Randy Newman is one of my favorite writer / musician / performers. He has family roots in Louisiana and, in his early music, he wrote about some of the cultural paradoxes he saw in that area of the south.
Cracker, sometimes white cracker or cracka, is a sometimes racist expression for white people,[1] especially poor rural whites in the Southern United States. In reference to a native of Florida or Georgia, however, it is sometimes used in a neutral or positive context and is sometimes used self-descriptively with pride.[2]
There are multiple explanations of the etymology of "cracker", most dating its origin to the 18th century or earlier.
One of the earliest etymological theories traces this term from Middle English word "cnac" or "craic" which originally meant the sound of a cracking whip, but came to refer to any loud noise, and is attested to by an 18th century letter to the Earl of Dartmoor, given below. In Elizabethan times this could refer to "entertaining conversation" (one may be said to "crack" a joke) and 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?"[3][4]