Does that even count? Fuck, I thought you were talking about people lobbing grave insults against other groups. Guess what: most groups get a pass on what they call themselves.
If you think “cracker” is as bad an insult as “nigger,” you’re straight-up nuts. Then again, I’ve never heard anybody seriously call a white person a cracker. I’ve heard it in comedy and that’s it.
No matter how sincere you are, it doesn’t matter. Once you have crossed that threshold, the options are:
Kill yourself
Or
Donate every last cent of your money, live in a cardboard box, and spend the rest of your life thinking about what a horrible transgression you made. This, of course, has never happened- but I think it just might work. Well, maybe if you intentionally gave yourself leprosy too.
There’s no logic to it, frankly. But I suspect it’s as obvious to you as it is to me, which makes me even less interested in getting into an argument about it. Cracker is just not that big of a deal.
The argument I’ve heard for the n-word being more offensive than “cracker” is that it’s associated with a series of really horrible legal and cultural institutions. The slave trade, slavery itself, Jim Crow, lynchings, etc. The n-word was a big part of the working vocabulary of those institutions, and the use of it can be seen as a tacit endorsement of them. On the other hand, there were never any similar institutions that employed the word “cracker”.
No, there is logic. A black man calls a white man a “cracker.” That is a racial slur. A white man calls a black man a “nigger.” That is also a racial slur. Either one carries the same weight with me, and it carries the same level of ignorance. Either way, the person using these terms is an uneducated idiot.
Without getting into how an individual perceived the meaning of the word (no matter how hard people try, there is no universal perception), they are exactly the same.
Congratulations, you have an opinion. I doubt too many other people share it, and as such, a lot of people don’t consider the two terms equivalent, even though they are both slurs connected to race. With words, the subtle differences can be very significant, and proving two words mean comparable things doesn’t deal with all the connotations they carry.
Interesting - it never occurred to me that that’s what “cracker” meant. I always thought it simply referred to skin tone - white, like a Saltine cracker. But yah, if that’s actually the source of the term, then I’d agree the offensiveness level goes way up.
Agree. If a white and black are about to get into a fight and the white calls the black a nigger, it would escalate the problem, every time. If the black called the white a cracker, it would probably diffuse the situation, as probably anyone around would start laughing.
There are white people who are really, seriously offended at being called ‘cracker’? I can’t imagine being anything but amused if somebody called me that.
Except all “racial slurs” aren’t created equal. Some are deadly, some are nerfed. The fact that this isn’t logical is irrelevant. “Cracker” just isn’t as offensive as “nigger”, and anyone who pretends they are equally offensive is selling something.
To me, there is either offensive or not offensive. The degree to which I’m personally offended is not relevant to this discussion as it is based solely on my own perception or emotional reaction.
I can’t fucking believe that some of you are so fucking into arguing that you’re actually implying that some racial slurs are horrible and punishable by death while others are good for a small laugh – based solely on history that *NONE OF US * have lived through. Jim Crow Laws? Are you fucking serious? I’m 100% Irish, can we go back to how the Irish were treated in the US upon their arrival in the 1840s?
So while it is a perjorative (with semi-racial overtones given its origin insulting the Scots), it does not appear to fall into the same scale as nigger.
It is all in how it is used, of course. When an 80 year old white man says nigger when fighting the forced inclusion of black candidates, it sounds pretty damned racist.
If a black comedian uses cracker, I can tolerate it. If Jesse Jackson does it, then I might be a bit pissed off, given his role in politics (tying in another thread).
There are people who can call me a redneck (justifiably so). When they do it, it is a pleasant thing usually referring to my hobbies of firearms, hunting, and working on old muscle cars.
There are others who use the term redneck in my presence to denigrate a percent of the population. Those folks get my response with both bores.
Amen brother. Coming from a very deep Irish background on one side, I have heard a lot of things. From the other side, I had Cherokee blood, which was also great for some stories.