And I Ain't Talking About Ritz

The other thing, in terms of old business is this. So Cath and I watched a lot of television when we were in Boston for a couple of reasons. Her parents have cable and we don’t. The TV was in our room. And we were doing a lot of sort of mindless things (packing, putting together envelopes with documents) and the TV was nice to have on to help pass the time. Plus, we have a slight addiction to Law and Order, and Comedy Central was showing a marathon of Chappelle’s Show.

But the other network we watched a lot of was the Food Network. Don’t get me started on the various chefs on this network and the bizarre personalities that they either have or affect. But one thing in particular stands out. Paula Deen, the older woman with a Southern accent (though I’m reasonably certain she’s from, like, New Jersey, and not Savannah, Georgia, like her wikipedia page says) was preparing an engagement dinner for her brother Bubba (really). She made homemade pork rinds by (if I remember correctly) baking the skin off a ham. When she made them, they were really crispy and looked very tasty, although I have to confess that I’ve never actually eaten a pork rind. In fact, they were so crispy that when she cracked one, she described the sound it made as, “That’s music to a cracker’s ear.”

Really? “Music to a cracker’s ear?” I clearly know what she was getting at, but I have to admit that I was surprised to hear such a thing on television. Is “cracker” being reclaimed as a term of endearment? I know that lots of people (including my former professor at Columbia, Aaron Fox, and my current Penn colleague, Jennie Noakes) have written about how terms like “redneck” and “hillbilly” are being used within communities, after having formerly been used by outsiders as terms of abuse. (And for our purposes, it’s particularly interesting that this often happens around music. Also, there’s obviously a huge discourse about this with the n-word, too.) But cracker? At least according to our friends at urbandictionary.com, the etymology of that word comes from the crack of a slavemaster’s whip, hardly the type of thing one would want to rehabilitate and valorize. In fact, my experience is that “cracker” is primarily used by African-Americans to refer to white racists. Is this something that Paula Deen wants to identify with?

Whatever. I mean, I understand that words only have the meanings that we choose to give them, that no meaning is self-evident, that there’s a “struggle for the possession of the sign” (Hebdige), that “il n’y a pas hors-texte” (Derrida), and that words are free-floating signifiers. And I should also put it out there that I don’t really have any stake in this game. The peculiar kind of semi-urban Upper Midwestern Lutheran whiteness that I was born into doesn’t really contain “crackers.” I like to think it’s because there isn’t very much racism in the community I grew up in, but that may just be me looking back with rose-colored glasses.

So, what’s up with “cracker”? Is this a term of endearment now? Can I call one of my white friends a “cracker” and have it taken the right way. And for my purposes, the other thing that I’m really interested in is: is there music out there that deals with “crackers” in a positive light? Questions, questions.