Wake up Cracker!

So the word “cracker” has begun to appear. Jenny found it first when she shared a post with me by the author Heather Havrilesky, and since then it has popped up in casual conversation, in blogs, and even on the radio (though, to be fair they were talking about a Christmas cracker, and not a white “cracker”, and it was a podcast of a radio program so I heard it on my ipod)

I am sure there are a couple of questions here. First, I was thinking about Homer Simpson’s gripe to John Waters:

Homer: They're embarrassing me... they're embarrassing America! 
They turned the navy into a floating joke! They ruined all our best 
names like Bruce and Lance and Julian... those were the toughest 
names we had. Now they're just, uh....
John Waters: Queer? 

Homer: Yeah... and that's another thing. I resent you people using 
that word! That's our word for making fun of you! We NEED it!

This debate points to the idea that if we co-opt a term we ultimately take the power out of it. But, do we need it. I always assumed that the word “cracker” was short for “wise-cracker,” a buffoon with limited formal education who used mockery and derision as a form of humor. Though in hindsight I don’t know where I might have pick up that notion, and it doesn’t really account for the full definition of the word. "Cracker", sometimes "white cracker", is a usually pejorative term for a white person, mainly used in the Southern United States, pejorative because the person is assumed to mean, poor and uneducated.

A quick Google search revealed that “cracker” might be associated with the cracking of whips by white slave owners. That would certainly account for the meanness, and what about the proverbial Jimmy, who whiled away the hours cracking corn while I don’t care? Is a cracker someone who takes a low paying job, the equivalent of the migrant farm worker? That would account for the poor and perhaps even the uneducated, I don't thinnk of migrant workers as having the benefits of good education, but I really don't know. Interestingly, it isn’t really what the word even means anymore; nowadays a cracker is basically another word for a hacker, someone who enters a target computer system without permission either with malice or curiosity. So perhaps the great co-opting of the word has begun. Though I doubt it.

My father, admittedly not from the south, was unfamiliar with either definition of the word. But many more do, and from what I have seen, its pejorative use is still widely understood. Still, I like the idea of co-opting the word. In a world of foodies and fashion models, where Americans are becoming poor living high on credit in houses they can’t afford, maybe it is time to reevaluate the our opinion of ourselves, and in the process become more sensible. Maybe I am a cracker, a damn fool living beyond his means looking for get rich quick schemes in real estate and lottery tickets and breakfast burritos.

I know it is a stretch, but from one cracker to another, maybe its time for a little more humility, humble livin’ that is. Take as an example the American diet. Americans want their tomatoes and their broccoli on the table 365 days of the year, a demand that increases the use of gas, fertilizer, waste water and the like, and for what? Bland vegetables that sit unripened, in warehouses, only to be shipped once again to your neighborhood superstore. Wake up cracker.

Finally, I can’t help but thing about J. K. Rowling character Hermione Granger, who bravely quotes Dumbledore that “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.” There are a lot of ugly words in the world. We have come up with so many that we lose count, and then they linger in the fringe of obscurity only to resurface and remind us of whom we were and whom we might still be. There seems a danger here, because oftentimes in forgetting the origins of things we never learn the lessons of the past, and so we pass them on to our children without meaning to. Better yet, by looking at them we can learn something valuable about ourselves, and maybe pass those lessons down to our children because ultimately, the things we teach our children are a reflection of how we want the world to be.