The term "cracker" as a slur for white people, especially poor rural whites in the Southern United States, has multiple historical origins and meanings. It originally comes from the word "crack," which in Elizabethan English and Gaelic (signifying entertaining conversation or boasting) referred to someone who was a braggart or loudmouth, as used in Shakespeare's King John in the late 1500s. By the 1700s, it was applied by the ruling classes to Scots-Irish and English settlers on the southern frontier of America for being boastful and lawless. Another origin associates the term with "whip-crackers," referring to poor white cowboys or foremen in Georgia and Florida who cracked whips to drive cattle or punish slaves, with the term “cracker” coming from that whip-cracking sound. There is also a related but debated origin from "corn-cracker," referring to poor white farmers who cracked corn for food. Thus, the term "cracker" evolved as a derogatory label for lower-class white Southerners, often implying poverty, boastfulness, and sometimes harshness or lawlessness. In some cases, particularly in Georgia and Florida, it has been reappropriated with a sense of regional pride.
