He looks like the personification of the southern Bubba. Listen to him; his accent is thick. Fix that stereotype in your mind, and then listen to what he says.
Man, he’s like a southern Jay Smooth.
There are a heck of a lot of stereotypes we all have to break down.
I like that guy. If I ever meet him, I’ll buy him a beer, even if he does believe in god.
I liked the distinction he made when he said that not all white people are racist, but white culture is.
Ford F150 is a good truck.
This guy is fucking awesome.
Well, the term ‘redneck’ is kind of a stumbling block. It originally was a mostly disparaging label that meant a poor white farmer or farm laborer. He spent all day bent over in the fields exposing the back of his neck to the sun. But now it is used as a form of self-identification, often to declare one’s separation from “liberal elites”. So when someone announces, unprovoked, that they are a redneck, the vast majority of the time I think they ARE saying that they subscribe to that Fox News, Tea Party, whites-are-the-best, mindset.
Wait. I’m confused. Was I supposed to expect him to say something gratingly clueless, dismissive, and damaging, effectively perpetuating and defending the entrenched inequities of his culture?
(/Why? I mean, it weren’t like his accent was Oxford.)
I’ve been seeing people complain about the use of the term as if it simply meant “a low-income white person,” optionally “non-city-dwelling,” rather than being mostly used these days as a largely self-adopted label for a particular,fairly toxic, subculture notable for being overwhelmingly white, anti-intellectual, xenophobic, and fairly spread-out across income levels but with a “legacy” hatred of those they imagine to be “elites.”
I guess that archaic usage explains where people get the idea that disparaging comments about “rednecks” are classist, but I can’t help wondering where they’ve been for, like, the entire time I’ve been alive.
DAMN that was eloquent. Everything he said was just spot on. Kudos to him.
He did get God in there when he was talking about equality, but he didn’t do it in an obnoxious way. He also got in a lot of “fucks” and “fucking.” I lot count.
Thank you, sir. That was well said.
Lynna @8:
I can just hear the whiners now…
Eloquent redneck? Can’t help thinking of Joe Bageant. Lots of links to his writing there.
I’m 60 years old, so the classist aspect of redneck doesn’t seem ancient.
More and more i realise that you can tell when someone sees it because one of the signs is that they are fucking angry. If they were not, something’d reaaaaaally wrong with that picture.
Those two in a video together would be awesome.
Us swamp yankees have no use for rednecks.
I am fucking impressed.
Hah! Awesome. For the third time over.
(Yep, Tony had this posted on Reagan’s Morning a couple days ago already.)
I don’t know what converted this guy, but whatever it was made him a better man, I’m really happy for him – and for the people who just might have a better life because he spoke out.
I lived so long in the South, in a culture where I was afraid to appear intelligent much less open-minded, that listening to that voice express those beliefs…damnit, it gave me a drop of hope again. Quickly! To the cynicism cave!
The way he closed his eyes as he talked was particularly endearing to me. His accent and attitude remind me of family.
I had a bit of a problem understanding each word this man said, due to his accent which is literally foreign to me. But I got the message and I liked it. He has obviously put some thought into the matter.
PZ, I would not conclude from his single reference to God that the man is indeed a religious believer. It seemed to me as if he were just making a retorical point. Not that it would matter as you mentioned, you should buy him a beer regardless. Oh, and he mentions he likes barbecue. So perhaps invite him to your place for some relaxed eating & drinking & conversation. That should result in some videotapeable moments to share with the rest of us ;-)
Moi aussi, Je suis Dixey Honkey!
Tony @#10 linked his youtube page
– https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxrwoWJ8cYyW9U8Fik7yATw – in response to me in the Jay Smooth thread. Thanks, Tony. The gent in the video, Dixon D. White, deserves recognition for his courage and honesty.
I would like to see more rednecks like him.
I’m curious about the personal experience that fundamentally altered his view. Clearly it was a powerful one.
Great stuff. I’ve lived in the deep south my entire life, and there more reasonable people here than the tired Hollywood stereotypes would have you believe.
Nice, unifying message. Love it as he speaks out for the shared “we” experience with genuine compassion. We can all use this reminder.
May he find much more approval than hate.
I will always respect people who are willing to admit that they were wrong.
And as PZ I would buy this sweet talker a beer anytime.
Rednecks with advanced degrees…
https://soundcloud.com/startalk/rocket-city-rednecks
He’s aware of the Matrix. Good for him.
But but but he said some uncivil words! I thought we were supposed to disassociate from that sort of thing.
I like his takedown of “I don’t see color”, that was gold!
He makes good points.
Hmmmm…..
gog@#25, do you use Facebook? He posted something about himself there today.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dixon-D-White/806189049463066?fref=nf
For those who avoid FB,
Testing…
(OK, seems my previous comment disappearing was an accident. I’ll try to reconstruct although it’s going to be a bit more concise since It’s late here and I’m tired)
This is exactly the same logic that people use to justify using the N word. “Sure, it started out as a slur, but nowadays they use it to refer to each other!” “Just Listen to that misogynistic rap music!” “Hey look Chris Rock said it so it’s okay!”
Y’all can keep talking shit about white working class folk as much as you like, but if you’re wondering why there aren’t more rednecks like this guy? It’s because of classist liberal scum like you fuckers here.
I personally love how he interrupted himself several times to remind his audience to stop being defensive and that he doesn’t actually mean every single white person ever. You can tell he’s actually taking his own advice and bringing these things up to people in person by the obvious exasperation in his tone.
You cannot possibly be trying to equate those two words as to the level of offensiveness. I refuse to believe anyone could even think that was appropriate.
1. Notice that the post clearly labels the concepts of redneck and southern and bubba as stereotypes, and says that those stereotypes need to be broken down. So basically the opposite of what you’re claiming.
2. Classist? For me, every member of my family is blue collar. Hell, my first school experience was Head Start. Browse around for just a little bit and you’ll see people all over this site talking about real money troubles, like not being able to make rent or not having a car any more because they can’t afford the repairs or skimping on basic medical care. PZ has written quite a bit about the problems he had growing up. Having an education and having the internet doesn’t automatically make somebody upper-class.
3. You are assuming that liberals are all upper-class. Fuck you for framing “working class folk”, as you put it, as the opposite of liberal. Seriously, fuck you. It’s people like you who keep blue-collar people away from liberal causes, by jeering at liberals as elitist classist scum and policing an us v. them mentality about it. There are not enough fuck yous for that attitude of yours.
@38
1. Notice I wasn’t quoting the OP, but a specific comment?
2. If you’re from a blue collar family and you don’t use slurs like “redneck” or “white trash” to put down folks who are more blue collar thatn yourself than I guess I wasn’t fucking talking about you was I?
3. You don’t actually seem to understand what “liberal” means” go read Adam Smith. Liberalism is about allowing the ruling classes the liberty to exploit everyone else for their benefit. As a leftist, I object to this philosophy.
Hell in all the conversations I’ve had with my most red-neckiest of neighbors I’ve never detected a hint of sympathy for liberalism. Progressivism maybe a hint. But socialism? That goes over like gangbusters among po’ white trash.
I have relatives who happily call themselves rednecks and don’t consider it a slur, reclaimed or otherwise.
Only a hint? You’re the one making them into a monolith here.
The person you quoted and were ostensibly responding to described it this way:
Granted, that’s a somewhat complicated sentence for a complicated concept, but it’s not being used to put them down or as a slur. It’s a self-identity or a badge of pride, for some rural, white, anti-intellectual bigots in the US. As the guy in the video demonstrates, people who aren’t bigots and anti-intellectual have reasons of their own for still identifying as rednecks, despite that connotation — presumably cultural ones about valuing certain aspects of rural life.
The claim is that it’s not just a generic and value-free term for working-class white people, and that to confuse those very different things is the wrong thing to do. Not that it’s okay or we should use it that way, because who cares about classism.
Things have moved on a bit since Adam fucking Smith. What it means to people now doesn’t hinge on him or his writings at all.
dysomniak @ 36
Oh? Does “redneck” have a lengthy history as part of dehumanizing slavery, Jim Crow laws, harassment, and violence? Does getting called “redneck” send cold fear down some poor white man’s spine because he might be lynched? Does it make him feel a helpless rage because the safest thing he can do is bite his tongue and hope that this time, this time, he’s gonna get to walk away safe?
Classism can be addressed without appropriating somebody else’s struggle. Whatever can be said about classist terminology targeting white people, it is never appropriate to compare it to that specific word. In fact, it makes me assume somebody is one of those fauxgressive types who thinks, gosh, classism is the real enemy and the intricacies of institutionalized racism aren’t nearly as important as everybody banding together to fight the system in such a way that ends up almost always benefitting white folks because that pesky racism thing still hasn’t been addressed.
::sips tea::
Cheers, Mellow Monkey. (Drinking my coffee, not tea.)
I want to emphasize that the problem is with a conjunction of bigotry* and anti-intellectualism. But rednecks generally also aren’t great about issues of class. No idea where dysomniak is coming from, but in the Midwest and South (which I’m most familiar with), a lot of self-hating and self-destructive stereotypes about class get built into the idea of being a redneck. It hardly needs to be said that they don’t tend to be championing progressive social agendas. On that front, they also tend to align with evangelicals, teabaggers, and at their most fancy and highfalutin (if you’re lucky!) they’ll agree with glibertarians — all of whom say effectively the same horrific fucking thing.
Maybe you have some other idea about that — but simply calling that what it is, in their own terms and by their own admission, is not a slur or a put down or whatever the fuck.
*Most prominently about race, gender, sexuality, religion and nationality — whether or not those are even counted separately in their minds.
His accent was Oxford, I say. Oxford, Mississippi, that is.
AJ Milne @ 5
Yup. He’s clearly the sort of person who stereotypes people because of their backgrounds. I mean, look at him! You know they’re all like that.
dysomniak @ 40
Yeah, ok, there’s no argument being made here.
“Take some fuckin’ responsibility ”
I need to start doing that. I did so a little bit about fifty years ago, but I’ve been neglecting it.
Dysomniak @41:
drowner
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
Thanks, Chigau. I wonder why it says differently in the list beneath the reply field? It does not list that one. I tried to be more specific but of course I can’t get it to display.
It’d be more surprising if I hadn’t already seen David Pakman interviewing a former KKK Grand Dragon. Rednecks aren’t inherently dumb, just the product of a culture that thinks being stubborn and willfully ignorant is the same as being strong and brave.
drowner
On any tag which is shown as including
cite="", you can safely miss that part out. Or if you’d prefer a click-to-format option to typing the tags, and are using Firefox, this addon is pretty nice.And to show HTML in a comment, replace
<with<and>with>(including the semi-colons).The Mellow Monkey @ 44
Is this in reference to Occupy types, for example? Just trying to think of examples and that’s all that came to mind.
I think y’all are missing the full meaning of the term “redneck” if you think it just means stubbornly conservative Fox News watcher. It primarily designates a marginalized social group – poor, white, rural, usually Southern, and often undereducated – not a group united by partisanship or political ideology. This group is united by cultural practices such as hunting (and even today, more of this than you would think is actually survival hunting that supplements poor families’ food supply), mudding, driving trucks and atvs, bootlegging (yes, people still make and drink moonshine – I’ve drank it), playing traditional instruments like banjos and washboards, etc. They share a dialect.
The fact that conservative politicians (including both today’s Republicans and the Southern Democrats of the past) have been largely successful at turning this group against other marginalized groups does not mean that the link between this subculture and conservative politics is inevitable. One of the reasons the New Deal was so successful is because it was able to tap into the progressive sentiments of this same group, and I think the guy in the video shows how one can be both culturally redneck and have strong progressive sentiments. I know organizers who work specifically with this subculture, and you’d be surprised at how many of them are receptive. They know they’ve gotten a shit deal and you can work with that.
As robertbaden and dysomniak both point out, the term has strong classist implications. That’s the origin of the term and it still gets used that way today. When somebody calls you a “dumb redneck,” the reason that term has power is because it implies that you are backwards, stupid and uneducated perhaps to the point of being illiterate, and dirt poor. The term may not have strong resonance for everybody, but for a lot of people it hits targets their insecurities directly. I mean, we are talking about a group that includes some of America’s poorest citizens. There are still people up in the Appalachains without running water or electricity, and they know this makes them outsiders, but it’s either not a part of their way of life or they simply can’t afford it. Even the folks who have modern conveniences often have highly exploitative jobs like coal miner or precarious jobs like subsistence farming. They know the highly unflattering things city-dwellers, Northerners, and well-educated people think about them, and it is hurtful.
“Redneck” complicated term, though, because it’s a self-identification as well as an insult. It’s similar to other reclaimed terms, except that rednecks’ particular cultural pride will often lead them to deny that the term is anything to be ashamed of. In the same breath they’ll tell you how pissed off they are at the stereotypes of the elites who call them “redneck” and then claim that they are and always have been proud of being a redneck.
I think the pride is the key thing people unfamiliar with this subculture just don’t get. They’re hanging on to a world in which neighbors quietly help their neighbors while denying that they’re doing any such thing. In this subculture, aid cannot be acknowledged by the giver or the receiver because it creates a debt, a power relation between the one with resources and the one without. To take government assistance (from strangers! who pity you!) is a humiliating admission that one is dependent, incapable of providing for oneself.
Now, if you frame it in terms of fairness, a lot of times you’ll find that people’s whole attitude changes. Well, if government is helping out the big corporate farms, it’s only fair that the small farmer should get a piece of the pie. Nothing embarrassing about that, just fairness. If the elite fat cats who don’t work a day in their lives are getting rich while hard-working folks can’t make ends meet, that’s not fair. People should get fair wages for the work they do. Well who can make that happen? The people. One person might be powerless, but a whole lot of people can work together to make things right. So then you can get them thinking about government action.
A lot of them are against the government because every interaction they’ve had with the government has made things worse for them. And if you note that their primary points of contact with the law are being told they can’t make their own booze (why should they have to pay a premium for something they can get cheap from Jim down the road?), can’t smoke pot (goddamn it, it grows in my yard, what the fuck do you mean I can’t smoke it), have to follow a zillion confusing regulations in their little farm or mom and pop restaurant or when constructing a farm, and have to pay taxes they can barely afford (because remember that the tax code in America takes a much higher percentage from the poor compared to the rich, even though the poor have less disposable income to begin with). Your main obstacle is overcoming this attitude – and you better have a good reason why this time it will be different and the government will be on their side.
It’s true that a lot of rednecks blame their grievances on black people or hispanics. That resentment is deep-seated and makes the lives of poor people of color even fucking worse. Which is why videos like this are so important. But just writing rednecks off as racist is the opposite of dealing with the problem; it’s giving up on changing people’s minds and exclusionary ways of living. You can’t dismiss them as dumb fucking rednecks (classist, insulting) if you want them to give up their prejudices; you have to give up some of yours too. It helps to show them who is really to blame for the problems of poor whites – not people of color, but rather, rich whites.
Okay, that ended up being a long rant, so, sorry. The basic point I’m trying to make is that “redneck” does carry strong cultural and class connotations. It’s not the N-word, but it can be deeply insulting when used by an outsider in the wrong way. Stereotypes about the people who self-identify in this way inhibit progress, both racial and economic. Note that the fact that this post focuses on the marginalization of rednecks vis a vis other groups of whites (rich/middle class, well-educated, Northern, city-dwelling) should not be taken to imply that they have it worse than people of color. Just trying to fill in some of the background for people unfamiliar with actually talking directly to rednecks.
As an aside, FWIW, I didn’t find the guy in the video’s accent difficult to understand at all.
His name is Jorge Moran, and he seems like a fascinating fellow:
http://jorgemoran.com/bio.html?hc_location=ufi
Here’s an interview with him about a incident of racism that he called out:
http://www.examiner.com/article/racism-at-bass-pro-shop-a-white-man-s-burden-the-story-of-jorge-moran
+1 to reverie!
re: accents — It wasn’t an issue for me, either. After all, when you can decipher Ozzy, you can handle damn near anything.
I don’t know where you’re getting a primary designation, and to me they do seem to be largely homogeneous in terms of politics. They’re not “united” if that means being a political monolith with identical ideas about a wide range of issues, but it’s simply false to claim they’re not almost entirely composed of bigoted and conservative republicans. Many are indeed marginalized in many ways, but that doesn’t shield them from criticism, nor is there any excuse for being on the wrong side of so many things. If you want to have a conversation about how bad they have it, fine, but that’s not the only conversation we can have here.
You don’t even have to talk about Democrats of the past: even now, those in predominantly “red” states are quite understandably more conservative than their “blue” state counterparts. (What’s “inevitable” is irrelevant, so I’ll just ignore that.)
But notice how this actually works. These are whole states full of people, not simply their representatives, which are consistently more progressive or more conservative. Politicians are reactionaries, who use their constituents prior attitudes and interests in order to gain votes. Many people largely ignore what politicians do, and they carry on just fine having their ignorant and hateful views in their day to day lives. These people (if they’re politically involved at all) evidently see no problem with voting for politicians who reinforce their bullshit. Because it’s their bullshit. No one needs to twist their arms, shove it down their throats, push them into any corners, or otherwise manipulate them into it. I’ve certainly been embedded in the same cultural environment as they are my entire life, yet I’m opposed to all of their fucked up bullshit.
So, you are getting cause and effect reversed, when you talk about how successful they are at “turning this group” into something which (if we’re supposed to believe your argument) it really isn’t. The vast majority of people are the ones who create a culture, whether it is a toxic culture or not. And I’m very well aware that I’m in a small minority where I live. It might be nice to think the vast majority aren’t so bad or that we should excuse them for something that is mostly the fault of some boogeyman on TV, but wishful thinking isn’t helpful here. And if you actually look at polls on all sorts of issues, if you don’t want to trust my anecdotal experiences on it, then even that evidence is simply against you on this. And I just have no idea what the point is of trying to deflect their responsibilities for their own beliefs and actions onto someone else.
demiurge @ 54
There was some of it in Occupy. If you often cross paths with white socialists, anarchists, etc, this rhetoric comes up often. “Well, sure, racism is bad, but if we got rid of classism it’d magically disappear…”
White feminists do the same thing when they ignore the specific struggles of women of color. (Or perhaps a Japanese feminist and her white husband who decide to appropriate a certain word targeting Black people and thus erasing the specific suffering of Black women.)
I really REALLY hope this guy isn’t an actor. I want this guy to be for real. I mean, it could be legit.