The term redneck is a derogatory term chiefly used for a rural poor white person of the Southern United States. Its usage is similar in meaning to cracker (especially regarding Georgia, Texas, and Florida), hillbilly (especially regarding Appalachia and the Ozarks), and white trash (but without the last term's suggestions of immorality).
By the 1970s, the term had become offensive slang, and its meaning had expanded to mean bigoted, loutish, and opposed to modern ways.
Patrick Huber has emphasized the theme of masculinity in the continued expansion of the term in the 20th century, noting, "The redneck has been stereotyped in the media and popular culture as a poor, dirty, uneducated, and racist Southern white man."
Anti-conservative epithet
By 1975, say Chapman and Kipfer, the term had expanded in meaning beyond the poor Southerner to refer to "a bigoted and conventional person, a loutish ultra-conservative." For example, in 1960 John Barlow Martin felt that Senator John F. Kennedy should not enter the Indiana Democratic presidential primary because the state was "redneck conservative country." Indiana, he told Kennedy, was a state "suspicious of foreign entanglements, conservative in fiscal policy, and with a strong overlay of Southern segregationist sentiment." William Safire says it is often used to attack white Southern conservatives. The term is also used broadly to degrade working class and rural whites that are perceived by urban progressives to be insufficiently liberal. At the same time, some white Southerners have reclaimed the word, using it with pride and defiance as a self-identifier.
19th and early 20th centuries
Political term for poor farmers
The term characterized farmers having a red neck caused by sunburn from hours working in the fields. A citation from provides a definition as "poorer inhabitants of the rural districts...men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin stained red and burnt by the sun, and especially is this true of the back of their necks".
By 1900, "rednecks" was in common use to designate the political factions inside the Democratic Party comprising poor white farmers in the South. The same group was also often called the "wool hat boys" (for they opposed the rich men, who wore expensive silk hats). A newspaper notice in Mississippi in August 1891 called on rednecks to rally at the polls at the upcoming primary election:
By , the political supporters of the Mississippi Democratic Party politician James K. Vardamanâ€"chiefly poor white farmersâ€"began to describe themselves proudly as "rednecks," even to the point of wearing red neckerchiefs to political rallies and picnics.
Linguist Sterling Eisiminger, based on the testimony of informants from the Southern United States, speculated that the prevalence of pellagra in the region during the great depression may have contributed to the rise in popularity of the term; red, inflamed skin is one of the first symptoms of that disorder to appear.
Coal miners
The term "redneck" in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members who wore red bandannas for solidarity. The sense of "a union man" dates at least to the 1910s and was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. It was also used by union strikers to describe poor white strikebreakers.
Late 20th and early 21st centuries
Writers Edward Abbey and Dave Foreman also use "redneck" as a political call to mobilize poor rural white Southerners. "In Defense of the Redneck" was a popular essay by Ed Abbey. One popular early Earth First! bumper sticker was "Rednecks for Wilderness". Murray Bookchin, an urban leftist and social ecologist, objected strongly to Earth First!'s use of the term as "at the very least, insensitive".
But many members of the Southern community have proudly embraced the term as a self-identifier.
Popular culture
Johnny Russell was nominated for a Grammy Award in for his recording of "Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer", parlaying the "common touch" into financial and critical success.
Further songs referencing rednecks include "Rednecks" by Randy Newman, "Redneck Woman" by Gretchen Wilson, "Redneck Yacht Club" by Craig Morgan, "Redneck" by Lamb of God, "Redneck Crazy" by Tyler Farr, and "Your Redneck Past" by Ben Folds Five.
Comedian Jeff Foxworthy's comedy album You Might Be a Redneck If... cajoled listeners to evaluate their own behavior in the context of stereotypical redneck behavior.
Outside the United States
Historical Scottish Covenanter usage
In Scotland in the 1640s, the Covenanters rejected rule by bishops, often signing manifestos using their own blood. Some wore red cloth around their neck to signify their position, and were called rednecks by the Scottish ruling class to denote that they were the rebels in what came to be known as The Bishop's War that preceded the rise of Cromwell. Eventually, the term began to mean simply "Presbyterian", especially in communities along the Scottish border. Because of the large number of Scottish immigrants in the pre-revolutionary American South, some historians have suggested that this may be the origin of the term in the United States.
Dictionaries document the earliest American citation of the term's use for Presbyterians in , as "a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians of Fayetteville [North Carolina]".
Roman Catholics
In Northern England in the 19th and 20th centuries, Roman Catholics were also known as rednecks.
South Africa
The exact Afrikaans equivalent, rooinek, is used as a disparaging term for English people and South Africans of English descent, in reference to their supposed naïveté as later arrivals in the region in failing to protect themselves from the sun.
See also
- Stereotypes of white Americans in the United States
- Culture of the Southern United States
- List of ethnic slurs
- Class discrimination
- Bogan, Australian term
- Plain Folk of the Old South
- Redlegs â€" poor whites that live on Barbados and a few other Caribbean islands
- Yokel
Notes
Further reading
- Abbey, Edward. "In Defense of the Redneck", from Abbey's Road: Take the Other. (E. P. Dutton, 1979)
- Ferrence, Matthew, “You Are and You Ain’t: Story and Literature as Redneck Resistance,†Journal of Appalachian Studies, 18 (2012), 113â€"30.
- Goad, Jim. The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (Simon & Schuster, 1997).
- Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A cultural history of an American icon (2003).
- Huber, Patrick. "A short history of Redneck: The fashioning of a southern white masculine identity." Southern Cultures 1#2 (1995): 145-166. online
- Jarosz, Lucy, and Victoria Lawson. "'Sophisticated people versus rednecks': Economic restructuring and class difference in America’s West." Antipode 34#1 (2002): 8-27.
- Shirley, Carla D. "'You might be a redneck if...' Boundary Work among Rural, Southern Whites." Social forces 89#1 (2010): 35-61. in JSTOR
- West, Stephen A. From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850â€"1915 (2008)
- Weston, Ruth D. "The Redneck Hero in the Postmodern World", South Carolina Review, (Spring 1993)
- Wilson, Charles R. and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, (1989)
- Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006)
External links
- Poor Whites â€" The Georgia Encyclopedia (history)