Posted on 07/04/2013 2:44:01 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
With a single phrase, Rachel Jeantel, that friend of Trayvon Martin's, may have lit a fuse in the trial of his accused killer.
Asked by the defense what Martin told her on the phone that night when he first spotted George Zimmerman, she testified a "creepy-ass cracker" was following him. There is nothing illegal about that. Jeantel said she didn't even know it was a racial slur, and numerous commentators have noted that some in Florida use the term in a non-derogatory, colloquial sense.
But for plenty of rural, white southerners, "cracker" is a demeaning, bigoted term, and its appearance does nothing to help the prosecutors.
The origin of cracker is murky. Some sources suggest it came from overseers who commanded slaves. Others say it derives from a Scottish word for boasting. At The Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, Bill Ferris says it emerged in the 1700s as a descriptive term for drovers who used small whips to move their livestock through the pine barrens along the Gulf of Mexico. "They were basically poor people. White people. A class of people who were landless."
Initially, cracker was not a pejorative term, but Ferris says it has become one, the equivalent of redneck. Its meaning and intensity as an insult depends on who is saying it and who is listening. For example, a white who might not object to being called a cracker by another white might consider Martin's use of the phrase offensive and evidence of ill intent.
In the circumstances described in court, Ferris notes, it was more likely a quick way for Martin to say he was in danger. "If it is used by Blacks (among themselves), it is usually with one meaning: Watch out.....
(Excerpt) Read more at phillytrib.com ...
” . . . some in Florida use the term in a non-derogatory, colloquial sense.”
I just wish they didn’t think we are so stupid. Of course “creepy ass cracker” is a racial slur and everyone with even half a brain knows it.
It is derived from farmers who gathered the sap from pine trees to make turpentine
The sap was cracked into the turpentine used in naval equipment
Does anyone remember the Atlanta Crackers? They were a baseball team in the Southern League.
Being a life-long privileged white male in the South, I have another view on the use of the N-word and Cracker.
When a white uses the N-word, they are saying “the best you can do in life is be a slave” with overtones of the target being a very stupid farm animal, not a full-fledged human.
When a black calls a white “cracker” these days, it is a very weak curse that either rolls off the back of the white or misses entirely. I have friends who laugh at the use, thinking it far less offensive than “redneck”.
One friend recently said that the N-word is a hand grenade and “cracker” is a Nerf ball, and when whites ignore the curse or act perplexed, it just make the Nerf ball thrower even madder.
Actually, yours is a bad example. The modifier here would indicate that the word cracker is neutral and becomes derogatory with the modifier. Not saying cracker isn't derogatory, just that your example indicates it isn't.
I always thought that the term “cracker” originated as a term to the white’s who “cracked the whip.” I always laugh at those that use the term as a slur about white people, in reality it is nothing but an admission by the user that he/she is nothing more that chattle that needs to be motivated at the crack of a whip held in the hands of the person they are trying to deride.
Hispanics are crackers, too? Who knew?
Who gives a crap about the origins of the word cracker? What does that have to do with what was meant on the witness chair? Is anybody seriously doubting that it was and is racial in nature. This idea that most blacks are not racial is BS!
I've never heard this before or even thought this before. It is true? Weird.
I was making a loosely connected comment that this word is offensive to me, particularly if someone black uses it.
Much like anyone’s (at least anyone white) use of the N-word.
Also, further illustrating the duplicity that it apparently is okay, as evidenced by black comedians, the black populace in general, and in the media’s apathy towards such, for one black to use the N-word to another black or to anyone for that matter as long as the utteror is black.
Consequently, ripping it off from another Freeper, I’m taking that word, Cracker, and making it a White-only word (because I am white). so there everybody...
“Does anyone remember the Atlanta Crackers? “
Yeah, I was fixin’ to ask the same question!
Call me a cracker.
Call me a crispy baked wheat snack.
Call me a Saltine.
I don’t care.
Just be sure to call me to supper!
(Grow up, America! A fully armed camp located in a near police state is no place to go around acting like a kindergarten playground. “He called me a bad name!” Boo Hoo.)
[Are there any grownups left in American politics, media, Black ‘leadership’, the Democrat Party, the Republican Party?]
Nice phrase, did you coin it?
Judge: “Bailiff, I want that man charged with impersonating a cracker!”
- Dr Detroit
Yep, it is clear from the photo who was on the bottom of the struggle.
One of Zimmerman’s family (think it was his father) early-on stated that when Martin discovered the gun on Zimmerman said to Zimmerman “You are going to die tonight MF (not abreviated)” and tried to take the gun.
“Nice phrase, did you coin it?”
I think I did.
Did LITTLE Trayvon have a growth spurt in the convenience store? He’s towering over the clerk.
Hispanics are crackers, too? Who knew?
Trayvon was racially profiling Zimmerman as a cracker.
Your take on the N thing is apt. When used by whites, it is a sort of verbal terrorism used to degrade blacks as perpetual subhumans.
Cracker seems to mean different things to different age groups. I suspect blacks feel “empowered” by having a term of abuse for degrading whites. The share-cropper white trash low-lifes in “Tobacco Road” were “Crackers” in the older sense of the term. Urban and suburban whites, and successful ruralians, were never crackers, and do not take blacks use of the term seriously, but as an ignorant misapplication by people not worthy of notice.
It has always interested me that whites use terms like “white trash” to disassociate themselves from the group’s numerous losers. America’s blacks seem to lack analogous terms for their own losers (at least none are apparent to me), trapping the successful in the wreckage of the losers.
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