buckra

Buckra or Backra is a term of West African origin. It is mainly used in the Caribbean and in the Southeast United States. Originally, it was used by slaves to address their white slave master. Later the meaning was broadened to describe white people in general.

Etymology

"Buckra" has been found in many variants, successively bacceroe, bochara, backra, baccra, bakra, buckera, buckra, bockra,''Dictionary of Jamaican English''
p. 18. University of the West Indies Press, 2002 and more. It probably derives from the Ibibio and Efik Annang word mbakara, meaning (white) European or master.''Buckra''
Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press Oxford Dictionaries The word traces back to the 16th and 17th century slavery, when slaves were transported from Sub-Saharan African to plantations into the Caribbean by European colonizers.

Originally, it was used by slaves to address their white slave master and their overseers. Later the meaning was broadened to describe white people in general. After the abolition of slavery, the word survived to refer to white people, usually used by black people in the US in derogatory meaning.

In the Caribbean

From about the 16th century, enslaved West Africans, notably Igbo and Ibibio, were shipped to Jamaica to work on plantations. A book written by Allen Eric about Jamaica, published in 1896, is titled ''"Buckra" Land — Two weeks in Jamaica''. It mentions the word buckra, "meaning man", used by Jamaica black people to greet strangers.Allen Eric
''"Buckra" Land''
p. 23-24. Boston Press Club, Feb 1896. Available on archive.org In Jamaican Patois, both
''Bakra'' and ''Backra'' are translated as (white) slave master. In Jamaica, the written form and educated pronunciation is as buckra; in folk pronunciation rather as backra similar to the source word mbakara.

In Sranan Tongo, a creole language in the former Dutch colony Suriname, the usual spelling is ''Bakra'', originally referring to the white slave owner on a plantation, or a white master in general. Nowadays, it primarily refers to a Dutch white person, but may also mean a white person in general.

Also in Guyana, the original meaning was white plantation owner, later a white person, or even an important non-white.

Poor buckras

Barbados has a history of colonization and slavery too. From the 1630s, when Barbados had become an English colony, large numbers of poor indentured Irish people were brought to the Barbados to work on sugar plantations. Other whites, such as military prisoners, widows and orphans, brought to plantation-owners to work in the fields were shipped to the Caribbean, effectively as poorly paid and treated servants, not to be mistaken for slaves. They were meant to supplement the African slaves.''Barbadoes’: Cromwell and Irish migration to the Caribbean''.
History Ireland, Jul/Aug 2008 In Barbados, these endogamous poor, white-skinned people were also called "poor backras" or "buckras".''Barbados and the Melungeons of Appalachia.''
L.E. Salazar, The Multiracial Activist, 2002.
"In Barbados, the term “abandoned people” was used to describe an endogamous group of poor, white-skinned people who were also called “poor backras or buckras”, a name not far removed from the epithet “buck” used to describe male North American Natives and Natives of Guyana in South America nor much different from Buckor or Bucco as it is sometimes written in some documents."

Use in the United States

In the second half of the 17th century, tens of thousands of indentured settlers of Barbados migrated to the other colonies when they did not secure the little piece of land they were supposed to get after expiration of their contract. Many moved on to the North American mainland. South Carolina in particular was founded by settlers from Barbados who brought many enslaved Africans with them. These slaves spoke an English-based Creole language that later became known as Gullah. This Creole was allowed to develop due to the fact that enslaved Africans in coastal South Carolina had limited contact with Whites or Blacks from other areas of the South. This Creole is still spoken today by descendants of the Gullah people in the South Carolina and Georgia low-country region.

Today, "buckra" is still used in the Southeast United States by the Gullah people, referring to white people. It refers especially the poor, although the buckras were, in the eyes of the black slaves, the rich class in former times:

"De nigger was de right arm of de buckra class. The buckra was de horn of plenty for de nigger. Both suffer in consequence of freedom."...(Moses Lyles, a former slave in South Carolina, speaking in the 1930s). As clearly noted in this 1916 publication, there was also the white trash level of buckra, referred to by both Southern races as "poor buckras"...locally pronounced "po' buckras".

See also

*List of English words of African origin

References

{{White people terms

African-American slang
Gullah culture
Ibibio
Pejorative terms for white people