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Editor’s note: Rounding out our hat trick of remixes of racial epithets I thought I’d drop this classic favorite of TONY’s KANSAS CITY.

I remember as a kid learning that the term ‘Uncle Tom’ is derisive, which struck me as a bit ironic since I have an uncle whose name is Tom. My uncle Tom is a rebbe in Brooklyn. He is funny and quirky and really intelligent too. So I needed to know how having an ‘Uncle Tom’ was not a good thing.

I asked BILLY SUNDAY about the meaning of ‘Uncle Tom’ and what’s wrong with ‘selling out,’ since it is a phrase I’ve heard uttered in connection with the first.

The Uncle Tom character is someone who’s been given benefits and guarantees while he works hard to please his master. The Uncle Tom believes that due solely to his hard work, he has secured his master’s favor. The Uncle Tom believes that the master’s doctrines are universally beneficial and equitable.

The Whip Cracker is completely different from the Uncle Tom in that the Whip Cracker understands that the benefits he receives are issued not for meritous acheivement but for complicit behavior. The Whip Cracker doesn’t believe that he is favored by the master but understands that if he complies with the master’s programs, then he will be spared from the master’s wrath. The Whip Cracker knows the dirty tricks the master employs to control his holdings and the Whip Cracker has no empathy for the moral consequences. All the Cracker wants to know is,”When am I going to eat?”

In the end, the Uncle Tom is a tragic figure because he believes that he is truly loved by his controllers, whereas the Whip Cracker understands and accepts that he is only a servant responsible for sustaining the master’s control.

Editor’s note: From deep in the archives BILLY SUNDAY drops another ReMix jewel on your plate. There’s a reason that we say you can’t handle the truth.

When nearly everyone hears this word directed at someone as an epithet, they immediately think of the racial component associated with the word. This pretty much works the same way for the word ‘nigger,’ unless it is two blacks speaking to one another. What most people don’t know, since they never went to school anyhoo, is that the words ‘nigger’ and ‘cracker’ were never created to describe an insult to one’s ethnicity. These words were created to identify one’s vocation.

The ‘cracker’ was the production supervisor on a plantation or farm. It was his job to monitor the slaves and keep them from slacking off. As he sat on his horse and trotted around the plantation, he might lash his whip on anyone he felt was unproductive. Many times he would use his whip purely as a means of intimidation, to let all the plantation workers know that it was going to be one of those lifetimes in which they would wish they had never been born.

The slaves did their best to avoid beatings from these enforcers, but they could not escape the best part of the American chattel slavery system: violence was often random and indiscriminate. This kept the slaves in a constant state of confusion and fear. The slaves began to call these enforcers ‘crackers’ because of the sound that the whip made when it was lashed across someone’s sweat drenched skin. The slaves would warn each other of the ‘crackers’ presence by saying the word rapidly and repeating it many times. Imagine the croaking of a frog. In this way, slaves developed a communication system that was undecipherable to the plantations’ managers.

At first, a typical ‘cracker’ might be the land owner and his male children, but as the plantations grew, ‘crackers’ were hired from the many European immigrants that came to America to escape the poverty and famine in their countries. Often times these new immigrants were quartered with the slaves and there are many instances of hired immigrants rejecting the task of violent enforcement against their roommates. Those immigrants would find themselves out of work and, worse still, disenfranchised from within their own community. In this way the landowners forced these immigrants to play their position, or risk being ostracized, destitute and literally worse off than the slaves.

Really large plantations even used other slaves as ‘crackers,’ which became a supremely effective tool for controlling the worker population. These slaves/’crackers’ knew which workers to target with intimidation and violence in order to maintain control and they even knew the slaves’ secret languages and dialects, so they could serve as effective translators for their managers and the landowners This is the most important fact we need to remember. The Black ‘cracker’ was put in place to regulate the Black populus. All the Black ‘cracker’ cared for was making sure that he secured a steady meal for himself. He would do whatever he was told by the manager or the big boss, the landowner.

Today these ‘crackers’ manifest themselves in many different ways, but their ultimate goal remains the same: to secure a steady meal for themselves. They receive their reward by helping to control the slaves through various measures using intimidation, violence and acting as translators to the owners.

Some might call this, ‘Getting Rich or Dying While Trying’.

Editor’s note: ROBBIE from UnKut dot com has given me the idea to remix some of these DP Dot Com favorites because of their relevancy. MICHAEL ‘KRAMER’ RICHARDS also had a hand in these remix drops as well. Today BILLY SUNDAY will take his turn at explaining what these powerful terms actually mean.

Everybody thinks that a ‘wigger’ is a white guy that dresses and acts ‘Black’. That has confused me for years since I have no idea what dressing and acting Black really means. Luckily, I finally figured it out and DALLAS PENN asked me to share my understanding of what a ‘wigger’ really is…

The ‘wigger’ is a tragic character in the cosmology of white folks. The ‘wigger’ wants to be white as much as any other white, but because of economics the ‘wigger’ can not be white. When a neighborhood is busted open with Black residents, all the white that have the financial means to relocate do so immediately, but the ‘wiggers’ are the whites that can not afford to relocate so they become ‘wiggerfied’. They must now live in a neighborhood with Blacks and use the same local services like supermarkets, hardware stores, delicatessens, etc., that the Blacks use. Some ‘wiggers’ will leave their neighborhoods and attempt to access the establishments that regular white has access to. Some like to call this passing. These places often must hire security personnel to dissuade the ‘wiggers’ from entering. Those ‘wiggers’ that are able to a evade the initial security clearance will be discovered when their zip code is revealed at the check out.

For all the readers that think that being Black in America is difficult, just know that being white in America and forced to live amongst Blacks is almost unbearable.