Twitch suspension of Hasan Piker sparks debate over what qualifies as racist language

A 2013 article from NPR's "Code Switch," which explores issues of race and identity, delved into the etymology of the term after it surfaced in George Zimmerman's trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Academics and historians interviewed by the article's author, Gene Demby, dated the term's use back to Shakespearean times when it was applied as an "insult for an obnoxious bloviator" and was usually directed at people from Scotland or Ireland. When immigrants from those countries crossed the Atlantic to America, the term followed them. Jelani Cobb, a historian now at Columbia University and a staff writer for the New Yorker interviewed by Demby, noted it was later tied to poor White farm hands "since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip."