As a native Atlantan, I know that the term "cracker" has been a disparaging term for at least since the Atlanta Crackers were disbanded.kurt said:
NY Times "Cracker" Vacation Experience
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yipes....
Having moved from the south to upstate NY (I'm an academic dean--academics move to move up), I can attest that northerners, esp New Yorkers, do hold the stereotypical views expressed earlier. But I was born in Vermont--I think that the rural stereotypes (ie yokel) still hold. Interestingly, the poverty I saw in rural Alabama was little different from the poverty that is hidden in rural Vermont....
Class issues are the key here, not regional ones. The NY Times is laughable in its treatment of the south--to use lit crit terms, the "south is other". (ie, not mainstream). But this article addresses issues of class, not region--similar articles have covered New York city types moving to Vermont or now upstate NY to "become rural"--(they've bought up prime farmland for 2nd homes). there's a fascination w. an imagined American ideal of "rural" and both today's article and others play into this imagined ideal. But in reality, there is no understanding of what being rural and poor is all about.
Don't take offense (tho the southern issues are real--I grit my teeth often when folks at my college ask me why on earth I'd go south for my vacation). The amusing thing is to think that people would want to emulate the poverty of the past--and yet the reality is that it takes a subzero frig to "create harmony in the woods." Its just like those who moved to Vermont to discover themselves amongst the "simple people and the maple trees"--they had no idea about how real Vermonters lived.
Having moved from the south to upstate NY (I'm an academic dean--academics move to move up), I can attest that northerners, esp New Yorkers, do hold the stereotypical views expressed earlier. But I was born in Vermont--I think that the rural stereotypes (ie yokel) still hold. Interestingly, the poverty I saw in rural Alabama was little different from the poverty that is hidden in rural Vermont....
Class issues are the key here, not regional ones. The NY Times is laughable in its treatment of the south--to use lit crit terms, the "south is other". (ie, not mainstream). But this article addresses issues of class, not region--similar articles have covered New York city types moving to Vermont or now upstate NY to "become rural"--(they've bought up prime farmland for 2nd homes). there's a fascination w. an imagined American ideal of "rural" and both today's article and others play into this imagined ideal. But in reality, there is no understanding of what being rural and poor is all about.
Don't take offense (tho the southern issues are real--I grit my teeth often when folks at my college ask me why on earth I'd go south for my vacation). The amusing thing is to think that people would want to emulate the poverty of the past--and yet the reality is that it takes a subzero frig to "create harmony in the woods." Its just like those who moved to Vermont to discover themselves amongst the "simple people and the maple trees"--they had no idea about how real Vermonters lived.
The Majorie Rawlings experience living in the swamps is a good reminder, although she had an ice box, not a Sub-Zero. And I guess that "Cracker" no longer seems disparaging to me as a Florida native, but I am guilty of some self deprecating humor involving that term. One holiday season, we made a banana pudding for some friends visiting from Boston and called it "Cracker Trifle." (They made fun of it, but then ate the entire bowl of leftovers from the fridge in the middle of the night!) No better midnight snack than to "git me some cold 'nanner pudding with that meringue all mashed into it." Can you dig it? 
BTW I saw on the Internet that there was also an Atlanta Black Crackers team. I did not know that. Can we say oxymoron?GVM said:
Okay...I'll admit that I like the show Laguna Beach on MTV. That's all I'm saying.
wlaner said:
Yep, that's one guilty pleasure there. Liked last year better though. Kristen...NO LC...YES!
Cracker Chic - St. Pete Times - 4/6/03
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/04/06/Floridian/Call_it_Cracker_chic.shtml
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/04/06/Floridian/Call_it_Cracker_chic.shtml
"Cracker chic," or the faux-distressed look of poor folks' homes, is all the rage in Florida according to an article by Queena Sook Kim (I met her when she was researching the article at WaterColor) in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required, so the gist is quoted below):
Architect Jim Strickland bought a 40-by-80-foot lot in a posh Gulf Coast resort community. On it, he's building a poor man's home.
With a corrugated-metal roof, a screened-in porch and clapboard siding, Mr. Strickland's new house has many of the same features as the shacks built by some of Florida's early settlers. The style reminds the 60-year-old Atlanta native of a "less formal, and less affected" time.
[?]
Now, several upscale developers and homeowners are embracing the down-at-heels look -- right down to the outhouse, although all these designer projects have plumbing. The trend has even attracted its own, somewhat controversial name: cracker style.
Folksy style: New houses with corrugated-metal roofs and wrap-around porches aim to evoke old Florida shacks.
[?]
"Crackers lived close to nature," says Mike Reininger, a former executive at Walt Disney Co.'s hospitality development group, who is the creative force behind WaterColor, the development where Mr. Strickland is building his home. "The style has a down-home feel." Including lots, houses in the development range from $750,000 to $3 million.
Local folklore has it that the term "cracker" alludes to the sounds of a whip cracking over the wild cattle that early Floridians hunted. Shakespeare used it as a derogatory term to describe boastful ruffians, and British colonizers later adopted it to refer to backwoods settlers throughout the Southeast. According to Dana Ste. Claire, author of the book "Cracker: The Cracker Culture in Florida History," the first significant wave of crackers entered Florida in the 1800s, when the state passed into American hands.
In the early 20th century, crackers were lauded as craftsmen and embraced by some Southerners as a sort of unsung hero akin to the cowboy. But during the civil-rights movement, Malcolm X famously used the term to deride white racists.
Some older Floridians shake their heads at the recent evolution of cracker from a slur to a symbol of architectural chic. Others are bewildered that people would pay big bucks to live in a fancy version of the kind of house that many were happy to leave behind.
"If you have ever been in a cracker home during a thunderstorm," says Curtis Law, a retired Pasco County commissioner who is a fifth-generation Floridian, "you wouldn't want to get back in one."
[?]
At WaterColor, 30 miles outside Panama City in the Florida Panhandle, developers are going beyond architecture to offer the "cracker experience," says Mr. Reininger. Instead of a golf course within the subdivision, WaterColor has fishing pros at a 220-acre natural lake to teach how to bait a hook and reel in a line. Every year, 15,000 bales of pine needles are brought in to hide the white sand and provide a backwoods feel. Large chunks of weathered tree branches are carefully strewn along trails so "it looks like they just fell out of a tree," says head gardener Snookie Parrish.
The desire to get "back to the basics" is what drew Fort Worth native Michelle Coslik and her husband Steve to a two-story, $1 million vacation home in WaterColor, which is being developed by the homebuilding subsidiary of Jacksonville-based St. Joe Co.
Ms. Coslik's home features 1,000 square feet of screened-in porch. The screen door is made of mahogany and fitted with hinges that mute the slam into a sort of soft thud that one WaterColor marketing executive describes as "the sound of growing up in the South." The cost of the door, including handle, is $700.
Ms. Coslik, 36, isn't using her porch to escape the heat as the early settlers once did. She has air conditioning for that. For her, the porch is a place to meditate and practice Yoga. "When I think cracker," she says, "I think of getting back to the essence and away from material aspects of life."
Architect Jim Strickland bought a 40-by-80-foot lot in a posh Gulf Coast resort community. On it, he's building a poor man's home.
With a corrugated-metal roof, a screened-in porch and clapboard siding, Mr. Strickland's new house has many of the same features as the shacks built by some of Florida's early settlers. The style reminds the 60-year-old Atlanta native of a "less formal, and less affected" time.
[?]
Now, several upscale developers and homeowners are embracing the down-at-heels look -- right down to the outhouse, although all these designer projects have plumbing. The trend has even attracted its own, somewhat controversial name: cracker style.
Folksy style: New houses with corrugated-metal roofs and wrap-around porches aim to evoke old Florida shacks.
[?]
"Crackers lived close to nature," says Mike Reininger, a former executive at Walt Disney Co.'s hospitality development group, who is the creative force behind WaterColor, the development where Mr. Strickland is building his home. "The style has a down-home feel." Including lots, houses in the development range from $750,000 to $3 million.
Local folklore has it that the term "cracker" alludes to the sounds of a whip cracking over the wild cattle that early Floridians hunted. Shakespeare used it as a derogatory term to describe boastful ruffians, and British colonizers later adopted it to refer to backwoods settlers throughout the Southeast. According to Dana Ste. Claire, author of the book "Cracker: The Cracker Culture in Florida History," the first significant wave of crackers entered Florida in the 1800s, when the state passed into American hands.
In the early 20th century, crackers were lauded as craftsmen and embraced by some Southerners as a sort of unsung hero akin to the cowboy. But during the civil-rights movement, Malcolm X famously used the term to deride white racists.
Some older Floridians shake their heads at the recent evolution of cracker from a slur to a symbol of architectural chic. Others are bewildered that people would pay big bucks to live in a fancy version of the kind of house that many were happy to leave behind.
"If you have ever been in a cracker home during a thunderstorm," says Curtis Law, a retired Pasco County commissioner who is a fifth-generation Floridian, "you wouldn't want to get back in one."
[?]
At WaterColor, 30 miles outside Panama City in the Florida Panhandle, developers are going beyond architecture to offer the "cracker experience," says Mr. Reininger. Instead of a golf course within the subdivision, WaterColor has fishing pros at a 220-acre natural lake to teach how to bait a hook and reel in a line. Every year, 15,000 bales of pine needles are brought in to hide the white sand and provide a backwoods feel. Large chunks of weathered tree branches are carefully strewn along trails so "it looks like they just fell out of a tree," says head gardener Snookie Parrish.
The desire to get "back to the basics" is what drew Fort Worth native Michelle Coslik and her husband Steve to a two-story, $1 million vacation home in WaterColor, which is being developed by the homebuilding subsidiary of Jacksonville-based St. Joe Co.
Ms. Coslik's home features 1,000 square feet of screened-in porch. The screen door is made of mahogany and fitted with hinges that mute the slam into a sort of soft thud that one WaterColor marketing executive describes as "the sound of growing up in the South." The cost of the door, including handle, is $700.
Ms. Coslik, 36, isn't using her porch to escape the heat as the early settlers once did. She has air conditioning for that. For her, the porch is a place to meditate and practice Yoga. "When I think cracker," she says, "I think of getting back to the essence and away from material aspects of life."