[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.[