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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Going to bat for "cracker" is really a bad fight for the left to pick. There is nothing to gain, and people who aren't terminally online will say "you're carefully litigating whether 'moron' is cool, but you're OK with insulting someone's skin color?"
But most importantly, there's nothing to gain.
I think the right knows they're being silly when they act offended by "cracker", and so does everybody else. When I was a dumb highschool kid I recall having a conversation with one of my dumb kid friends about this, and laughing at the word "cracker" because how could it possibly be offensive to us white people? It signifies no shame or perceived lower status, unlike other slurs. Libs get this even if they pretend not to.
edit: just to add, I think all you need to do is point out that anybody pretending to be offended by cracker is really just mad they're not allowed to use actual offensive slurs, not at the word "cracker"
If some chud tries to equate cracker with the n-word that's a fight worth having: persuadable people instinctively know we're right and you can educate people by explaining why. There is actually something to gain there, because the reason is basically structural racism, a topic most people do not adequately understand, much less confront.
What's silly is insisting that a term insulting one's skin color isn't racist at all. You get nothing out of that fight you don't already get out of "of course cracker isn't anywhere near as bad as the n-word," but now most people are thinking "I don't know, ripping on someone's skin color seems pretty racist to me."
Picking your battles is good, actually.
All actual racism is structural. If you argue that a group that experiences no disadvantage based on their skin color can be insulted in a racist way, you're already lending legitimacy to the myth of "anti-white racism" being a thing, or at the very least remain stuck in a liberal misunderstanding of racism as an individual's character flaw that leads to them acting in an uncivil way, not a part of a society-spanning system of exerting power and creating permanent underclasses along racialized lines. Any and all debate around the word cracker is always a debate about the first part of your post, and if it doesn't arrive there, that's a failure to frame the debate correctly and steer it towards highlighting how racism actually works.
The vast majority of English speakers use "racism" to mean "prejudice or hate based on race," which covers a lot more ground than structural racism. There isn't a great reason to try and redefine racism to exclusively mean structural racism, either, because individual prejudice based on skin color is bad, too.
When people see prejudice based on skin color, the response shouldn't be "whoa whoa whoa, maybe this is OK, depending on who has power here." The response should be that prejudice based on skin color is bad in any situation, but is especially harmful where the group exercising that prejudice has structural power to hurt the target group. Some types of prejudice being worse than others does not mean there is an excusable form of prejudice. It definitely doesn't mean that the less harmful forms aren't prejudice at all.
Ah, more of the liberalism. You know there's structural racism, you know it is fundamentally different from this "prejudice based on skin color" nonsense, you know that people are not aware enough of that ignorance and like a liberal counterrevolutionary, you argue in favor of keeping them ignorant on this. Why? How fragile do you have to be to get insulted over the term cracker? I'm white myself, i've never felt the slightest bit insulted by the word. And unlike your privileged ass, i know what actual oppression is, what it means to be targeted by actual slurs. Your position is laughable and reactionary.
Here's what I actually said:
Yes, and after that you have spent several posts arguing why we should do the exact opposite and value the misleading idea that cracker is in some way comparable to the nword, you disingenuous debatebro weasel.
You continue to argue in bad faith like the cahuvinist redditor turd gourmet you are, quoting the one paragraph ITT where you werne't completely full of shit and pretending you didn't type out the entire rest of your replies.
Yeah I dunno, I think viewing racism this way allows people to equate settler violence and resistance by Palestinians because they're both "based on race/religion/ethnicity". I don't think people actually believe that, they're really just racist morons, but rhetorically I think the logic follows between the two. Getting people to think and base their values on wider social contexts seems to be an important thing to educate people on.
But of course Palestinian resistance isn't based on race/religion/ethnicity, it's a response to settler violence. To the extent someone is willing to learn you can draw a clear difference there. And if someone isn't willing to learn, what you're saying doesn't matter to them anyway.
And "cracker" is a response to a racist system, not a racist term.
Story time:
This white guy at the bar was bragging that he amassed a fortune selling weed and bought some Banksys before they were cool and was now rich. Went on to say that he used some of the money to rent out "places you [me, white] and I wouldn't want to live in." Went on to say that Los Angeles was one of the most racist cities he had been to because Black people called him "cracker." Strange how I, having lived there for years without trying to extract wealth from poor neighborhoods, was never called a cracker there.