If you “Don’t care what it says”, then by all means feel free to remain ignorant. The use of the term is offensive now, but that is not how it originally started, and it had nothing to do with slavery. . There are parts of Florida where people rightfully wear that title proudly. They were (and are) a proud, individualistic, stubborn and self-sufficient people. The blacks adopted it somewhat later, probably because some “upper class” whites also looked down on the Scots-Irish
From the same source:
” ‘Cracker’ has long been a racial slur used by African Americans as a contemptuous term for the Southern white.”
That usage became more widespread after the slave period was over,
and about the time the Scots-Irish cowboys were coming in to Florida.
I am of Scots-Irish descent, and I find it to be an extremely offensive racial epithet.(Remember all of the bad terms and violence directed at the Irish immigrants in past history in this country. One historian even suggested that the Irish had it worse than the blacks.) If a black person were to call me that, I would have no trouble in calling him or her a “nigger”.
I don’t know if you know this, but black people generally do not base their slang terms and racial slurs on their intricate knowledge of history.
It doesn’t have anything to do with anything other than white people cracking whips, and none of those people who cracked those whips are even alive today, but they call us that anyway. Accuracy matters not a hill of beans, it’s an ignorant racial slur.
It’s what black people call white people. That’s all there is to it.