Redneck
Redneck ( English for "red neck" or "red neck") is in the narrower sense an often derogatory term for poor white farm workers, especially those who come from the US southern states . The terms hillbilly , which is used in particular for people who come from the Appalachians and the Ozarks , hick and white trash - this term also implies immorality and immorality , are used in a similar way .
Since around the turn of the 21st century, the term redneck has also been used to describe people in general as zealous conservative reactionaries who are hostile to modernity. Occasionally, the term is also used to refer to all conservative North Americans. Primarily, however, it refers to whites of the working class and / or the rural population who are poorly educated and who reject liberal views. However, a number of Southerners knowingly and proudly use this name to underline their origins and views.
designation
Seen figuratively, the expression should come from the skin color of the neck, which is reddened by exposure to sunlight and exertion, when working in the great outdoors, for example in the field. In the Anglo-Saxon-speaking area, this developed into a general, colloquial, derogatory term for a poorly educated member of the rural-conservative, white lower class , comparable to the German term Hinterwäldler . The German terms Pöbel or Prolet (“Proll”) do not correspond to the term redneck, but rather to the term white trash : According to their self-assessment, rednecks belong to the middle class and are typically very conservative in their values.
Worldview and way of life
According to stereotypical notion, the typical redneck characterizes a number of specific worldviews and ways of life at the beginning of the 21st century. These include support for the Republican Party in the USA and the Conservative Party of Canada in Canada, a rejection of trade unions and social welfare payments, a disdain for the government apparatus, skepticism towards people with an academic background, membership of a Christian fundamentalist denomination , a pronounced one Patriotism, use of conservative Fox News Channel as the primary source of information, opposition to same-sex marriage and the right to abortion , enthusiasm for hunting, football , Canadian football and NASCAR racing , a taste for fast food , beer and whiskey , one im Compared to other population groups, stronger and longer-lasting support for the Iraq war and the US or Canadian troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and resistance to restrictions on the right to own weapons. As one of the most popular exponents of today's redneck culture, stand-up comedian Jeff Foxworthy cited "a great lack of subtlety" as one of its main hallmarks . Foxworthy also disapproved of the idea that a redneck had to be a southerner, insisting that he had met rednecks in every US state. From Thomas Frank's point of view, the self-image of the (Republican-voting) rednecks is aptly reproduced in an article by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst, in which he explained why he elected George Bush in 2004:
“Most Red Americans are unable to analyze postmodern literature, instruct a nanny, choose a Cabernet with an aftertaste of liquorice, or quote prices from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog . But we can raise great children, run the plumbing in our own homes, do wonderful things with our two hands, talk casually about God, fix a small engine, spot a maple tree that makes good syrup, and tell you the stories of ours Telling the city and the dreams of our neighbors, handling a rifle, using a chainsaw without fear, calculating the load capacity of a roof and growing our own asparagus: ... "
According to this stereotype, rednecks have, at best, a high school degree. Today they no longer earn their living as farm workers or tenants, but predominantly as workers in factories or simple and thus poorly paid service occupations. Many of them are bogus self-employed - they are contracted by companies to perform certain jobs, which saves these companies the social, industrial accident and health insurance payments that would be due if they were on a permanent basis. They typically have a household income in the lower third of the income distribution (around $ 30,000 to $ 35,000 per year based on 2004/2005 data) and have poor job security. It is not uncommon for both spouses to have to work to earn this household income. As a result, they often limit their income situation to a life in trailer parks and mobile home estates . This form of real estate ownership is neither a way to build up a little wealth nor a form of retirement planning. Trailers and mobile homes have a limited lifespan, lose a lot of value on the first day of use and are often only on rented plots. Since typical rednecks cannot build up reserves due to their low income and they usually have no or only inadequate health insurance, illness represents a considerable risk of poverty for them. A study by Harvard University from 2005 found that 50 percent of all Personal bankruptcies were due to unpaid medical treatment costs. The average outstanding debt was $ 12,000.
Rednecks belong to a segment of the population that would benefit particularly from stricter labor laws, an expansion of the social welfare system, an expansion of health insurance, better financing of public schools and simplified lending to finance college attendance. However, they predominantly vote for the Republican Party, which rejects these measures and pursues an economic policy that tends to be detrimental to this class. Both David Bageant in Deer Hunting with Jesus and Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas? (What is the matter with Kansas?) Justify this with the fact that the own economic situation is not in the foreground when deciding for or against a party in this layer. While David Bageant also sees a lack of or one-sided information and insufficient penetration of economic policy issues as the reason for this, Thomas Frank argues that rednecks associate the Democratic Party with a group of people from whom they feel completely alienated and with whom they believe they are completely alienated do not share any values. Frank therefore speaks of a war of values (cultural war) . In his opinion, this phenomenon is only a few decades old. In the period between the end of World War I and the United States' entry into World War II , rednecks became more associated with the Democratic Party, and the terms redneck and union member were not contradictory.
Rednecks are mainly found in the US-American southern states as well as in Montana , Minnesota and Wyoming . In Canada, they are mainly found in the provinces of Alberta , Saskatchewan , Manitoba , New Brunswick , Newfoundland and Nova Scotia as well as in southern Ontario .
history
As early as the early 20th century, poor residents of the Appalachian and Ozarks were known as hillbilly . The redneck cliché also included poor (white) southerners and farm workers in general. The drafting of conscripts in the United States for the First World War allowed the first concrete comparisons between the Appalachian region, the southern states and the rest of the country. White Southerners and Appalachians had lower incomes, lower levels of education, and were poorly medically cared for than the average white American. Only African Americans in the southern states were worse off.
In the 1920s and 1930s, agriculture in the Dust Bowl areas suffered heavy losses due to droughts, which, like the economic depression, made the situation even worse. Federal programs by the New Deal- era Tennessee Valley Authority and later the Appalachian Regional Commission fueled development and created new jobs for the underprivileged rural dwellers of the southern states and the Appalachian region. The Second World War finally led to an economic boom in these areas. Inside and outside the armed forces, whites, but also Afro-Americans from these regions, received training for activities in production and administration, which would previously have been unthinkable. Many military bases sprang up, particularly in Georgia and Texas , and factories were set up in formerly agricultural regions. Numerous families moved to metropolitan areas like Atlanta and many workers moved to office jobs. This progress also reached black citizens, even if not all rural residents could benefit from it in the end.
The booming economy also changed the social status of the rednecks. Until then, rednecks tried to shed their dialect and present themselves as normal, average citizens; only coaches of popular sports and politicians always kept a certain local flavor to show their loyalty to the people. The new prosperity allowed the rednecks to hold on to their idiosyncrasies and to evade the pressure of integration of modernity . Professor James C. Cobb of the University of Georgia said of the way the rednecks see themselves today: “Today, in secure circumstances and closer to the mainstream , they rebel against being respectable and embrace the hero of the counterculture: the redneck who is what he is and doesn't care what someone else thinks about it. "
Rednecks in Literature
The Georgia-born author Erskine Caldwell is considered to be the writer who placed the experiences of poor white farm workers and tenants in the southern states in a special way at the center of his actions. His two best-known works are Tobacco Road (1932, German title: Die Tabakstraße ) and God's little Acre (1933, German title: Gottes kleine Acker).
The scene of Tobacco Road is the rural Georgia during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts the life of the Lesters family, who are among the many impoverished cotton farmers who neither understand the increasing industrialization of cotton processing nor the migration to the cities and who fight desperately against a further loss of their social status. The poverty of the Lester family is so great that their lives are only dominated by the fulfillment of the most elementary needs: the satisfaction of their hunger and their sexual desire. In a review eighty years after the first publication of the novel, the critic Nathaniel Rich wrote that the novel still had the quality of a freak show : as moderate comedy and utterly failing as tragedy, it brutally confronts the reader with losers in American society, who no longer have any dignity. This distinguishes this novel from the novels of John Steinbeck , Carson McCuller or Eudora Welty , which also depict failures, but still give these failures an inner dignity.
One of the central themes of God's little Acre , which is based in South Carolina, is the plight of workers in cotton mills who are without the protection of a functioning union. Together with his second wife, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White , Caldwell documented the desperate situation of poor southerners during the Great Depression in You have seen Their Faces (1937) .
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee is one of the best known documentaries of the lives of impoverished white southerners during the 1930s . Originally commissioned by Life Magazine to write a report, the two men spent six weeks in Alabama documenting the lives of three white families who made a living from cotton growing. Every detail of their joyless, hard life was documented by them with the greatest care: their little furniture, their ragged clothes, their skinny chickens, the cheap calendars and newspaper advertisements with which their fireplace wall was decorated. The book was not a sales success in the 1940s. It was not recognized by a wide audience until the 1960s.
Rednecks in the movie
One of the best-known portrayals of rednecks in the film is the American adventure film When You Die Everyone First from 1972 by John Boorman with Burt Reynolds , Ronny Cox , Jon Voight and Ned Beatty in the lead roles. The film revolves around the four Atlanta- born city dwellers Lewis, Ed, Bobby and Drew. They want to go canoeing on the remote, wild Cahulawassee River in the US state of Georgia , before the area around the river disappears underwater when a dam is built. From the beginning of your journey it is clear that you are strangers in a strange world. The residents of the area to which they are traveling are portrayed in a stereotypical manner as rednecks: the obviously impoverished, brutalized and uneducated locals behave in a disinterested or dismissive manner towards the four tourists. An encounter between the tourists and other rednecks two days later leads to violence and ultimately to the death of several of the men.
The film is based on the 1970 novel Deliverance (German River Cruise ) by the American author James Dickey . One of the most famous scenes in the film is a musical duel between a guitar and a banjo , which is played by one of the main characters in the film or by an obviously mentally disabled boy.
The comedic Netflix series The Ranch (TV series) provides a representation of this segment of the population in the 21st century . Leading actor Ashton Kutcher plays a returning football player who helps keep the family ranch afloat for generations.
Rednecks in Music
Kid Rock celebrated the Redneck's lifestyle in 2012 in his song "Redneck Paradise":
“It's a hole in the wall kind of small but the people are really nice and folks in here they're free and clear to drink beer and dance all night, that's right. And no one's uptight in Redneck Paradise. Now I might get a little tipsy, I might be past my prime but pour some Jim Beam whiskey and I'll show you a real big time. You don't need reservations, drop by anytime. The sun is shining in Redneck Paradise. And the things we like don't cost a lot of money. Good foot stomping music gets us by. Measure up our wealth in friends and family. We're going to hit them honky tonks tonight "
“There's a hole in the wall, it's pretty small, but the people are really nice and the people in here are free and want to drink beer and dance all night. And nobody is uptight in redneck paradise. I may be a little tipsy, I may be past my prime, but pour me a Jim Beam and I'll show you how to have a good time. You don't need a reservation, just come by, the sun is shining in redneck paradise. The things we like don't cost much. Good pounding music keeps us alive. We measure our wealth in friends and family. Tonight we're going to make the pubs unsafe "
In the mid-1990s, the Swedish Eurodance group Rednex offered a parody of this social class , which landed four hits in the charts with the songs Cotton Eye Joe , Old Pop in an Oak , Wish You Were Here and The Spirit of the Hawk .
literature
- Joe Bageant: Deer Hunting With Jesus - Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America . Portobello Books, London 2013, ISBN 978-1-84627-559-3 .
- Stephen Edward Cresswell: Rednecks, redeemers, and race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877-1917. Publishing house Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006, ISBN 1-57806-847-9 . Partly available online
- Thomas Frank: What's the Matter with Kansas? - How Conservatives won the Heart of America . Owl Books, New York 2004, ISBN 0-8050-7774-X .
- David R. Roediger: Towards the abolition of whiteness: essays on race, politics, and working class history. Verso, 1994, ISBN 0-86091-658-8 , p. 134 ff., Partly available online.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Harold Wentworth, Stuart Berg Flexner: Dictionary of American Slang. Book Sales Verlag, 1988, ISBN 0-06-181157-2 , p. 424.
- ↑ Christiane Wanzeck: On the etymology of lexicalized color word combinations. Rodopi, 2003, ISBN 90-420-1317-6 , p. 37.
- ↑ Harold Wentworth, Stuart Berg Flexner: Dictionary of American Slang. 1975, p. 424.
- ^ Anthony Harkins: Hillbilly, A Cultural History of an American Icon. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 39.
- ^ Ernest Cashmore, James Jennings (Ed.): Racism: essential readings ,. 2001, p. 36.
- ↑ Barbara Ann Kipfer, Robert L. Chapman: American Slang. 2008, p. 404.
- ^ William Safire: Safire's political dictionary. 2008, p. 612.
- ^ Goad: The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats. 1998, p. 18.
- ↑ Bageant: Deer Hunting with Jesus . 2013, p. 5.
- ↑ See Joe Bageant: Deer Hunting With Jesus - Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America . 2013.
- ↑ Redneck Repartee ( Memento from May 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), on gtalumni.org
- ↑ Quoted from Frank: What's the Matter with Kansas? In the original the quote is: Most Red [= Republicans electing] Americans can't deconstruct post-modern literature, give proper orders to a nanny, pick out a cabernet with aftertones of licorice, or quote prices from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. But we can raise great children, wire our own houses, make beautiful and delicious creations with our own two hands, talk casually and comfortably about God, repair a small engine, recognize a good maple sugar tree, tell you the histories of our towns and cities the hopes of our neighbors, shoot a gun and run a chainsaw without fear, calculate the bearing load of a roof, grow our own asparagus ...
- ↑ Bageant: Dear Hunting with Jesus. 2013, p. 47.
-
^ D. Gilbert: The American Class Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA 2002.
W. Thompson, J. Hickey: Society in Focus. Pearson, Allyn & Bacon, Boston, MA 2005.
L. Beeghley: The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States. Pearson, Allyn & Bacon Boston, MA 2004.
The American Class Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality. Wadsworth Belmont, CA.
W. Thompson, J. Hickey: Society in Focus. Pearson, Allyn & Bacon, Boston, MA 2005.
L. Beeghley: The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States. Pearson, Allyn & Bacon, Boston, MA 2004. - ↑ Bageant: Deer Hunting with Jesus . 2013, p. 106.
- ↑ Bageant: Deer Hunting with Jesus . 2013, p. 234.
- ↑ see for example Frank: What's the Matter with Kansas. P. 168.
- ↑ Poor Whites , on georgiaencyclopedia.org
- ↑ American Dreams: Book Review by Nathaniel Rich , accessed January 24, 2014.
- ^ Peter Conn: Literature in America - An Illustrated History. Cambridge University Press, London 1989, ISBN 0-521-30373-7 , p. 405.
- ^ Peter Conn: Literature in America - An Illustrated History. Cambridge University Press, London 1989, ISBN 0-521-30373-7 , p. 405 and p. 406.
- ↑ Lyrics of Redneck Paradise. Retrieved November 18, 2017 .