origin of slang term cracker/cracka

[cheka.]

i heard that it comes from the crack of a whip - so white master cracking the whip = cracker

any ebonic experts on here to verify?

[madfranks]

I always figured it was because saltine crackers are white. I've never heard the "whip cracker" theory, but I wouldn't think that would be why. It's supposed to be a derogatory term, and "whip cracker" doesn't sound too derogatory to me.

[cheka.]

I always figured it was because saltine crackers are white. I've never heard the "whip cracker" theory, but I wouldn't think that would be why. It's supposed to be a derogatory term, and "whip cracker" doesn't sound too derogatory to me.

i thought same. but being called a saltine doesnt do it either

[crimethink]

Supposedly, it is actually an ethnic epithet used originally against poor Englishmen, then, especially, Irishmen or Scotsmen, who were regarded by the "gentlemen" English as wild "loud-mouths" - craicers, morphing into "cracker" later. Hence, it is the equivalent of "Nigger" for Celtic folks. Most Southerners are part-Scot or part-Scots-Irish.

The root for the phrase "crack" a joke is identical.

Ben Franklin used the term in his Memoirs*, disparagingly against White immigrants "as wild and savage as the Indians." Basically, the context means he was using it in the worst sense of "hillbilly."

An Englishman, always considering themselves superior to Celts, wrote to the "Earl of Dartmouth" in the late 18th century: "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."




* https://books.google.com/books?id=qp9WAAAAcAAJ&q=cracker#v=snippet&q=cracker&f=false

[ximmy]

Found this ...Interesting.
The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker'


July 1, 20132:09 PM ET


As you might have gathered from our blog's title, the Code Switch team is kind of obsessed with the ways we speak to each other. Every Monday in "Word Watch," we'll dig into language that tells us something about the way race is lived in America today. (Interested in contributing? Holler at this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sv8Q6NPWWolBKClfASONBDJtErBb4YhMrkXcq23IM80/viewform).)

Last week, Rachel Jeantel took the stand in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin after an altercation. Jeantel was on the phone with Martin moments before the fateful encounter.
Jeantel said that Martin told her that a "creepy-ass cracker" was following him. She told Don West, George Zimmerman's attorney, that she didn't think the phrase was racist; West argued that it was.

Hold up a second. Cracker? In 2013? It struck my ears as dated, like ofay or honky, the kind of slur an old head like Richard Pryor might have uttered. Jeantel and Martin, of course, were millennials. Could cracker be a regional thing?
I asked Jelani Cobb, a historian at the University of Connecticut and a contributor to The New Yorker, if he might know. (Full disclosure: Cobb is a friend.) He'd written 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, er, crackers. (He literally wrote the book on them (http://upf.com/book.asp?id=CLAIRS05).)
Ste. Claire pointed me to King John (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/john/full.html), 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.

"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."

more at link: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761/word-watch-on-crackers

[Tumbleweed]

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.

"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."





Florida "Crackers".


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTMqrF4j7io

[crimethink]

Niggers can call me a "cracker" and I will laugh. But call them a Nigger and they will likely attack you.