Honky (also spelled honkie or sometimes honkey) is a derogatory term used to refer to White people, predominantly heard in the United States. The first recorded use of "honky" in this context may date back to 1946, although the use of "honky-tonk" occurred in films well before that time. Etymology The exact origins of the word are generally unknown and postulations about the subject vary. Hungarian Honky may be a variant of hunky, which was a derivative of Bohunk, a slur for various Slavic and Hungarian immigrants who moved to America from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 1900s. Wolof Honky may also derive from the term "xonq nopp" which, in the West African language Wolof, literally means "red-eared person". The term may have originated with Wolof-speaking people brought to the U.S. It has been used by Black Americans as a pejorative for White people. Other The phrase honky-tonk refers to a particular type of country music, most commonly provided at bars for its patrons, or more commonly, may even refer to the bar itself. Honky may have come from coal miners in Oak Hill, West Virginia. The miners were segregated; Blacks in one section, Anglo-Whites in another. Foreigners who could not speak English, mostly Whites, were separated from both groups into an area known as "Hunk Hill". These male laborers were known as "Hunkies". The term may have begun in the meat packing plants of Chicago. According to Robert Hendrickson, author of the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Black workers in Chicago meatpacking plants picked up the term from White workers and began applying it indiscriminately to all Whites. Notable uses Honky was adopted as a pejorative in 1967 by Black Power militants within Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) seeking a rebuttal for the term nigger. The Department of Defense stated in 1967 that National Chairman of the SNCC, H. Rap Brown, told a Black audience in Cambridge that "You should burn that school down and then go take over the honkie's school" on June 24, 1967. Brown went on to say: "[I]f America don't come 'round, we got to burn it down. You better get some guns, brother. The only thing the honky respects is a gun. You give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might shoot Lady Bird." Honky has occasionally been used even for White allies of African Americans, as