Comment on Ancestry dot com
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month agoI thought it was slang for whips during slave times, cracka, as in whip cracka.
Comment on Ancestry dot com
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month agoI 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.