Comment on Ancestry dot com
MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 1 month agoOlder white American here. Historically speaking “crackers” were poor white folks from Appalachian Georgia and the Florida “pan handle” (the bit on top) thus cracker isn’t just racist it is historically classist as well.
The Jeffersons, a 1970s TV show featuring an upwardly mobile black family moving into a more affluent neighborhood, featured George, the main character, calling a few racist white folks crackers popularizing the term for whites in general.
I don’t see myself as a cracker. Im not poor nor was I southern. Any ancestor that I had that owned slaves did so centuries ago as none of my relatives who could own slaves did so. The fact that I can ignore racist terms directed at my race is a really strong sign of privilege.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I thought it was slang for whips during slave times, cracka, as in whip cracka.
MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Nope
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The term “cracker” has multiple origins, including a reference to whip-cracking, a derogatory term for white Southerners, and a Gaelic word meaning “entertaining conversation”.
Whip-cracking
The term may have originated as a shortened version of “whip-cracker”.
In the 1700s, “cracker” was used to describe poor white drovers who used whips to move cattle through the pine barrens of Florida and Georgia.
White slave foremen in the antebellum South may have been called “crackers” because they used whips to drive and punish slaves.