It can be used all day long between white people, the word cracker. It could be comparable to two African Americans, or blacks using the N word between them. For example I could say, “yo my cracker ass cracker, what are you doing?” As soon as a black person uses the word to describe a white person it becomes derogatory. Not knowing I believe is the worst thing of all, because I thought the word came from slave or land owners around the 1800`s. When land owners or slave traders would travel from house to house say in North Carolina they would use wagons pulled by horses. This could be best described as a scene out of the movie “Django.” Cracker is the man or men on top of the carriage of would carry the whip and crack it on the slave who was last in line to hurry them up. It could be as many as a hundred people traveling from one plantation to another.
Most people like you and I hear the word cracker and think of Saltines or maybe Ritz something to put peanut butter or cheese on. These are name brand crackers we can put in soup. Cracker could be best described as one who breaks into a locked computer or network system. I`m personally researching the word as a more racial slur for poor white people, sometimes it`s used in natural context or conversations between two whites or more. The actual and factual meaning comes from around 1783. The use of “crackers” specifies men who are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his memoirs (1790) crackers are equal to people that are wild and as savage as the Indians who would inhabit the “desert[ed] woods and mountains.” “The Ballet or the Bullet,” speech that Malcolm X gave in 1964 used the word cracker directly as a derogatory term and I quote, “It`s time for you and me to stop sitting in this country letting some cracker senators, Northerner crackers and Southern crackers, sit there in Washington D.C., and come to a conclusion in their mind that you and I are supposed to have civil rights. There`s no white man going to tell me anything about my rights.” Also on November 29th 1993 a speech given at Kean College in New Jersey, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, a spokesman for the Nation of Islam called the Pope John Paul the II ” a no good cracker.” The point is I could go on referencing this word and how a black or Africa American man used it as a derogatory slur or racial slur. If you are not talking about the food it is just as bad as a white man using the N word and I`m not talking about ninjas.
So in conclusion I feel that if you knew better, you would do better. It`s very important to inform, because I do not believe the saying “ignorance is bliss.” I one hundred percent disagree. Having to do with white Northerners and white Southerners, the word resonates the same with the two, no matter what the financial background is. The word cracker is a sharp racial insult period anywhere you go in the United States. This term may not carry the same weight in other countries, but being someone that has been raised as an American it`s not okay to say. I don`t know why some whites use this term when amongst other whites.
Michael Bachalo 