hands on a gun so he could kill some crackers, thus making himself unsuitable`for the army.

In August 2006, California state Senator Don Perata referred to San Diego-area opponents of a bill allowing illegal immigrants to obtain drivers licenses as "crackers".[12].

References

• 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.

See also

• Hillbilly
• Honky
• Redneck
• List of ethnic slurs
• List of pejorative political slogans
• Trailer park trash
• White trash

External links

• The Story of Immokalee, Florida 1938 WPA interview covering founding, slave era, post-Civil War Reconstruction and up through Great Depression. Electronic record maintained by Library of Congress. Repeated non-derogatory use by white settler of the terms cracker and cracker house, (possibly as synonym for pioneer, in the sense of "cracking" area for white settlement.) Accessed January 15, 2007.
• Cracker – Entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Etymology of "cracker" by Professor Kim Pearson
• Florida Cracker Trail Association

Footnotes

• Template:FnbThe word "craic" was in itself, adopted into modern Irish Gaelic from the word crack.