Honky - Possible Meanings, Origins and Uses

Possible Meanings, Origins and Uses

Honky may be a variant of hunky, which was a deviation of Bohunk, a slur for Bohemian-Hungarian immigrants in the early 1900s. Honky may have come from coal miners in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The miners were segregated; blacks in one section, whites in another. Foreigners who couldn't speak English, mostly from Europe, were separated from both groups into an area known as "Hunk Hill". These male laborers were known as "Hunkies."

Honky may also derive from the term "xonq nopp" which, in the West African language Wolof means, literally, "red-eared person" or "white person". The term may have originated with Wolof-speaking slaves brought to the US.

Another documented theory, and possible explanation for the origins of the word, is that honky was a nickname black people gave white men (called "johns" or "curb crawlers") who would honk their car horns and wait for prostitutes to come outside in urban areas (such as Harlem and red-light districts) in the early 1910s.

Honky was adopted as a pejorative in 1967 by black militants within Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) seeking a rebuttal for the term nigger. National Chairman of the SNCC, H. Rap Brown, on June 24, 1967, told an audience of blacks in Cambridge, "You should burn that school down and then go take over the honky's school." Brown went on to say: "If America don't come round, we got to burn it down. You better get some guns, brotha. The only thing the honky respects is a gun. You give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might shoot Ladybird."

Honky has occasionally (if intentionally ironic) been used even for whites supportive of African-Americans, as seen in the 1968 trial of Black Panther Party member Huey Newton, when fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver created pins for Newton's white supporters stating "Honkies for Huey."

As of 1990 in North Carolina, it should be reported that the term "honky" was commonly thought to refer to a past practice of whites "honking" a car horn, while driving in the Black community. It was understood that these whites were in the black neighborhood for deviant and anti-social behavior, such as picking up prostitutes or drugs, and being afraid to get out of their cars would “honk” their horns to get the attention of a black accomplice. There is no written reference or documentation to this usage of course, but nevertheless it is an accurate description of how the word "honky" was thought to have derived at that time in North Carolina.

In Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore and also in Hongkong / Hong Kong itself, the term is used in a casual nature to refer to people originating from Hong Kong. It is also a familiar short form for "honcarenko" (pronounced "honk-a-ren-ko") which is the Slavic word for "Ukrainian".