Posted on 11/20/2006 7:03:27 AM PST by torchthemummy
Michael Richards exploded in anger as he performed at a famous L.A. comedy club last Friday, hurling racial epithets that left the crowd gasping, and TMZ has obtained exclusive video of the ugly incident.
(Excerpt) Read more at tmz.com ...
Thanks! I've been meaning to add the soldiers with the 'Stuk in Irak'poster.
Folks,
Some of you act like this guy committed about the worst sin he could commit.
Give me a break.
I watched his comments. They were sick. So? He was being heckled.
He blew a gasket and went crazy. People do that sometimes.
What he did was wrong, but my word, some of you are going overboard on this.
He should apologize and that is the end of it.
LOL. Believe them or your lying ears.
It's funny, all these old theories for the term "cracker". The most likely origin is that "cracker" probably comes from the Gaelic word "craic", meaning bantering, bragging, and boisterous conversation. Cracker was a term used in Shakespeare's day, long before Southern crackers existed.
Most conservative blacks don't use it.
Many young people do use it.
I hear it all the time.
So yes, it is a valid argument.
He is a white guy that used the N word. THat is all you need to know. Ostracized for life now.
So it is OK to use racist, bigoted terms as long as you have a personal connection. If a comedian's wife is black and he is white, can he use the N-word?
True . Any professional comedian should have heckler material ready.
YouTube is blocked here though.
A guy can do whatever he wants.... doesn't make it funny.
Jeepers, 'Kramer' acted like a jerk on stage, in response to some audience members who were probably also acting like jerks. And you want to base some societal rule on this little episode, why?
Denis Leary or Richard Beltzer he's not!
No one could ever heckle them and come out alive!
It was corrected from the same source that I originally heard that story from...hotair.com. But you're welcome not to believe them, if you wish.
Interesting point and I think its true. True story: Where I work, where we have gone from having a Christmas Party, to a Holiday Party, and now it's called a Year End Celebration, one person I know apologized, APOLOGIZED, just for saying the word Christmas.
Wow. I never saw "Nutty Professor" but I just had to pull my jaw off the floor. Eddie Murphy uses "nigger" in the first 20 seconds of the clip! Then the humor goes down from there.
From Wikipedia:
Cracker (sometimes "white cracker") is a pejorative term for a white person, mainly used in the Southern United States.
[edit] Usage
The term "cracker" was and is used most frequently in the southern U.S., especially in Georgia and Florida. Since the 1870s a nickname for Georgia is "The Cracker State", which is displayed proudly with no hint of insult or irony.
Historically the word suggested poor, white rural Americans with little formal education. Historians point out the term originally referred to the strong Scots-Irish of the backcountry (as opposed to the English of the seacoast). Thus a sociologist reported in 1926, "As the plantations expanded these freed men (formerly bond servants) were pushed further and further back upon the more and more sterile soil. They became 'pinelanders,' 'corn-crackers,' or 'crackers.'" [Kephard Highlanders] Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from the northern United States, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and noted that some crackers "owned a good many negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated." [McWhiney xvi]
The "cracker" would be similar to the accepted term of cowboy in the Western United States. (Smith. A Land Remembered)
Usage of the term "cracker" generally differs from "hick" and "hillbilly" because crackers reject or resist assimilation into the dominant culture, while hicks and hillbillies theoretically are isolated from the dominant culture. In this way, the cracker is similar to the redneck. In the African American community, "cracker" is a disparaging term for whites. (The OED cites the 1830s origin of white trash as a word used by slaves on rich plantations to ridicule poor whites.)
Since 1900 "cracker" has become a proud or jocular self-description. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, "cracker" is now used informally by some white residents of Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations. However, the term "white cracker" is not always used self-referentially and remains a disparaging term to many in the region.[1]
[edit] Etymology
There are various theories about the origin of the term "cracker."
The term cracker was in use during Elizabethan times to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack1 meaning "entertaining conversation" (One may be said to "'crack' a joke"); this term and the alternate spelling "craic" are still in use in Ireland and Scotland. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this . . . that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?"
By the 1760s, this term was in use by the English in the British North American colonies to refer to Scots-Irish settlers in the south. A letter to the Earl of Dartmouth reads: "I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode." A similar usage was that of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, to refer to "Virginia squatters" (illegal settlers) (p. 35).
Other origins of the term "cracker" are linked to early Florida cattle herders that traditionally used whips to herd wild Spanish cattle. The crack of the herders' whips could be heard for great distances and were used to round cattle in pens and to keep the cows on a given track. Also, "cracker" has historically been used to refer to those engaged in the low paying job of cracking pecans and other nuts in Georgia and throughout the southeast U.S.
[edit] Examples of usage
Label depicting a barefoot boy eating peaches from a straw hat, clearly being referred to as a cracker
Enlarge
Label depicting a barefoot boy eating peaches from a straw hat, clearly being referred to as a cracker
The Florida Cracker Trail is a route posted across southern Florida by the Florida Department of Transportation.
The rustic lives of crackers were the topic of the novels of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
Crackin' Good Snacks (a division of Winn Dixie, a Southern grocery chain) has sold crackers similar to Ritz crackers under the name "Georgia Crackers". They sometimes came in a red tin with a picture of "The Crescent", an antebellum plantation house in Valdosta, Georgia.
Before the Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta, the Atlanta minor league baseball team was known as the "Atlanta Crackers." The team existed under this name from 1901 until 1965. They were members of the Southern Association from their inception until 1961, and members of the International League from 1961 until they were moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1965. However, it is suggested the name was derived from players "cracking" the baseball bat and this origin makes sense when considering the Atlanta Negro League Baseball team was known as the "Atlanta Black Crackers."
[edit] Popular culture
When used in pop culture, the term "white cracker" or "cracker" is sometimes intended to be humorous, though the distinction is not always clear.
A puppet named "Colonel Crackie" played the stereotypical Southern gentleman in the children's television show Kukla, Fran and Ollie which aired on NBC from the late 1940s to the late 1950s.
Curtis Mayfield uses the word "crackers" twice in his cautionary anti-racist anthem "If There's A Hell Below (We're All Going To Go)" - once in the opening spoken introduction ("Niggers, whiteys, jews, crackers/If there's a hell below...") and once in the first verse ("Blacks and the crackers, police and their backers.")
The Band briefly considered referring to themselves as "The Crackers" prior to the release of their debut album. Because of ensuing confusement and bemusement on the part of Capitol Records, an initial single was released under the moniker of Danko/Helm/Hudson/Manuel/Robertson. The intentionally inflammatory name was suggested by drummer Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas. Another perjorative, "The Honkies", was also considered.
In John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance, Lewis, played by Burt Reynolds, derisively refers to the rural people they encounter as being "crackers," implying that they were slow-witted hillbillies who lived in a world much different from that of him and his friends from a southern city. (However, a northerner would be just as likely to call Lewis/Reynolds a cracker.)
In the 1984 movie "Tank" starring James Garner, the white, southern sheriff was derisively referred to as a "cracker" multiple times.
In the 2000 film O Brother Where Art Thou?, the upper class white character "Pappy" O'Daniel, candidate for the Governor of Mississippi and host of the radio show "Flour Hour", meets a lower class and uneducated white character as he arrives at the radio station for his program. Pappy is told that he can make $10 for singing into a can inside, whereupon he snaps, "I'm not here to make a record, you dumb cracker."
Hip hop group Dead Prez are known for using the term "cracker" in their lyrics when referring to a white person. For instance, "I'm down for runnin' up on them crackers in their city hall" in the song 'Hip hop'.
[edit] Politics
The Cracker Party was an active political party involved in city politics in Augusta, Georgia up until the early 1940's. [2]
In August 2006, California state Senator Don Perata referred to San Diego-area opponents of a bill allowing illegal immigrants to obtain drivers licenses as "crackers." [3].
[edit] References
* Roger Lyle Brown. Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture Festivals in the American South (1997).
* Cassidy, Frederic G. Dictionary of American Regional English. Harvard University Press, Vol. I, 1985: 825-26.
* "De Graffenried, Clare. "The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills." Century 41 (February 1891): 483—98.
* George Gillett Keen and Sarah Pamela Williams. Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sarah Pamela Williams edited by James M Denham and Canter Brown. U of South Carolina Press 2000/
* Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988).
* John Solomon Otto, "Cracker: The History of a Southeastern Ethnic, Economic, and Racial Epithet," Names' 35 (1987): 28-39.
* Frank L. Owsley. Plain Folk of the Old South (1949)
* Delma E. Presley, "The Crackers of Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly 60 (summer 1976): 102-16.
* Burke, Karanja. ""Cracker."
[edit] See also
* Hillbilly
* Honky
* Redneck
* List of ethnic slurs
* List of pejorative political slogans
* Trailer park trash
* White trash
[edit] External links
* Cracker – Entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia
* Etymology of "cracker" by Professor Kim Pearson
* Florida Cracker Trail Association
I'm not for making any societal rules. If you have read any of my other posts, you will see that I am not defending Richards, just questioning the double standard. The reaction to a racist remark should be the same regardless of who said it.
That's not a normal or civilized manner of responding to a heckler.
On a scale of things to worry about, Michael Richards' attitudes towards minorities might be low on the list, but it is discouraging to see someone with all the advantages and benefits he has had do something like this, and set people against each other. Rickles' humor was borderline edgy, but you knew what his schtick was when you went to see him. He made watermelon and fried chicken jokes, which were funny in the 60s as America was working things out on race, but which have gotten a little old and stale. But he certainly didn't suggest that the good old days were when blacks could be lynched--"stick a fork in him upside down" was how Richards put it. That doesn't magically jump out of someone's mouth, it was already in his head.
Fine. You don't have to find it funny. I don't either. On the worth of it, we probably agree. I don't like comics that focus on race. I don't like Mencia because his entire shtick appears to be "I'm a minority so I can make minority jokes". I'm not into it. But I do understand the double standard, it's human nature. Self-deprecating humor ~can~ be funnier than than some outsider making the same slam. I can talk about my weight. You can't. That's the rules ;~)
And your point is...what? Did you watch this video?! He is a vile human being, period. It doesn't matter what black comedians do or don't do, this was completely offensive and if you can't see that, take a hard look in the mirror.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.