Cracker (term)

Cracker (sometimes "white cracker") was originally a pejorative term for a white person, mainly used in the Southern United States, and still is in many instances. It has also, however, increasingly been used as a proud (or self-deprecating) term by some Southern whites—or American whites in general—in reference to themselves.

Usage

Label depicting a barefoot cracker boy eating peaches from a straw hat

The term "cracker" was and is used most frequently in the South, especially in Georgia and Florida. Since the 1870s a nickname for Georgia is "The Cracker State", which is displayed proudly with no hint of insult.

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 the northern United States, 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]

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. In the African American community, "cracker" is a disparaging term synonymous with whites. (The OED cites the 1830s origin of white trash as a word used by slaves on rich plantations to ridicule poor whites.)

Since 1900 "cracker" has become 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 disparaging term to many in the region.[1]

Etymology

There are various theories about 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 crack Template: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 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. Cattlemen of the state of Florida (and some native born Floridians) take pride in being called "crackers", "Florida Crackers", or "Cracker Cowboys". The Cracker culture included using the bullwhip as a form of communication between cattle drivers, using "Cracks" and pauses to send messages.

Other less likely theories include references to cracking a whip over oxen when driving 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. Another usage was that of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, to refer to "Virginia squatters" (illegal settlers) (p. 35).

Examples of usage

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

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

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, 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."

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 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 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. (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 2000 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 term in his performances.

Hip hop group Dead Prez are known for using the term "cracker" in their lyrics when referring to a white person. For instance, "I'm down for runnin' up on them crackers in their city hall" in the song 'Hip hop'.

Politics

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

The Democratic Party political machine that dominated city politics in Augusta, Georgia for most of the 20th century was known as "The Cracker Party."

Greg Palast used the expression "good ol' boy cracker-crats of the Republican party" to describe Georgia Democrats, in a blog entry on the official 2006 campaign website of Cynthia McKinney. An Alleged Blow for Us All

References

Roger Lyle Brown. Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture Festivals in the American South (1997).
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).
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.
Burke, Karanja. "Cracker."

External links

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.