I don't understand this discussion about cracker versus other racial terms. On a base level, saying that you can never be offended by a racial slur is asinine. If you want to delineate based on systemic oppression and power dynamics, then that's a nuanced discussion that probably doesn't need to occur in this thread.
As for everyone downplaying the term's effect on a personal level, I grew up in an area with an over 90% white population, with almost every minority being Native American. Someone in my community was called a "cracker" multiple times by two Native Americans in public. This was not uncommon, as tensions sometimes run high between white people and Native Americans in that community. But in this case, he was called a "cracker" while walking down the sidewalk before he had his fucking head caved in with baseball bats. They literally didn't know him and had never seen him before, but they put him in a coma. He never recovered from his injuries and died several years later.
That doesn't change that Native Americans are routinely treated as second class citizens still to this day, and most of them are the poorest members of my old community. They are discriminated against on the very soil taken from them, but their plight is not undermined by acknowledging that minorities can dehumanize. So obviously the attack I mentioned goes deeper socially than just some rogue bad apples, but it's still fucking dehumanizing when that word comes from someone who actively does or wants to cause you harm based on your skin color alone. I don't give a shit how you try to justify it.
