How offensive is this?

[LWJ]

Background. I live in Oregon. The word I am asking about really doesn't get used here. As such, my social barometer simply doesn't register. I need more data points.

My son has a "rapper name." It is not serious, but satirical. We live in a upper income suburb. We are white. His rapper name is "Ritz Cracka."

I find this to be very funny. I want to buy him his name with large gold letters and chain for his birthday. He would think it hilarious. Certainly not something to wear regularly.

So Mrs. LWJ thinks this is offensive. And it is. But, if you are white and call yourself "Cracka" is this permissible? I think so. Especially in a vein of satire.

Comments and flames on.

Thanks!

[fastfredracing]

Not offensive. Everyone needs to re-set, and get their sense of humor back.

[masraum]

I think it's hilarious as well. I don't see anything offensive about it. As a matter of fact, I think Cracker was a term used to describe the original, primarily white settlers to FL, and I think in some instances "Florida Cracker" is considered a good thing (tough folks that flourished in a harsh environment).

I was once called a cracker by someone of another race. I think it was supposed to be inflammatory, but the insult was lost on me.

I don't see any problem with it, but then I'm not thin skinned or easily offended.

[Seahawk]

Did he give himself the name?

You can't give yourself a nickname, call sign or pajamas, it just isn't done.

[SCadaddle]

Ummm, fellas, the term "Cracker" doesn't refer to your skin color being similar to a saltine, it's roots are from the sound of the "Master's" whip.

[Bill Douglas]

It's a bit of a laugh, and it's to give him a giggle with his friends.

[craigster59]

I think white people calling each other "Cracker" is as offensive as black people calling each other "The N Word". Race doesn't give you privilege to use derogatory language.

[berettafan]

My dog has a rapper name.

DJ Rug Pissa

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by berettafan

My dog has a rapper name.

DJ Rug Pissa

That name is already taken, with copyright...you'll be hearing from my lawyer, Aesop Rock the Brief.

He good.

[Roswell]

The term has nothing to do with slavery. It has to do with Florida cowboys and the sound their whips made. Derogative term for a poor white person.

[javadog]

Originally Posted by SCadaddle

Ummm, fellas, the term "Cracker" doesn't refer to your skin color being similar to a saltine, it's roots are from the sound of the "Master's" whip.

Well, it has several associations over the years. The one you refer to originates long before the period of slavery in the US and has nothing to do with it. It goes back to the middle ages, in England. It has also referred to someone that ran his mouth a little too much.

In this context, I'm not offended.

[widebody911]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(term)

[javadog]

A more in-depth look:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761/word-watch-on-crackers

[masraum]

Originally Posted by SCadaddle

Ummm, fellas, the term "Cracker" doesn't refer to your skin color being similar to a saltine, it's roots are from the sound of the "Master's" whip.

That sounds like a plausible theory, but I suspect it's not the case. Etymology for terms, even slang, that have been around a long time rarely seem obvious to us now.

Cracker usually is used to describe poor whites, I don't think poor whites had a lot of slaves.

Wikipedia does include the theory that you suggested.

Per wikipedia

Cracker, sometimes white cracker or cracka, is a racial epithet for white people,[1] used especially for poor rural whites in the Southern United States. It is sometimes used in a neutral context in reference to a native of Florida, Georgia or Texas (see Florida cracker, Georgia cracker or Texas cracker).[2]

A 1783 pejorative use of "crackers" specifies men who "are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times, and inherit so much profligacy from their ancestors, that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth".[3] Benjamin Franklin, in his memoirs (1790), referred to "a race of runnagates and crackers, equally wild and savage as the Indians" who inhabit the "desert[ed] woods and mountains".[4]

The term could have also derived from the Middle English cnac, craic, or crak, which originally meant the sound of a cracking whip but came to refer to "loud conversation, bragging talk".[5] In Elizabethan times this could refer to "entertaining conversation" (one may be said to "crack" a joke) and cracker could be used to describe loud braggarts; this term and the Gaelic spelling craic are still in use in Ireland, Scotland and Northern England. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"[6][7] This usage is illustrated in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth which reads:

I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.[8]

The compound corn-cracker was used of poor white farmers (by 1808), especially of Georgians, but also extended to residents of northern Florida, from the cracked kernels of corn which formed the staple food of this class of people. This possibility is cited in the 1911 edition of Encyclopędia Britannica,[9] but the Oxford English Dictionary ("cracker", definition 4) says a derivation of the 18th-century simplex cracker from the 19th-century compound corn-cracker is doubtful.

It has been suggested that white slave foremen in the antebellum South were called "crackers" owing to their practice of "cracking the whip" to drive and punish slaves.[10][11][12] Whips were also cracked over pack animals, so "cracker" may have referred to whip cracking more generally.[13][14][15]

The whips used by some of these people are called 'crackers', from their having a piece of buckskin at the end. Hence the people who cracked the whips came to be thus named.[

[sc_rufctr]

I like "Ritz Cracka" Buuuut someone may try and distort this situation into something else.

Is your son in school or college? I would bet there would be a teacher or lecturer who would find offence even if non was intended.
You can't even joke about race without being called out on it. Pro comedians can get away with it but no one else can.

This whole racist thing is so sensitive right now.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by javadog

A more in-depth look:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761/word-watch-on-crackers

Very interesting article. I'd never heard of swamp cabbage or corn pone.

This seems to point at the whole slave thing as being bogus.

It was in the late 1800s when writers from the North started referring to the hayseed faction of Southern homesteaders as crackers. "[Those writers] decided that they were called that because of the cracking of the whip when they drove slaves," Ste. Claire said. But he said that few crackers would have owned slaves; they were generally too poor. (That of course, doesn't mean they weren't participants in the South's slave economy in other ways.)

[masraum]

Originally Posted by sc_rufctr

I like "Ritz Cracka" Buuuut someone may try and distort this situation into something else.

Is your son in school or college? I would bet there would be a teacher or lecturer who would find offence even if non was intended.
You can't even joke about race without being called out on it. Pro comedians can get away with it but no one else can.

This whole racist thing is so sensitive right now.

Valid point. Many folks may not find it offensive, but you'd have to pick and choose where you advertised.

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by craigster59

I think white people calling each other "Cracker" is as offensive as black people calling each other "The N Word". Race doesn't give you privilege to use derogatory language.

Then why can you fully spell out the "C" word but you can't say the "N" word without being crucified?
Reverse discrimination sucks and unfortunately one group is notorious for pulling out "the race card"

[Sooner or later]

Okie was a derogatory term. Now it is used for businesses and advertisements.

I have no problem with the OP messing with his kid.

[pwd72s]

The kids in "Lake Ego" high school might find it funny. Wonder what the kids attending Jefferson in NE Portland would think?