To be clear, racism in America is still very much a problem and is almost always directed at non-whites. That said, racist slurs for whites do exist and their use — like all racial slurs — is against Twitch's terms of service.
Twitch has been tackling its racism issues since last year and although progress has been slow, it's still at least making progress. Streamers, users, and moderators are all receiving bans for using racial slurs.
Case in point, HasanAbi's moderators were banned for 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 vent his outrage over the whole debacle.
“Absolutely insane that Twitch banned two of my mods for using the word cracker," wrote HasanAbi. "One of is black and the other is brown. Does Twitch actually believe cracker is a slur?”
It's not just Twitch. According to Wikipedia, "cracker" has been a slur since the 1700s. First, it referred to the rural poor in the southern United States, but it's believed to have been co-opted by slaves in the 1800s to refer to slave owners. "Cracker" in this context meant the person who "cracks" the whip.
Cracker was more widely used as a racial slur against white people in the 1960s after Malcolm X's speech "The Ballot or the Bullet." It's perhaps not as immediately revulsive as the N-word, but it's still a slur and that makes it against Twitch's terms of service.
Admittedly, it's not as widely used as even a decade ago, but HasanAbi should be as easily able to look this information up as anyone else, so his outrage over the bans seems a little hard to grasp.
But not as hard to grasp as Soulja Boy's recent double ban. Rapper Soulja Boy also got banned from Twitch twice over the weekend, but nobody is quite sure why. It's believed to have been related to copyrighted music, but Twitch isn't saying and Soulja is as in the dark as everyone else.
