The exact history and etymology of cracker barrel pancake mix word is debated. The term is “probably an agent noun” from the word crack. The word was later documented describing a group of “Celtic immigrants, Scotch-Irish people who came to America running from political circumstances in the old world”. Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.

By the early 1800s, those immigrants “started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor” as is the case with other events of linguistical reappropriation. Georgia, but also extended to residents of northern Florida, from the cracked kernels of corn which formed a staple food of this class of people. 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. 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. Another possibility, which may be a modern folk etymology, supposes that the term derives from “soda cracker”, a type of light wheat biscuit which dates in the Southern US to at least the Civil War. Cracker” has also been used as a proud or jocular self-description in the past. Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated. Late 19th century cattle drivers of the southeastern scrub land cracked whips to move cattle. Many slaves and free blacks joined the Seminoles and found work in the cattle business. Descendants of crackers are often proud of their heritage.

In 1947, the student body of Florida State University voted on the name of their athletic symbol. From a list of more than 100 choices, Seminoles was selected. The other finalists, in order of finish, were Statesmen, Rebels, Tarpons, Fighting Warriors, and Crackers. Before the Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta, the Atlanta minor league baseball team was known as the “Atlanta Crackers”. The Florida Cracker Trail is a route which cuts across central Florida, following the historic trail of the old cattle drives. A 1783 pejorative use of crackers specified men who “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”. Indians” who inhabit the “desert woods and mountains”.

In his 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet”, Malcolm X used the term “cracker” in reference to white people in a pejorative context. On November 29, 1993, in a speech given at Kean College in New Jersey, Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad called Pope John Paul II “a no good cracker”. In 2012, in Jacksonville, Florida, Michael Dunn murdered Jordan Davis in an argument over loud music coming from a car. Dunn alleged that he had heard the word “cracker” coming from the vehicle occupied by high school aged teenagers. Cracker’ conveys history of bigotry that still resonates”. Cracker: Cracker Culture in Florida History. Old times there are just not quite forgotten”.

Cracker : the cracker culture in Florida history. Hillbillies, Rednecks, Crackers and White Trash”. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. The Color of Words: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States. Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida. Guide to Florida Pioneer Sites: Exploring the Cracker Heritage.