Becky (slang)

[2] In 2019, dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster wrote that "Becky" was "increasingly functioning as an epithet, and being used especially to refer to a white woman who is ignorant of both her privilege and her prejudice.

[4] In USA Today in 2016, Cara Kelly suggested that the term dates to the social climber Becky Sharp, protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair (1848) and the 2004 film of the same name.

"[1] "Becky" is the title and subject of the fourth segment of Jean Toomer's Harlem Renaissance novel Cane (1923), about a white woman with two black sons.

[7] The modern term, the "ur-Becky",[6] is thought to date to Sir Mix-a-Lot's song "Baby Got Back" (1992), where one woman says to another: "Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt".

[10] The meaning settled on a young white woman, unaware of her racial and social privilege, who loves Starbucks and Uggs, and who might take photographs of her Frappuccino.

Lyrically, references to specific locations and the mention of "fourteen words"[14] suggest underlying racial tensions and the character’s resistance to imposed boundaries.

[15] The following year, a white woman in California became known as "BBQ Becky" after calling the police because two African-American men were using a charcoal grill in a park.