peckerwood

peckerwood

offensive slang A derogatory term for a white person, especially a man, usually used to imply that they are poor or uneducated. Derives from an obsolete term for a woodpecker. Primarily heard in US.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

peckerwood

and wood
n. a poor white person. (Very old southern term for a woodpecker.) What’s that peckerwood want in this hood?
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • saltine
  • foundry
  • nut factory
  • nut-foundry
  • nuthatch
  • nuthouse
  • redneck
  • queen
  • Queens
  • latrino
References in periodicals archive
You don't want to be one of those low-life peckerwoods, now do you?"
Peckerwood Lake got its name from the thousands of woodpeckers that tapped out tunes on the acres of standing dead timber created when the lake was impounded.
There are hundreds of acres of woodlands that border LaGrue Bayou and Peckerwood Lake, which are home to a sizable deer herd, turkeys introduced by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, waterfowl and other game.
When the girls ape her grandmother's posture, Maya weeps, thinks of getting her uncle's rifle, and wants to throw lye and pepper on them and to scream at them "that they were dirty, scummy peckerwoods" (24-25).
During the great Southern racial struggles of the 1960's, the late Homer Bigart filed a story in which he wrote that the courthouse at Philadelphia, Miss., where the sheriff and staff were accused in the kidnapping and murder of three civil rights workers, was surrounded by "rednecks and peckerwoods." According to local community beliefs the crowd was instead made up of irate citizens out to protect their sheriff from undue "outside interference."
"Those peckerwoods can rot for all I care," he continued, "but after a while they're going to look for someone to blame their troubles on, and when that happens, the four of us had better duck." Throughout that strange autumn of storms and drenchings, Master Yehudi seemed distracted with worry, as if he were contemplating some unnameable disaster, a thing so black he dared not even mention it to us.
I called out his name, and those peckerwoods heard me.
But you have to think of life like it is--and these here Chicago peckerwoods is some baaaad peckerwoods.
In this case, however, the frustration of the South and Southern Midwest over the rise of godless modernity at the hands of the North and the Easterners built up over a century and a half during which Southerners were derided as "peckerwoods and rednecks," as the former segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, once put it.
And you know there's just one thing wrong with encouraging one of those peckerwoods to kill a n--.
Even when the "peckerwoods" protest Bob's beating as too severe and possibly fatal, the president, supported by two policemen, orders them to continue, and the workers remain paralyzed under the multiple threat of the police force, the military, and their boss.
Now, I know you don't know much about Alabama, but peckerwoods in Alabama would kill a colored man for waking up on Sunday.