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Honky, Honkey or Honkie is a predominantly American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 derogatory racial slur for white people
White people

White people is a term which is usually used to refer to Human characterized, at least in part, by the light Human skin color. It often refers narrowly to people claiming ancestry exclusively from Europe....
.

Honky is a corruption of hungy or hunky, a term which originated in the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago. The term may derive from "Bohunk" (Bohemian-Hungarian), which was used to refer to central Europeans. Black and Hungarian workers were two of the largest ethnic groups in the Chicago meat industry.






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Honky, Honkey or Honkie is a predominantly American
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
 derogatory racial slur for white people
White people

White people is a term which is usually used to refer to Human characterized, at least in part, by the light Human skin color. It often refers narrowly to people claiming ancestry exclusively from Europe....
.

Honky is a corruption of hungy or hunky, a term which originated in the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago. The term may derive from "Bohunk" (Bohemian-Hungarian), which was used to refer to central Europeans. Black and Hungarian workers were two of the largest ethnic groups in the Chicago meat industry. Racial and ethnic tension between the two groups led Black workers to begin calling Hungarian workers, and those perceived as Hungarians, hunky, perhaps in retaliation for the racist epithets to which blacks were subject. The corruption 'honky' emerged shortly thereafter.

Honkey was later adopted as a pejorative in 1967 by black militants within SNCC
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC was one of the principal organizations of the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s....
 seeking a rebuttal for the term nigger
Nigger

Nigger is a noun in the English language, most notable as a pejorative term and common ethnic slur for black people, and also as an informal slang term, among other contexts....
. National Chairman of the SNCC, H. Rap Brown
H. Rap Brown

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin , also known as H. Rap Brown, came to prominence in the 1960s as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party....
, on June 24, 1967, told an audience of blacks in Cambridge, "You should burn that school down and then go take over the honkey's school." Brown went on to say: "If America don't come `round, we got to burn it down. You better get some guns, brother. The only thing the honkey respects is a gun. You give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might shoot Ladybird."

On the TV show The Jeffersons
The Jeffersons

The Jeffersons is an United States situation comedy that was broadcast on CBS from January 18, 1975, through June 25, 1985, lasting 11 seasons and a total of List of The Jeffersons episodes produced by Tandem Productions from 1975-1982 and Embassy Television from 1982-1985....
, George Jefferson regularly referred to white people as honkies. In a popular sketch on SNL, Chevy Chase
Chevy Chase

Cornelius Crane ?Chevy? Chase is an United States Emmy Award comedian, writer, and television and film actor. Born into a prominent family, Chase quickly became a key cast member in the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live, where his Weekend Update skit quickly became a staple of the show....
 and Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III was an United States comedian, actor and writer.Pryor was a storyteller known for unflinching examinations of racism and customs in modern life, and was well-known for his frequent use of colorful, vulgar and profane language and racial epithets....
 used both "nigger" (Chase) and "honky" (Pryor) in reference to one another during a "racist word association interview."

Also, on the show Scrubs
Scrubs (TV series)

Scrubs is an Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning American comedy-drama that premiered on October 2, 2001, on NBC. It was created by Bill Lawrence and is produced by ABC Studios ....
, the main character, J.D., uses this term to describe himself.

The word honky may also refer to a particular type of country music
Country music

Country music is a blend of popular American music forms originally found in the Southern United States and the Appalachian Mountains. It has roots in Traditional music, Celtic music, gospel music, and old-time music and evolved rapidly in the 1920s....
, called honky tonk
Honky tonk

A honky tonk is a type of bar with musical entertainment that is common in the Southwestern United States and Southern United States United States....
.

See also

  • Cracker
    Cracker (pejorative)

    "Cracker", sometimes "white cracker", is a pejorative term for a whites, mainly used in the U.S. Southern states United States, but in recent decades it has entered common usage throughout North America....


Footnotes