(November 14, 2019 at 10:39 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: A point that may be of interest for both Boru and Hillbilly (and anyone following either line of convo)
There is no equivalence between the use of the term redneck and..that other word, lol..in popular culture or in works like Twains. Both in Huck Finn and in Roots it's blunt and frequent employment was intended to shame the audience for clear and egregious racist sentiment past and present. It's still effective, in that context (lol). While wheedling or talking around an obvious racial bias, a person can be confronted with the nasty and plain language clearly buttressing their position on something - and it can also help when others who do not share that bias...but who make apologies and euphemisms for the same legitimize and re-focus the discussion as a way of memory holing the issue, which is the same issue in twains time or today. A person hears it, and either hears the word as a knife or they do not..and in either case the person will have learned something about themselves and the word, and the futility of concealing or helping others to conceal the attitudes and motivations and history which make it's employment, explicitly or implicitly, acceptable.
In contrast to what is and has always been a term of degradation, redneck began and continues to be a term of endearment and pride. A call to rural white southerners, and broadly, the white working class in so many other places who see rural white culture as "real america" or "the heartland". As in WVA, where striking miners tied red bandanas on for the march to Blair Mountain, following the Mattewan massacre, leading to an armed confrontation between 10k or more union supporters and about 2k members of a private security force backed by law enforcement agencies armed with submachine guns and with the support of aerial bombers from the US Army.
It's use as a slur backfired then, in the 20's, and continues to backfire today..even though the divide invoked is a self defined point of prideful reference in a culture war that rednecks, themselves, largely determine by the stratification of racial apathy and antipathy in direct contrast to their perceived "enemies" on the more liberal and more diverse coasts. In that sense, we proud non-dirtbag rednecks aren't taking the word back from oppressive liberals, as we might contend that african americans are taking the word back, and it has never been successfully employed to hold us down....but from the distasteful elements in redneck culture, families, and communities. People who have smeared their own, and our, good names. Being and self identifying as a redneck is othering in an urban environment, but still a positively viewed novelty, and that othering is unfortunate in the case of liberal rednecks, as we're othered in our own culture and homes, by our redneck peers, as well. We end up being one-of-no one, to the point that it's a profitable very narrow niche product in popular culture.
Should anyone sing the n word..probably not, not even the artists themselves. Should anyone sing the r-word? Irrelevant question arising from apathetic or antipathetic apologism. They're not only dissimilar, in any context, they're not even in the same galaxy. Perhaps a more down-to-earth criticism, though..is that white people sound fucking ridiculous belting it out. That makes it funny on account of it's absurdity and taboo, ofc, and the punchline of funny type rap jokes...from white rappers...as so competently expressed by lil d, imagining that he woke up in chris browns body.
Ha! White men can't jump but no man can't rift in november rain.
