Gregory Rodriguez: The Roots of Redneck Pride
[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the LA Times.]
Terms like "redneck" and "white trash" were first used in the 19th century by upper-class whites to classify their poorer cousins. They are essentially the product of the ideology of white supremacy. If, as Southern slave owners argued to justify the enslavement of Africans, whites were a superior race, then those whites who did not exhibit "superior" qualities had to be identified and taken down a notch. In other words, poor, rural, uneducated whites were deemed something less than fully white. Northern abolitionists also used poor Southern whites to further their agenda. They considered rednecks uniquely depraved and living proof that the evils of slavery undermined social morality....
But poor whites gradually redefined the meaning of the terms. If to elites "redneck" or "white trash" meant deserved poverty and menial labor, to many poor whites it came to mean suffering unfairly and hard work. While the Southern gentry may have found rednecks' lack of education vulgar and coarse, rednecks came to see themselves as frank, commonsensical and having no airs. By the 1970s, redneck also implied a form of authenticity even as the identity jumped far beyond its Southern origins.
Today, to declare yourself a redneck is to insist that you don't take your cues from New York, Washington or Los Angeles. To call yourself a redneck is to thumb your nose at highfalutin propriety and to revel in a lack of sophistication. Redneck is an identity based on having a chip on your shoulder but not simply — as some insist — because of the gains made by blacks. Redneck resentment doesn't so much stem from losing "white privilege," it stems from never having had a crack at that privilege in the first place....
Read entire article at LA Times
Terms like "redneck" and "white trash" were first used in the 19th century by upper-class whites to classify their poorer cousins. They are essentially the product of the ideology of white supremacy. If, as Southern slave owners argued to justify the enslavement of Africans, whites were a superior race, then those whites who did not exhibit "superior" qualities had to be identified and taken down a notch. In other words, poor, rural, uneducated whites were deemed something less than fully white. Northern abolitionists also used poor Southern whites to further their agenda. They considered rednecks uniquely depraved and living proof that the evils of slavery undermined social morality....
But poor whites gradually redefined the meaning of the terms. If to elites "redneck" or "white trash" meant deserved poverty and menial labor, to many poor whites it came to mean suffering unfairly and hard work. While the Southern gentry may have found rednecks' lack of education vulgar and coarse, rednecks came to see themselves as frank, commonsensical and having no airs. By the 1970s, redneck also implied a form of authenticity even as the identity jumped far beyond its Southern origins.
Today, to declare yourself a redneck is to insist that you don't take your cues from New York, Washington or Los Angeles. To call yourself a redneck is to thumb your nose at highfalutin propriety and to revel in a lack of sophistication. Redneck is an identity based on having a chip on your shoulder but not simply — as some insist — because of the gains made by blacks. Redneck resentment doesn't so much stem from losing "white privilege," it stems from never having had a crack at that privilege in the first place....