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“I understand the word to be from Florida ranchers cracking their whips to move cattle.”

‘Lots of meanings. The one associated with the term most is the slavemasters who “cracked” the whip on their slaves. More than a little offensive to those who owned no slaves and to those who fought to have the slaves freed. Biting the hand that freed you is as ugly as the N word.

There is at least some indication that the Florida and south Georgia use of “Cracker” to describe descendants of the white frontiersmen who settled the territory, is a corruption of the Spanish “quaquero,” meaning Quaker. That's what the Spanish called all Protestants there in the early period.

This is different from the English-derived derogatory term, which arose from the Celtic “craic,” meaning braggart or joker. Scotch-Irish frontier settlers from the Shenandoah on down into Carolina and north Georgia were called “crackers” by the Anglican English establishment.

And, both are different still, from the historic black usage of the term, which is a derogatory name for the class of people who were plantation overseers, landless, not people with any material wealth. Poor white trash, essentially.

So, when Rachel Jeantel referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-@ cracker,” was she calling him:

A) A descendant of Protestant early Florida settlers
B) A backwoods braggart or joker, or
C) Poor white trash who liked to crack a whip on black people?

I'm more than reasonably certain that both A and B can be ruled out, so she was speaking in a racially derogatory manner that itself implied racism on the part of Zimmerman, never mind that he's about as white as Barack Obama and should therefore be incapable of it under the cultural Marxist standard of the day.