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On 8 July 2015, Change.org user Ryan Koch of Des Moines initiated a petition on that site seeking to Change the name of Cracker Barrel to Caucasian Barrel. That petition appeared at a time of heightened racial controversy in the United States: in particular, while debate was ongoing about whether display of the Confederate flag should be retired to primarily historical contexts in the wake of a racially-motivated shooting at a Charleston, South Carolina, church on 17 June 2015. The petition facetiously suggested that the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store chain of restaurants and gift shops employed an offensive slur in its name: The petition was popular on social media sites, where some users found it clever (and others claimed the joke as their own): The petition suggested the name Cracker Barrel was suspect, as everyone knows crackers don't come in barrels. However, an obituary for Cracker Barrel founder Dan Evins published in the Washington Post in 2012 gave the following explanation for the chain's nomenclature: According to NPR, the pejorative term cracker was essentially reclaimed by poor white people well before the Cracker Barrel chain existed: After his tongue-in-cheek petition garnered a good deal of attention, Ryan Koch clarified that it was not meant to be regarded as anything other than a form of satirical expression: Cracker Barrel themselves said of the issue that: Thousands of people have since signed the Change the name of Cracker Barrel to Caucasian Barrel petition, but it doesn't seem many (if any) considered the missive anything other than a critique of a culture that detractors feel has become too sensitive. On 15 September 2016, a web site covered the ancient nontroversy and revived the rumor that liberals sought to change the name of Cracker Barrel, but the petition on which that claim was based remains purely a satirical one.
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