In America, the word
redneck dates back to the 1800s, and in different parts of the country at different times, its meaning has shifted. Over the course of nearly 200 years, it has stood for the following:
- poor, Southern whites
- a name “applied by the better class of people to the poorer [white] inhabitants of the rural districts”
- a word used “to denigrate [white] farmers within their party who supported populist reforms”
- white Presbyterians living in North Carolina (specific rednecks!)
- Communists
- a term black southerners used—alongside poor white trash, cracker, and peckerwood—to poke fun at poor white country folks
- white coal miners who belonged to labor unions (in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana)
- any white racist, regardless of his or her class position or birthplace
These are all pretty degrading characterizations and perhaps what most people have in mind when they hear the word
redneck.
But according to
Patrick Huber and Kathleen Drowne, the term—originally an allusion to the sunburned red necks of farmers—was not always used as a slur amongst whites. For example, wearing red neckties and kerchiefs to political rallies, some southerners claimed the label as a “badge of class pride for a county’s populist voters.”
Chic and Upscale Rednecks
In the 1970s, being a “redneck” became fashionable, and the term
redneck chic, which seems to have little to do with outwardly disparaging race or class, was born. According to Patrick Huber, this is what was happening during the Carter presidency and afterward. He writes in “
A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity:”