Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch considers “cracker” a serious racial slur, a fact many only learned this week after socialist streamer Hasan Piker and others were banned for saying it. This latest bizarre moderation decision comes months after protests for Twitch’s failure to protect streamers of color for racism and harassment.
The ban wave began with Piker’s mods who were removed after using the words in chat earlier this week. Some of Piker’s fans considered the term hateful and out of line. Piker did not. “I’ve been called ‘cracker’ more times than every single one of you fucking pasty little cracker bitches in my chat, okay?” he said at one point.
After Piker came to his mods’ defense, he was also hit with a ban starting on December 13. Whether or not cracker should be a bannable offense was catapulted into discourse, meaning that streamers like Ian “Vaush” Kochinski started using the term in their commentary on the controversy—only to also get banned for it. Another streamer, Fawn, was also recently banned from Twitch, and wrote on Twitter that she believed it was for the same reason.
The term cracker dates back to at least Shakespeare, and was historically deployed against poor white people and immigrants by other white people. At some point last century it started also being used specifically by Black people against racist white people. Now, as the far right tries to fuel racist panics wherever it can keep its stranglehold over this country, culture warriors have tried to elevate cracker into an anti-white slur as offensive as any other racial epithet. The problem, of course, is that racism refers to overarching power structures, not if an innocuous word made you feel bad. Nor is “cracker” equivalent to words historically used to subjugate and literally harm BIPOC.
