Well… needless to say, I feel like I’m walking on eggshells posting this question.
Racial slurs have infuriated many people and races for as long as I can remember. Although, those aimed at whites seem to be a thing of the past, the only thing that ever really bothered me about them was the fact that I never really knew what any of them meant. Two in particular come to mind right off the top of my head: “white cracker” and “honkey” (which I think was first pronounced “hunkey”).
What do they mean? Why should I have been offended? What others were there?
welllllll…they basically are attempts to match insults such as ‘nigger’, [yeah i can say it because i am black. another thread, 'kay guys!] 'jungle monkey, tar baby, O.J etc,. To me, it’s just like the phrase ‘white trash’. It said more in a joking manner, than serious. I don’t think i’ve ever heard anyone refer to a white person like that AND was seriously intending to hurt their feelings.
Cracker is a nickname for Georgians and Floridians. White cracker simply emphasizes the stereotype (for the intended audience) that whites of those two states are liable to be poor, ignorant, and prejudiced. Word Maven - cracker also has a link to a discussion of redneck.
I have heard an alternative explanation that honky was a reference to the more nasal speech of white America (as opposed to the throatier speech by black America), comparing whites to sounding like geese. I suspect that the goose theory is folk-etymology and that the reference to Eastern European immigrants is more likely correct. At the time the word was apparently coined, a great many blacks had recently moved to the industrial North looking to escape the poverty of share-cropping in the South. When they arrived in the North, they found themselves competing for jobs with recent white immigrants, and the most recent group (before we slammed the door on immigration in 1920) was from Eastern Europe. The word hunky, originally applied to Hungarians, had been extended to Poles, Slovenians, Ukrainians, etc. (The Italians were among the same wave, but their nicknames did not get applied to their nrothern and eastern neighbors.)
The whip idea sounds like folk etymology. As noted in the Word Maven link,
The usage to mean poor white southerner is the earliest beyond simply “braggart” and it is unlikely that it would have been associated with a person overseeing slaves on a rich man’s plantation.
I read that “cracker” stems from the lowest form of employment that c/d be held by whites in the ante-bellum south. Po’ whites were hired by plantation owners to “crack” pecans and other nuts that were grown on the plantation. Hence, cracker.
That too sounds like a convoluted etymology, though.
I always thought “honky” was making a mockery of “hony-tonk” taken from country music. Being a mostly white and southern genre of music, it could be a prime target for mockery. But, that leaves the question “What’s a honky?” And adds the question, “what’s a tonk?”
I honestly never heard the term “white cracker.” I hope I never used it when describing a box of light-colored Ritz. I’ve also never heard “O.J.” describing black people. It’s shockingly recent, I thought people outgrew name-calling. Ever been in one of those situations where everyone looks shocked at what you just said, and you sit there with no clue why they are gaping at you like that?
The problem with trying to associate cracker with cracking whips is that there are no citations that demonstrate any such linkage and several citations for the use of cracker to mean a poor person.
Whip-cracker has a nice snap to it, but it has no historical support.
There’s a fairly well-researched article on the subject here. The gist is that the meaning almost definitely derives from a word of Celtic origin meaning “a boaster, braggart, or liar”; the citations well back into the 18th century support this derivation. Consider that the population generally identified as “crackers” included a large portion who were of Scotch-Irish descent, and that craic (pronounced “crack”) is modern Irish for the particular type of light-hearted conversation common in pubs. It’s a standard stereotype that poor Southerners from the areas in question are (or were) prideful and apt to boasting about their abilities in hunting, fishing, and other “manly” pursuits, though less so in other, perhaps more practical matters. It’s pretty easy to imagine how the word for the type of talk in which these people supposedly engaged could come to be applied to the people themselves. I have a much easier time imagining the first person to call another a “cracker” doing so if they could reasonably expect to be understood without having to explain what was meant – i.e., if it built on a meaning of the word that was already widely used in the society in question. That’s true for the “braggart” etymology, and far less so for the others.
The term “white trash” is racist against non-whites by implication because it assumes that you need to qualify the term when applied to whites and because it assumes that unless you are called “trash” that you are good “white” folks. I understand that it is usually meant in a light hearted manner, but it is a term of derision that the longer you think about it, the more offensive it is to everyone. None of us are “trash”.
Ok, bad me, but when I refer to someone as “white trash,” there is an implication that they are worthless, lazy, welfare-sponging losers who are simply unwilling to carry their own weight in society. Offensive? Yes, and intended to be. Nothing lighthearted about it.
Conversely, I have never referred to any black person as a nigger, and I take great offense to the term “white nigger,” which I hear frequently. I’ve heard my sister called that, because she (white) has children fathered by a black man, and I have actually heard people say that my sister wants to be black because of that. Weird? yes. Indiana? yes.