Becky is a derogatory American slang term for a white woman.[1] After Beyoncé used the term in 2016 in the song "Sorry", on her album Lemonade ("He only want me when I'm not there / He better call Becky with the good hair"), it came to mean a "white girl who loves Starbucks and Uggs and is clueless about racial and social issues", according to the New Statesman. [2] In 2019 the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster wrote that: "Becky is 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."[3] It can also refer to a busybody middle-aged White/European-American woman making formal complaints about trivial activities (generally speaking, against ethnic minorities or other disenfranchised populations). [4][5]
According to Amelia Tait, writing in the New Statesman, Urban Dictionary at first defined Becky as a white woman viewed as "snobbish".[2] 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. In Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom Sawyer falls in love with Becky Thatcher, with her "yellow hair plaited into two long tails".[1] "Becky" is the title and subject of the fourth segment of Jean Toomer's Harlem Renaissance-associated novel Cane (1923), a short cautionary tale of "the white woman who had two Negro sons" and who may be "a hant" (ghost).[6] Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) features another woman "who will always be in a man's head", Kelly wrote.[1]
Rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot used the term in "Baby Got Back" (1992): "Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt", while in the song "Becky" (2009), the American rapper Plies sang: "I want yo mouth, gimme that Becky!"[1] This was apparently a reference to fellatio.[2] Beyoncé referenced the term in "Sorry" (2016): "He only want me when I'm not there / He better call Becky with the good hair."[1][7] In 2017 Rebecca Tuvel, the author at the center of the Hypatia transracialism controversy, was labelled a Becky by critics.[8]
In 2016 Karsonya Wise Whitehead of Loyola University Maryland attributed two meanings to the term: a woman the speaker does not respect, and "a white woman who is clueless, who is kind of racist, [and] who makes statements without knowing what she's saying". Whitehead was not convinced that the term is a racial slur, although Beyoncé's use of it (the "good hair") had a racial connotation, she said, by implying that straight hair is preferable to Afro-textured hair.[9]