That's not racial, it's cultural and it's accurate
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Posted On: 11/22/2019 10:45:21 AM
That's not racial, it's cultural and it's accurate
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.)
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/...n-crackers
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.)
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/...n-crackers
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