honky

Origin: Sense of “factory hand” attested from 1946. Compare hunky, bohunk. Most likely from Hungarian, Slav, eastern European; any white person, an African-American vernacular shortening of Hungarian. Another possible etymon is , a term frequently used in African languages to describe white men. As a term of racial abuse it was popularized by the Black Panther Party starting from 1967, who sought a rebuttal to nigger. Origin information sourced from Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0).