Twitch has been tackling its racism issues since last year, and despite being slow, progress has still been making progress. Everybody receives bans for using racist slurs. The moderators banned from using the word “cracker” on Saturday. Strangely, HasanAbi doesn’t seem to think that “cracker” is a pejorative at all, since he took to Twitter to say he’s resenting the whole debacle. The word Cracker is extremely crazy. Twitch bans two of my mods,” wrote Hasan Abi. Two is black and a darker. Is the cracker actually the slur? It isn’t only Twitch. According to Wikipedia, “cracker” is a slur since the 1700s. First, it refers to the poor in the south of the US, but presumably in the 1800’s the slave’s decision to make reference to slave owners. In this case, the “Cracker” meant that person who “cracks the whip”. Cracker became increasingly used as a racial slur in the 1960s after Malcolm X’s speech “The Ballot or the Bullet” came to fame. It probably isn’t as immediately revulsive as the N-word, but it is still a slur, so is not true of Twitch’s terms of service. It is certainly not the same as a decade ago, but HasanAbi should look this information as easily as anyone else, so his outrage about the bans seems a little overwhelming. But this isn’t as hard as Soulja Boy’s recent double ban. Rapper Soulja Boy got canceled from Twitch twice over the weekend, but no one knows why. It’s thought that this was related to copyrighted music, but Twitch isn’t saying that and Soulja is as dark as everybody else.
