Uh...so...what was the justification for use of 'crackers' again?

[Vetrean]

Not to say that it's necessarily unjustified, I just haven't been able to find said justification. 'Cuz you've mentioned a justification you wrote out somewhere, but I haven't seen it, so I was wondering if someone would help me find it.

Or the 'Letters from Kunlun' that have been mentioned before.

Am I just not being observant enough, or what?

[Ike]

The use of crackers is justified because what else are you going to eat with cheese?

[Vetrean]

...XD

Clever.

[lopan]

Yes, Vetrean, we did have a whole thread with a half dozen pages on the use of the term "Cracker".

It's still around, but it's been hidden away in the lost forum of "Letters from Kunlun".

I'm debating whether i should repost Dialectic's post supporting the use of the term on this site, but I'm afraid of starting this debate all over again and poo-pooing the tone of this site.

[silkie]

I think whether or not someone decides to use the term cracker, my opinion is that there is no slang word for white people that carries the same emotional and historical baggage as words for black, Asians, or other minorities.

When someone spews the word chink, for example, they are hacking up all the reminders of past abuses on an entire race, the second class status, everything, and spitting it at you. When someone uses words like honky and cracker, it carries more of a tone of resentment like an enraged animal lashing out at their captors. Cattygurl once provide a link to a white guy who acknowledges this fact.

So yeah, as much as it is problematic to counter racism with "reverse racism," I think racist attitudes from whites to other people are different in nature from the other way around.

[ellencho]

Well, here's my official stance on crackers - they're dry and crumbly, and they're only good for feeding to ducks at the pond. There I said it, it's final now.

[angi]

I had a white guy on a site block me because I referred to white people as crackas.

He claimed it was a racist and ignorant thing to say because cracker originated from the snap of the slavemaster's whip. I was like wtfever, quit playing oversensitive white boy. How many black friends you have anyway? 0? Yeah, why am I not surprised? The black guy you say hi to in the hallway at work doesn't count either....asshat.

[Dialectic]

I'm not going to repost any "justification" nor are we going to make the Kunlun section available again, at least not for this reason.

In short, this is why it's "not as bad" but probably still not great to use the word:

1. As Silkie mentioned above, racist terms for all colored folk dredge up reminders all sorts of oppression and abuses. There is NO equivalent for whites. They have NEVER been systematically abused and oppressed economically, militarily, politically, etc. or been colonized in any significant way by colored people. They've been invaded, of course, but lasting colonization as we know it today has only been committed by them.

2. White people have used it in their writing of King of the Hill, and Chris Rock used it in a hilarious skit about racist old black men. Essentially, social norms confirm that it's not that bad, and not nearly on the level of "chink" or "raghead" or the dreaded "nigger." It's also kind of funny to use in many contexts.

3. As far as I know, the popular and derogatory use of "cracker" did originate from "whip-cracker"; this makes sense to me, because if it had significantly originated from one of the other uses suggested in a site someone mentioned in another thread (uses originated by whites), then it wouldn't be considered derogatory to the whites as a whole. And here, you can see how "special" the whites have it: even an insult to them actually refers to colonialism, slavery, and oppression THEY committed. Recall that whites, particularly, but not limited to, the British and the Americans, committed SLAVERY, GENOCIDE, GUN-RUNNING, and DRUG-TRAFFICKING literally EVERYWHERE THERE WERE PEOPLE on Earth. They WAGED WAR so they could ENSLAVE and SELL DRUGS. They waged war to create and expand MARKETS. They treated people EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD as OBJECTS. This is the context which informs how bad a racial slur is. Keep in mind that the whites can HUMILIATE us at ANY TIME with a word or a deed, because the whites are IN POWER not only in their own countries, but all over the world. This is slowly changing, but as it stands, if you're in a minority, in a less powerful group, and you insult someone in the majority, in THE most powerful group, there are very different implications and feelings involved. It would be very hard for me to humiliate a white person by calling him a "cracker" or pointing him out and laughing at him, or preventing him from getting a job or equal service somewhere, because whites have power over me, not the other way. With a single word, a white man can "put us in our place." We can't do the same thing to him, and even if we did, he would be on top of the world. This extends to the entire planet. And again, the insult of "cracker" reminds them of what they did to countless blacks, Browns, Asians, indigenous peoples all over the world. Very, very different thing from being called, say, a chink or a coon.

So no, no normal person with a normal perspective thinks the word is all that bad. It's obviously still not great to say, because insults in general are not great to use most of the time, but it ain't NEARLY as bad as racial slurs against colored folks for the reasons stated above.

This debate is over. I'll leave the thread open for some comments, but if it looks like this is going to turn into a big thing, I'm locking and deleting whatever I think is stupid.

[blockthebox]

Angi, let's convert to lesbianism and run away together! We can keep boys on the side too!

[Vetrean]

o i c

That makes sense, thanks.

[Le Sheng Liu]

I like rice crakkkers. Ya know, the kind of white folk that love asian culture, especially if it's a white girl who loves asian guys.