The Dish

It stretches “all the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least”:

“The meaning of the word has changed a lot over the last four centuries,” said Dana Ste. Claire, a Florida historian and anthropologist who studies, er, crackers. … Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator.

What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?

“It’s a beautiful quote, but it was a character trait that was used to describe a group of Celtic immigrants — Scots-Irish people who came to the Americas who were running from political circumstances in the old world,” Ste. Claire said.

Those Scots-Irish folks started settling the Carolinas, and later moved deeper South and into Florida and Georgia. But the disparaging term followed these immigrants, who were thought by local officials to be unruly and ill-mannered. “In official documents, the governor of Florida said, ‘We don’t know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don’t; we tell them not to settle this area and they do,” Ste. Claire said. “They lived off the land. They were rogues.”

One Scots-Irish view of the matter:

Consider the “purple tomato,” engineered to preserve the nutrients by splicing “two genes from snapdragon plants into normal red tomatoes”:

Purple tomatoes are not only more nutritious than red ones, but they also have a long shelf life, as researchers recently found. The short shelf life of many fruits and vegetables poses major logistical issues. To get fresh-looking, ripe tomatoes into your local grocery store, tomatoes are harvested while still green, kept in cold storage, and then artificially ripened right before they’re put up for sale. We’re all familiar with the result: pale, tasteless tomatoes that have a lower nutritional value than tomatoes that are allowed to ripen while still on the vine. … The researchers found that purple tomatoes produce lower amounts of these self-destruction enzymes. As a result, purple tomatoes are less susceptible to fungus, and they remain firm more than twice as long as red tomatoes. This means that purple tomatoes could be harvested later, after they’ve ripened naturally.

The article concludes, that, as “the technology to make them improves, GMO foods designed to be healthier could become a bigger part of your diet.” Recent Dish on the benefits of GMOs here and here.

(Photo: Scientists from the John Innes Centre, UK have genetically engineered tomatoes to contain very high levels of the cancer-fighting antioxident ‘anthocyanins’, which as a result have turned the usually red fruit into a deep purple. By John Innes Centre UK/Getty Images)

John McWhorter writes that “there’s a difference between, say, the white man who once dismissed me as ‘just another nigger’ when I bested him in an argument in 1993 and [Trayvon] Martin referring to [George] Zimmerman chasing him as a ‘creepy-ass cracker’: power.” He also considers the intended audience:

Martin didn’t call someone a cracker in a public forum, nor did he call someone a cracker to his face. He referred to someone as a cracker in a private exchange that he had all reason to suppose would never be heard again by anyone. That’s different, even to the extent that using the term wasn’t ideal.

One must be consistent here, and I am: I argued last week that Paula Deen’s use of the N-word in private in 1986 was different from her hauling it out upon someone or popping up with it on the air or at a booksigning. Again, degree matters. I think Deen’s apologies were sincere—and enough. People almost never completely erase the psychological conditioning of their childhoods. Many note that Deen has spent most of her life living after the Civil Rights revolution, but remember, as a 66-year-old, Deen’s formative years were the fifties, in the Deep South. Of course such a person might pop out with the N-word in a private heated moment, even in her forties. Unideal, but unsurprising at her age (although I don’t mean that all Southerners of her years are so likely to pull it) and so many people do so much worse: I don’t think Deen should suffer the penalty of losing her livelihood because of it. I’d feel otherwise if she were 30: degree, again.

Alyssa thinks Deen’s use of the racial slur is only part of the story: 

An investigation by the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition into Deen’s employment practices suggest that many workers in Deen’s businesses have had good experiences, but also that many of them fear retaliation, and that some feel there’s an environment of racial discrimination in promotions and raises. Those allegations are significant and important, and deserve just as much attention as Deen’s language. But they’re also less shocking and sexy, and less easy to dismiss as a somehow-forgivable relic of the past than Deen’s use of ugly words or antiquated sense of aesthetics.

In other words, Deen’s potential use of the word “nigger” renders her exactly the kind of figure the Hollywood vulture industry likes: a little old lady who did wrong without knowing what she did, and who can be rehabilitated and educated for everyone else’s profits and amusement. Addressing her as a bad boss would make her greedy and vindictive in a rather more commonplace way, and in a way that reflects on quite a large number of other people whose racial biases may not show up in their words, but are obvious in the composition of their workforces.