"How do you circumcise a redneck? Kick his sister in
the mouth." This is a joke that one of my students was
telling another student in the hallway outside of my classroom.
Having been raised in a community that is known more for its
ability to raise up sawmill and factory workers than bankers
and the other captains of capitalist industry, I found that
joke to be offensive, especially coming from an upper-middle
class nineteen-year-old who drives a better car than I do.
It disgusts me when I see people make fun of the poor. I
am not disgusted because of some altruistic kinship I have
with the downtrodden of American society, but because of my
being intrinsically connected to those same people. Although
my wife and I have managed to break the manacles of abject
poverty, sometimes I am still ashamed that my bills far exceed
the 789 dollar Social Security check that my grandmother raised
me on. Sometimes I feel like a class traitor—especially
when I hear redneck jokes from upper-middle class students
and don't say anything about it.
In the winter of 2000, I bought tickets to the "Blue
Collar Comedy Tour" and got to hear Jeff Foxworthy tell
redneck jokes up close and personal in Will Rogers Coliseum.
I also got to hear Larry the Cable Guy explain that Al Gore
lost the election because a handful of rednecks in Dade County,
Florida, didn't know how to operate a voting machine. I suppose
if those same machines were designed to look like video poker
or cigarette machines then our political landscape would be
looking a whole lot different right now. I enjoyed the show
because I was a redneck, and it gave me the nostalgic feeling
of being on my grandma's back porch cracking jokes with my
uncle and cousins. At the same time, I was offended because
an obviously (and ostentatiously) upper-middle class couple
was sitting in front of me laughing louder than I was.
When I started college, I quickly became familiar with the
term multiculturalism. In fact, I had to write a paper on
it when I was enrolled in English Comp II. I understand that
in this day and age, American society is far too civilized
to use terms like "wop, mick, Jap, or spic" because
those racially charged terms are hurtful, and society should
promote cultural diversity. In the wake of the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001, that same multicultural society had
become extremely sensitized to pejorative terms like "diaper
head" and "camel jockey," fearing that Arab-Americans
would become the new "racial other" on which society
could dump all of its racial hatred. Oddly enough, my most
vivid memory of 9-11 comes from my driving to my home at UTA
housing after I got off from work: It was two a.m., and there
was a UTA police officer walking around my apartment complex.
Curious as to why the police officer was stalking the parking
lot, I asked him what had happened. The officer explained
that there were a lot of international students in my building
and the administration was concerned that some of the "rednecks"
might want to avenge the terrorist attacks, so they assigned
him to parking lot duty just to make sure that no one got
hurt.
Looking back, I can now see that there are other examples
of how the "redneck" is marginalized in twenty-first
century America, but it took some homespun wisdom from one
of my fellow rednecks to send me down the path to a cultural
understanding—a redneck epiphany. Over the winter break,
my wife and I went to visit my family in southeast Missouri.
I hadn't been home in nearly five years and had the romantic
vision of a nostalgic return to the happy days of my young
adulthood only to discover that I was much like Richard Hoggart’s
Scholarship Boy. (One of my friends asked me if it was possible
to run a cable to the moon and "ski lift" the necessary
equipment to build a colony.) My last hope for those thrilling days of yesteryear
came with the Saturday night ritual of going to the local
roadhouse and drinking beer with my best friend from high
school. Joey and I talked about our glory days and caught
up on all of the things that we had been doing. He was very
impressed with my being in a Ph.D. program and then said,
"Well, thank God you didn't turn out to be a liberal."
I was fascinated by his comment - and insulted. I had
always thought of myself as being a liberal person. I always
voted for the Democrats in Presidential elections and almost
always voted for the Libertarians for everything else. I was
a real "live and let live" kinda guy. "What
do you mean liberal," I asked?
"Well," he said, "that's usually what happens
when people go off to college and get smart - they turn
into liberals. They start talking about tolerance and how
we're all just a bunch of dumb rednecks for thinkin' the things
we think and doin' the things we do. All they talk about is
tolerance. I don't really understand this tolerance thing.
If you're supposed to tolerate everybody, then why can't they
tolerate me? Is the only time intolerance is all right is
when you are being intolerant of the intolerators? Isn't hating
the haters still hate?"
I didn't really know how to answer him. I thought about it
for awhile and about all of the Jeff Foxworthy jokes and about
the September 11th memory, and a whole host of other things
bombarded my psyche. In a Marxist sense, I suppose I could
blame it on my material surroundings, the empty shoe factory,
the abandoned lead mines, the sawmill, the material means
of production, but somehow I no longer saw all of the incidents
that involved the pejorative term "redneck" as being
disjointed happenings, they suddenly became a clear and cohesive
chain of events that led to an undeniable reality that I wish
I could choose to ignore. I left Missouri five years ago to
make my mark on the world. I turned my back on my hillbilly
upbringing and tried to culture myself so that I could, as
my grandma says, "be somebody." I was too blind
to see that I already was "somebody" and that all
of the institutions and social circles that I sought membership
in thought that my kinfolk and community were less human than
themselves.
I went to Missouri hoping to relive my nostalgic past and
was disappointed to find that Heraclitus was right. You can't
step in the same river twice.
I left Missouri and drove back to Texas mad, mad that I had
busted my ass for the last five years just to suddenly discover
that I was society's "other." I had spent my entire
life feeling somewhat privileged and, at times, somewhat guilty,
that I was white. But whenever times got tough, I could always
sit back and say, "It could be worse, you could be a
minority." Because I had that mentality, it was extremely
disconcerting to wake up and find that me and mine are just
a bunch of racial others. It was much worse than being "pigmentally
challenged." We were not racial others because of some
superficial characteristic of skin color. Our lot in life
was much worse. We were poor and uneducated. We were rednecks.
Like Dorothy Allison writes in Trash, I, too, believe
that me and mine are the "men who drank and couldn't
keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who
quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours,
and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong
attitudes.” Now, like Barbara Eirenreich, I feel that
"sitting at a desk all day [is] not only a privilege
but a duty: something I [owe] to all of the people in my life,
living and dead, who [have] so much more to say than anyone
ever [gets] to hear." So let’s begin.
Racial Identity
"Recently," writes Matt Wray, "a great deal
of critical writing has centered around the notion of whiteness
and white racial identity." In Queering the Color
Line, Siobahn Somerville writes, "The challenge
is to recognize the instability of multiple categories of
difference simultaneously rather than to assume the fixity
of one to establish the complexity of the other." It
is within this challenge that, according to Wray, "many
works on whiteness call for recognition of the ways in which
whiteness serves as a sort of invisible norm." Wray also
cites the work of minority intellectuals like Toni Morrison
and bell hooks writing that they "have called for whites
to reevaluate themselves and their identities" because
they, like Dr. Charley Flint, an African-American woman, and
Lowell Thompson, an African-American male, who are both members
of The Center for the Study of White American Culture, believe
that whiteness, posited as the norm, is "an oppressive
ideological construct that promotes and maintains social inequalities,
causing great material and psychological harm to both people
of color and whites."
For Louis Kushnick, "racism developed as a dominant ideology
which is supportive of the capitalist world system. It legitimized
the conquest, enslavement, and super-exploitation of people."
In addition to the effects that racism has on ethnic minorities,
Kushnick writes, "the ideological effects of racism have
confused the metropolitan white working class as to the basis
of its privileges." For Kushnick (and others), racism
is an ideology that prevents the working class from becoming
conscious of the common experience that they share and enables
the capitalist class to exploit them. By propagating the myth
of "white privilege," the bourgeois class duped
the white working class into believing that they had non-monetary
privileges in society that make them better than the ethnic
minorities.
It is through the articulation of these non-monetary benefits
that the Jim Crow laws in the American South were put into
place. For example, Siobahn Somerville introduces Queering
the Color Line by summarizing the experience of Homer
Plessy, the plaintiff in the landmark civil rights case, Plessy
v. Ferguson. In addition to Plessy v. Ferguson being the precursor
to more than a generation of institutionalized segregation
under Jim Crow, it also enabled the status quo to shift the masses’
attention from socioeconomic factors to those that simply
involve the color of skin through the creation of a false
dichotomy of black and white. Looking back over the history
of America during this landmark decision, we would not easily
draw the parallel between the Jim Crow laws and the status
quo's attempt to mainstream Populism into the political hegemony.
Thomas K. Gross pointed out that, "according to Keith W. Medley in his book We,
as Freeman, some faulted the legislation for failing
to exclude 'low white people of the worst possible stamp,
and the Chinese, both more obnoxious than most colored[s].'"
However, if the laws of the land were that overt in their
discrimination against poor whites, then Populism would not
have been so easily assimilated. The Jim Crow laws gave poor
whites a pseudo-Marxist false consciousness of being better
off than African-Americans and other minority groups and being
next to last is not as bad as, to use a hickism from Whitetrashistan,
Missouri, "sucking hind tit."
"Support was given," by the status quo in overturning
the Jim Crow laws, writes Kushnick, "in order to direct
the black struggle away from class questions and alliances
with the left and toward its incorporation into the existing
class system." In simple terms, the status quo never
really went away, they just switched sides. Instead of promoting
white privilege, they began a campaign of multicultural understanding
where whiteness became a fixed non-racial and non-cultural
norm against which every other ethnic and cultural experience
was posited. In doing so, Kushnick writes that although "the
white male working class has been at the top of these hierarchies,
its position is hardly a satisfactory one" because "wage
increases and full employment are no longer secure" and
"jobs for their children, particularly their sons, are
disappearing." In addition to these primary benefits,
secondary benefits are also being diminished because "educational
opportunities for working-class youngsters at every age level
are being constricted, and existing social services are being
reduced." As the granting of privileges diminishes, the
legitimacy of the system becomes endangered, and the system
begins to rely on scapegoating to maintain order.
Wray writes, "Far too often, admission into the multicultural
order depends upon one's ability to claim social victimization.”
According to Marx, cultural forms emerge in specific historical
situations, serve particular socio-economic interests, and
carry out important social functions. Seen in terms of the
myth of whiteness, multiculturalism is merely an ideology
employed by the "ideological state apparatus" of
the American education system that shifts the focus of racism
from being one of exclusion to one of inclusion. However,
this paradigm shift fails to consider that racism is an ideological
social construct to cover up class distinctions. Just as there
is the myth of whiteness, there is also a myth of racism. Both whiteness and racism are, at best,
distractions to keep the material reality of class-consciousness
subliminated. Doug Kellner argues, "Ideology is a critical
term for Marxian analysis that describes how dominant ideas
of a given class promote the interest of that class and help
to cover over oppression, injustices, and negative aspects
of a given society." By defining equality in terms of
opportunity rather than in terms of condition, capitalist America can provide
the working class with the illusion of equality while it continues
to exploit them. Nearly every business, educational institution,
and government entity has an equal opportunity clause that
reads something like this: "We do not discriminate on
the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or
[pick a euphemism for handicapped]," constantly reminding
its citizens that America is the land of equal opportunity.
Allan Berube knows this inequality all too well. He writes,
"Other whites who looked down on us because of where
we lived could call my whiteness into question. Ashamed, I
kept these and other social injuries to myself, channeling
them into desires to learn about how to act and look more
white, and to find other ways to move up and out of this life
that more and more felt like a trap I had to escape."
Annalee Newitz writes, "When middle-class whites encounter
lower-class whites, we find that often their class differences
are represented as the difference between civilized folks
and primitive ones. Lower class whites get racialized, and
demeaned, because they fit into the primitive/civilized binary
as primitives."
Many theorists in Cultural Studies throw the word “race”
around, but few people define what they mean by this nebulous
term. Webster's defines the word as being "a family,
tribe, people or nation belonging to the same stock"
and "a class or kind of people unified by community of
interests, habits or characteristics." Webster's also
defines race as "obsolete: inherited temperament or disposition.”
Siobahn Somerville writes that, for her, "the term 'race'
refers to a historical, ideological process rather than to
fixed transhistorical or biological characteristics: one's
racial identity is contingent on one's cultural and historical
location." Somerville also writes that Turgee's legal
argument for Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson "reveal[ed]
the existence of a cultural desperation regarding rights in
language and the control of language over the social construction
of identity." If society allows ideology to control the
language and define race exclusively in terms of whiteness
and non-whiteness, then it enables the capitalist class to
create the illusion of a classless society by redirecting
the masses’ attention away from their material conditions.
However, if race is defined more liberally, then society can
include economic, geographic, and a whole host of other characteristics
into the equation that might provide a more holistic view
of "a family, tribe, people or nation belonging to the
same stock" and "a class or kind of people unified
by community of interests, habits or characteristics."
Using this more liberal application, we can easily argue that
white trash and rednecks have racial identity because racial
identity is not simply aligned with skin color.
Comedian, George Carlin, demonstrates how American's "pigeon
holing" of identity can get muddy when he asks, "If
a white man of English descent living in South Africa immigrates
to the United States, is he an African American?" We
might also argue that anyone born in the United States who
renounces his citizenship and becomes French might be seen
as a native American to the average Parisian. Although the
labels given to the various ethnic groups in America are just that, labels,
and somewhat nebulous in their definitions, the label, white
trash, is even more nebulous and abstract. Because, as Paul
Fussell writes, "you can outrage people today simply
by mentioning social class," the economic disparities
between the classes is never mentioned in the paper or on
the evening news. Because class is "America's forbidden
subject," it is more difficult to define white trash than any other ethnic group.
In defining white trash and rednecks, I will first attempt
to define whiteness. Because I argue that class contributes
to inequality just as much, if not more, as race or gender,
you can probably guess that whiteness will not be defined
solely in terms of ethnicity or skin color. "For anthropologists,"
writes Dolores laGuardia, "the concept of race has no
scientific standing. All human beings are members of the same
species. In that sense, all human beings are 'created equal.'"
For laGuardia, race is a social construct. In America, we
all have some idea of the authentic American. Although many
academics who have taken up the multicultural torch have done
groundbreaking work in shifting society's focus from Christopher
Columbus to the native people that were exploited, from the
Puritans at Plymouth Rock to the natives that suffered at
the hands of those same God fearing Puritans, or from the
Mississippi Colonel to the slaves whose labor sustained his
ostentatious lifestyle, there will always be the spectre of
the status quo's idea of the authentic American. Anna Quindlen
writes that this authentic American is "white and Christian
(but not Catholic), ethnic origins lost in the myth of an
amorphous past, not visible in accent, appearance or allegiance.”
However, as I have been arguing, “white,” in this
context, actually refers to the capitalist class.
To define white trash and rednecks, now, is to distinguish
between classes of whites. Wikipedia explains that
the epithet “white trash” was first used in the
1830's and, then, the term was “poor, white trash.”
Once the idea of “poor” became intrinsic to the
definition, it was simply not spoken anymore. The term “white
trash” belongs in a category with terms that focus on
behavioral characteristics rather than racial ones.
The Oxford English Dictionary Online illustrates
that even slaves used the term “white trash”:
"The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt
for white servants, whom they designate as poor white trash."
The slaves, no doubt, must have acquired the term from the
wealthy plantation owners, i.e. the capitalist class. Here,
I am reminded of Flannery O’Conner’s Revelation
when she writes, "Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself
at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the
heap were most colored people then next to them—not
above, just away from—were white-trash."
Perhaps the best way to define “white trash” is
simply to define the word “trash.” The Oxford
English Dictionary Online defines “trash”
as being "that which is broken, snapped, or lopped off
anything in preparing it for use; broken or torn pieces, as
twigs, splinters, cuttings from a hedge, small wood from a
copse, straw, rags; refuse." People who are white trash
are, indeed, broken, cut off.
The redneck is most easily described as white trash with an
attitude. Jim Goad says, "A redneck, as I define it,
is someone both conscious of and comfortable with his designated
role of cultural jerk. While hillbillies and white trash may
act like idiots because they can't help it, a redneck does
it to spite you. In the same way that stubborn mules are often
able to make their owners look like asses, the redneck has
the troublesome capacity to make ironic sport of the greater
public's repulsion/fascination with him." In many ways,
the redneck is very similar to Jose Limon's pelado. Limon
argues, "The Mexican pelado belongs to a most vile category
of social fauna; a form of human rubbish. Life from every
quarter has been hostile to him and his reaction has been
black resentment. He is an explosive being with whom relationship
is dangerous, for the slightest friction causes him to blow
up." According to Charlie Daniels, "what most folks
call a redneck, ain't nothin' but a workin' man." And
Wikipedia defines “redneck” as being
either a pejorative term or one of pride (depending on who
is using it).
Typically, when the term redneck is used by anyone but a poor
white, it is used in a pejorative manner. For example, if
a member of the capital class (whiteness) owns a factory in
South Carolina where a group of poor whites work, they are
"good country people" or "hard working men
and women," but if those "hard working men and women"
were to go on strike, then his business would be disrupted
by a bunch of rednecks. For the most part, "hard working
men and women" become white trash and rednecks whenever
they have agency and exhibit resistance against the status
quo.
As the legitimacy of the capitalist system becomes endangered,
that same system must rely on a scapegoat in order to continue
its ideology. One of the most obvious ways that scapegoating
has manifested itself is through the "welfare to work"
programs of the 1990's. According to the "moral majority,"
the new right, these "welfare chiselers" are the
reason that middle class America must pay such high taxes.
One of the basic tenants of a free market economy is that,
if left alone, it will generate prosperity for all. Although
capital America says that laissez faire should be
the law of the land, it doesn't hesitate to prevail upon the
government to help bail out industry when disaster strikes.
No one knows how much money the government gave big business
in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan or even September 11th,
because those statistics are rarely reported and scarcely
cited by the media or the politicians. By contrast, nearly
every media mogul or politician could provide some figure
for the cost of social programs for those less fortunate members
of American society. Why do we question our government helping
the poorest of its citizens and rarely even pause when it
shells out millions to American airlines or Chrysler? Isn't
corporate welfare still a handout? While America has "put
an end to welfare as we know it," it has done nothing to end the cycle
of poverty. It has only turned the unemployed poor into the
working poor. As Miriam Shulman says, "We throw out anecdotal
evidence, mixed with a few facts and figures, and then we
all retreat to our preconceived ideas without any empathetic
consideration of the other side."
The Oxford English Dictionary Online notes that the
word scapegoat originated in the Mosaic ritual of the Day
of Atonement. One of two goats was chosen by lot to be sent
alive into the wilderness, the sins of the people having been
symbolically laid upon it, while the other was appointed to
be sacrificed. It further defines scapegoat as "one who
is blamed or punished for the sins of others," and the
example given is, oddly enough, from an 1824 newspaper, "Country-boys
are patient, too, and bear their fate as scape-goats, (for
all sins whatsoever are laid as matters of course to their
door), with amazing resignation."
Cultural critic Jim Goad explains that the redneck and white
trash stereotypes fit all of the traditional scapegoat requirements:
rednecks and white trash have biological differences (buck
toothed, inbred, and stupid); geographic and regional differences
(rural areas and trailer parks); economic differences (sick,
lazy, and dirty); cultural differences (loud, superstitious, and excessive); and moral differences (racist,
violent, and alcoholic).
Donna Haraway states, "Both science and popular culture
are intricately woven of fact and fiction," and "fiction
can be imagined as a derivative, fabricated version of the
world and experience, as a kind of perverse double for the
facts or as an escape through fantasy into a better world
than 'that which actually happened.'" The work of Latour
and Woolgar, writes Haraway, was primarily "interested
in science as a fresh form of power in the social-material
world" and explains that "scientific practice is
literary practice, writing, based on jockeying for the power
to stabilize definitions and standards.” We would be
hard pressed to find a better example of how scientific practice
jockeyed for power than in the science of eugenics in the
nineteenth century. Siobahn Somerville quotes Francis Galton,
the father of eugenics, who defined the term “eugenics”
in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
(1883) as the cultivation of the race and the science of improving
stock, which takes cognizance of all influences that tend
in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races
or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily
over the less suitable that they otherwise would have had.
Although Somerville's discourse on eugenics focuses on the
biological othering of African Americans, gays, and lesbians,
those same principles were also applied to rednecks and white
trash. Matt Wray tells us, “Current stereotypes of white
trash can be traced to a series of studies produced around
the turn of the century by the U.S. Eugenics Records Office
wherein the researchers sought to demonstrate scientifically,
that large numbers of rural poor whites were ‘genetic
defectives.’" Typically, researchers conducted
their studies by locating relatives who were either incarcerated
or institutionalized and then tracing their genealogies back
to a "defective" source (often, but not always,
a person of mixed blood).
Somerville argues, “The new field of eugenics worked
hand in hand with growing anti-miscegenation sentiment and
policy, provoked not only by attempts for political representation
among African Americans but also by the large influx of large
populations of immigrants.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
likewise states, "The Anglos often disliked the newcomers,
disdained their uncouth presence, feared their alien religions
and folkways.” W.E.B. Dubois testified that when he
grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870's,
“the racial angle was more clearly defined against the
Irish than against me.'" The double-edged sword of capitalism
is that it has no conscience - if left unchecked, it will
do anything to make money. Schlesinger comments on this when
he writes, "However prejudiced white Anglo-Saxons were
in practice, they were ashamed to endorse nativism in principle.
Equally important, an expanding economy in an underpopulated
country required a steady influx of new hands. Immigration
alleviated the labor shortage and economic need overpowered
moral and aesthetic repugnance."
In addition to the biological othering of white trash and
rednecks, there is evidence that they are geographically othered
as well. William Byrd II’s Histories of the Dividing
Lines Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina is one example
of the geographic and regional marginalization of white trash
and the redneck. John Miller observes in Surveying Race:
Establishing Boundaries of Colonial American Whiteness
that “Byrd's scathing descriptions of the white settlers
he encounters on his Mid-Atlantic surveying mission tend to
be uniformly read by critics as scorn by the proud Virginia
author for his North Carolinian neighbors.” Miller goes
on to propose that there “is a larger racial project
occurring in The Histories, one that involves more
than just the Native American figures, and offers a more thorough
explanation for Byrd's disdain for his fellow Caucasian colonists.
The aristocratic author and political leader of Virginia is
racializing whiteness, creating a white Other in order to
affirm his own elite social position and justify his claims
to vast new territories in America.”
For example, Byrd writes: “The only business here is
raising of hogs, which is managed with the least trouble,
and affords the diet they are most fond of. The truth of it
is, the inhabitants of North Carolina devour so much swine's
flesh, that it fills them full of gross humours. Thus, whenever
a severe cold happens to constitutions thus vitiated, it has
all the symptoms of syphilis, with this aggravation, that
no preparation of mercury will touch it. This calamity is
so common and familiar here, that it ceases to be a scandal.
Thus, considering the foul and pernicious effects of eating
swine's flesh in a hot country, it was wisely forbidden and
made an abomination to the Jews, who lived much in the same
latitude with Carolina.”
After demonstrating how the dietary practices of these proto-white
trash/rednecks make them inferior to aristocratic Virginians
like himself, the noble Colonel Byrd moves on to the clothes
that these poor redneck savages wear: “There is but
little wool in that province, though cotton grows very kindly,
and, so far south, is seldom nipped by the frost. The good
women mix this with their wool for their outer garments…Flax
likewise thrives there extremely, being perhaps as fine as
any in the world, and I question not might, with a little
care, be brought to rival that of Egypt; and yet the men are
here so intolerably lazy, they seldom take the trouble to
propagate it.”
Byrd then goes on to describe the terrain of North Carolina:
“It had one beauty, however, that delighted the eye,
though at the expense of all the other senses: the moisture
of the soil preserves a continual verdure, and makes every
plant an evergreen but at the same time the foul damps ascend
without ceasing, corrupt the air, and render it unfit for
respiration. Not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly
over it, no more than the Italian vultures will over the filthy
lake Avernus, or the birds in the Holy Land, over the Salt
sea, where Sodom and Gomorrah formerly stood.”
And here is Byrd’s depiction of white trash morality:
“What little devotion there may happen to be is much
more private than their vices. The people seem easy without
a minister, as long as they are exempted from paying him.
Sometimes the Society for Propagating the Gospel has had the
charity to send over missionaries to this country; but unfortunately
the priest has been too lewd for the people, or, which oftener
happens, they too lewd for the priest. For these reasons these
reverend gentlemen have always left their flocks as arrant
heathen as they found them. Thus much however may be said
for the inhabitants of Edenton, that not a soul has the least
taint of hypocrisy or superstition, acting very frankly and
above-board in all their excesses.”
Byrd also demonstrates how these ruthless savages would rather
live and die in their own filthy uncivilized terrain than
to join Byrd’s civilized society (the Great State of
Virginia): “The line cut William Spight's plantation
in two, leaving little more than his dwelling house and orchard
in Virginia. Sundry other plantations were split in the same
unlucky manner, which made the owners accountable to both
governments. Wherever we passed we constantly found the borderers
laid it to heart if their land was taken into Virginia: they
chose much rather to belong to Carolina, where they pay no
tribute, either to God or to Cæsar. Another reason was,
that the government there is so loose, and the laws are so
feebly executed, that, like those in the neighbourhood of
Sidon formerly, every one does just what seems good in his
own eyes.”
Miller writes, “Not only does Byrd's book describe the
marking of the border between the Virginia and North Carolina
colonies, it also depicts the defining of boundaries in white
America along economic, political, and social lines.”
The geographical distinction of William Byrd’s dividing
line really doesn’t work anymore. After all, even the
most rural areas of America have a McDonald’s and a
Wal-mart. However, if we look beyond the mere geographical constraints of Byrd’s book, we could
argue that Byrd considers the state of North Carolina to be
a state of mind as well as a state of the Union. As Miller
states, “By establishing this prototype for 'white trash,'
Byrd emerges in comparison as the true savior and leader of
the young colonies.”
The economic differences between white trash, rednecks, and
the status quo are typically dismissed. The capitalist class
uses a "blame the victim" philosophy for writing
these people off. In order for the capitalist class to have
workers to exploit, it must keep those same workers in economic
uncertainty and does so by limiting the resources available
to them and preventing them from rising above their class.
“One class gets the sugar and the other class gets the
shit,” writes Paul Fussell. “It is not enough
to succeed,” Gore Vidal might add, “others must
fail.”
The White Trash Aesthetic
Gael Sweeney writes, "We know White Trash Culture when
we see it. Rather than defining a people or a class, although
both are implicated, it is an aesthetic of the flashy, the
inappropriate, the garish." The white trash aesthetic
is the shock and awe of Porter Waggoner in sequined country
and western shirts, a fat Elvis in diamond studded jumpsuits
and a monster truck the size of a small office building.
Jose Limon writes, "The Mexican macho is a humorist who
commits chingaderas, that is, unforeseen acts that produce
confusion, horror, and destruction. He opens the world; in
doing so, he rips and tears it, and this violence provokes
a great sinister laugh. The humor of the macho is an act of
revenge." The Mexican macho and the American redneck
have that in common, they both "rip and tear" the
world, only multiculturalism celebrates chingaderas and frowns
upon the redneck saying, "Hey, watch this shit."
Goad acknowledges that "working Class amusement is always
too much. It operates from an Overdose Aesthetic." Sweeney
concurs, paraphrasing Bakhtin: “The carnivalesque inhabits
the space that counters and subverts institutions of authority
and repression, the dominant hegemonies of Church, State,
and, in capitalist democracies, Industry. The pleasures of
the carnival are subordinate pleasures: unruly and lower class,
vulgar, undisciplined. During carnival, the working class
are not working; they are out of their
place and out of line.”
For Sweeney, "Carnival is a place of laughter, bad taste,
loud and irreverent music, parody, free speech, bodily functions,
eating and feasting, a place where excess is glorified."
It is through the white trash and redneck need for carnival
that America gets dirt track stock car racing, honky tonk
juke joints, the glitter of Las Vegas, the cult of Elvis and
pornography. Goad comments on this traditional depiction:
"A whole vein of human experience is dismissed as a joke,
much as America's popular notions of black culture were relegated
to lawn jockeys and Sambo caricatures a generation or two
ago." Some would argue that the world would be a much
better place without WWF Wrestling, NASCAR, and The Jerry
Springer Show, obvious consequences of the white trash
aesthetic, but these experiences are only those that are co-opted
and commodified by the capitalist class.
Unfortunately, the co-opting of the white trash culture has
done more to reinforce white trash stereotypes than it has
to demonstrate that it is a culture worth exploring. As Somerville
says, “They argued that blacks were an incipient species,
holding that there had been no racial progress or intellectual
development of blacks in recorded history, and that, by the
tenants of natural selection, blacks remained biologically
inferior.” Now, take out the word “blacks”
and insert the word “redneck” or “white
trash” and read the sentence again. Instead of it sounding
like some antiquated scientific claim from the nineteenth
century, it sounds more like the underlying message of The
Jerry Springer Show. Unfortunately, The Jerry Springer
Show is both a carnival for white trash and a commodification
of its aesthetic that reinforces the stereotype. Springer's
depiction of white trash is not surprising because the media
has gone out of its way to reinforce the white trash stereotype.
We only need to turn on the TV news to see that reporters
go out of their way to find the dumbest people they can to
interview whenever tragedy strikes a rural area.
Jim Goad writes, "The major media have never been concentrated
in places where cotton grows. The redneck ethos, by and large,
has been propagated by those with absentee ownership in rednecks'
cultural heritage." The fact that The Jerry Springer
Show is filmed in Chicago only substantiates this claim.
The television show Cops provides another example
of how the redneck is depicted in the media. Filmmaker Michael
Moore talks about the television show in his film Bowling
for Columbine, pointing out that minorities are constantly
being chased through the streets, slammed down on the ground,
and arrested on national television, but fails to see that
when the producers of the show aren't busy reinforcing society's
stereotypes about minorities, they are showing a redneck being
arrested for domestic violence in a trailer park. In contrast
to the media depiction of poor whites committing crimes on Cops, Barbara Eirenreich
comments on the lack of positive messages about the poor working
class in popular culture: “When I watch TV over my dinner
at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15
per hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor
folk. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or
school teachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast food worker
or nurse's aid to conclude that she is an anomaly - the
only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited
to the party.”
Racism Against White Trash
Although white trash and rednecks are typically accused of
being racist against African Americans, it is the federal
government, city slickers, and northern whites that the White
Trash Nation is most opposed to. John Dollard writes, "There
has been a long history of bitter and aggressive men going
into the South from the northeast, and the newcomer is appropriately
classified at once." Dollard quotes Thomas Page who writes,
"No statement of any Southern white person, however pure
in life, lofty in morals, high-minded in principle he might
be, was accepted. His experience, his position, his character,
counted for nothing. He was assumed to be so designing or
so prejudiced that his council was valueless." The battle
lines were clearly drawn.
Like other ethnic groups, white trash and rednecks have also
been oppressed, but their oppression is a little more subtle
than a water fountain marked Colored. When "separate
but equal" ceased to be the law of the land, the rich
found other ways to segregate themselves: First Class accommodations,
country clubs, five star restaurants, and a host of other
private spaces. America was the land of capitalism, so there
was no crime in charging a hundred dollars per plate if people
were willing to pay for it, and they would be willing to pay
for it, if they didn't have to sit by any blacks, Hispanics,
or, as Medley put it, "low white people of the worst
possible stamp, and the Chinese, both more obnoxious than
most colored." The wealthy whites even put their children
into private schools. Richard Cohen reminds us that "'forced
busing" to achieve racial balance in the schools had
proved bitterly divisive and contributed to white flight from
public education."
Louis Kushnick writes, "Until the working class creates
its own consciousness and culture, it will continue to be
unable to advance its own interests." The Emancipation
Declaration of the White Trash Nation reads: We hold these
truths to be self-evident: All of humankind is created equal
but society does its best to change that from the moment of
conception. Healthcare for the poor is disastrous, from the
lack of prenatal care for those who have yet to be born to
the lack of adequate geriatric care for those who are approaching
death. Working class bodies are not the bodies of GQ
and Mademoiselle. In fact, they are not bodies at
all. They are raw materials used to manufacture goods and
then thrown on the slagheap of industrial progress when they are no longer
useful to society. Working class bodies are commodified, taken
to the marketplace, sold, used up and then become trash, hence
the term white trash. Poverty, unlike wealth, is not concentrated
among white people and could serve as a starting point for
healing the racial divisions in America.
All humankind is created equal, but humankind becomes unequal
because of competition. As Doug Kellner points out, "In
a competitive and capitalist society, human beings are primarily
self-interested.” Peter Rothberg states, "Some
observers trace the huge disparity of incomes in our society
to a winner-takes-all philosophy. Managers at the top of the
economic chain become billionaires while their temporaries
work for minimum wage without health plans."
Douglas L. Wilson writes, "How could the man who wrote
‘all men are created equal’ own slaves?"
A better question would be, "How can a country that says
it is founded on an egalitarian philosophy that challenged
the privileges of a hereditary aristocracy force so many of
its citizens to bow and scrape to the pampered few?"
As long as multiculturalism thrives, then public attention
will always be shifted away from class onto race and gender,
and the high-minded rhetoric of the Constitution will never
be reconciled with the actual behavior of government and industry.
Delores laGuardia writes, "Nations look in the mirror
of their history to understand who they are. However, what
they see in the mirror of history is shaped by the agendas
of those who do the writing. Because of multiculturalism,
"much current writing takes into account the point of
view of the conquered, the dispossessed, the enslaved"
writes laGuardia, and yet, we could easily argue that white
trash and rednecks have been conquered and dispossessed. Where
is their history being written and who is writing it?
Jim Goad writes, "Multiculturalism is a country club
that excludes white trash. It's refusal to view terms such
as 'white trash' and 'redneck' as race-specific and class-specific
lends itself to a mountain of contradictions." He further
states that multicultural theories and theorists willingly
understand “the economic imperatives behind urban street
gangs but not rural moonshiners; it embraces Crips and Bloods
but not the Hatfields and McCoys."
We can only hope that in the future, phenomena unique to the
redneck experience are explored by academia and the media
alike. White trash or rednecks (whichever pejorative term
you prefer) seem to have fallen through the cracks of the
multicultural sieve and have become an other that is too powerless
and poverty stricken to do anything about it. Paul Fussell
writes: "Karl Marx is the prophet of the proles [rednecks],
even if most of them don't know it." When the day comes
for my fellow proles to march in protest, I will happily sing,
"I am redneck, hear me roar." Who knows? Maybe someday
we will be judged by the content of our character not the
color of our necks.
January 2005
From guest contributor William Matthew McCarter
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