How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Redneck
Or, the Rise of a New Working Class Hero.
Welcome to Southern Gothic Week. Every day this week, I’ll be publishing essays that cover a range of topics related to the American South. This is the second post in the series — stay tuned for more.
No matter how many angles I catch Glen Powell shotgunning a beer from, I’m never not absolutely fucking enthralled. His carefree glide onto the stage of a Luke Combs concert, of all things, feels reminiscent of the Georgia boys I grew up with and yet casually glamorous all at once, all SEC eroticism and a backward cap. How swiftly he downs the beer and the effulgent joy with which he flings the empty can into the crowd presents a rich text only decipherable by my extremely elite and well-respected college degree in pre-gaming. It’s an undeniable victory in the annals of Southern masculinity, nonchalant sexuality and American-made savoir faire.
Behold, the Redneck.
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And what’s in a name? Except that it’s kind of perfect, these red-blooded, red-state beings whom I most associate with those red bugs I used to pick out of my skin or smother with clear nail polish after wading through the tall Tennessee grass. That is to say: they make me itch. But also, carry with them a sense of home. A rose-colored pest by any other name would talk as sweet.
But, where does the red come from? Depends who you ask.
In “A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity,” Patrick Huber writes, “The compound word redneck, most scholars of the American language agree, originally derived from an allusion to sunburn.”
A way of discriminating against poor people based on the color of their skin, a red neck could distinguish a white field worker from the white middle class.
“Whatever its derivation, the origin and early usage of the slur suggest that it ridiculed not only the sweaty, drudging labor of white farmers and sharecroppers but also their perceived deception, at least a limited one, from a pale white complexion. From its earliest usage, then, the pejorative term redneck reflected clear connotations of both class and color difference.”
However, in another article, Huber explores an alternative history of the term: “During the 1920s and 1930s, however, another one of its definitions in the northern and central Appalachian coalfields was ‘a Communist.’ And during the first four decades of the twentieth century, redneck also referred more broadly to a miner who was a member of a labor union, particularly to one who was on strike,” in reference to the red bandanas striking miners wore.
These whiskey-breathed, white working men then present a defiance to exploitation. The Redneck is defined by his lack of respect for authority and a natural suspicion of modernity. He arises from a classless society, one ruled by desire and superstition over government and legislation.
And now, alongside a resurgence of recession-core, working-class style and the popularity of Zyn (that’s just dip, y’all are dipping, you can’t fool me), the culture has given us rednecks to root for. Gone are the Deliverance-style threats to modern masculinity like the gun-toting villains of the Mississippi-set Straw Dogs remake, or ridiculed straw men like True Blood’s resident himbo Jason Stackhouse.
Netflix’s teen treasure hunter show Outer Banks follows a group of working-class North Carolina high schoolers who proudly describe themselves as “local as they come” to differentiate them from their seersucker-clad, country club classmates.
Meanwhile, Sean Durkin’s sports drama The Iron Claw dons the conventions of a male melodrama — and plays with the trope of family as the site of trauma often found in Southern Gothic stories — to craft a parable about the danger of toxic masculinity threatening a brood of Texas wrestlers.
And most recently, we were introduced to Glen Powell’s brash tornado wrangler in Twisters. The Oklahoma redneck traffics in the same provincial charm Powell has made a signature of his own public image. Much has been said about Powell’s and his characters’ charm, which embodies a blend of intelligence and masculinity.
“Glen Powell is so good at being manly, but also sensitive,” gushes one Vogue writer.
In the time of a masculinity crisis enabled by red-pilled internet grifters, the Redneck emerges as an alternative brand of hyper-masculinity and fringe power. In The Iron Claw, the burlesque nature of wrestling itself gives viewers enough distance to see traditional masculinity as ridiculous and untenable. While the film ends with Zac Efron saying “A man doesn’t cry,” through his own tears, we see the men of Outer Banks break down time and again. Twisters leaves most of its pathos with its haunted female protagonist, but Tyler Owens lays some very memorable emotions on us at pivotal moments in the film.
Most rednecks don’t think or care enough about women to construct their entire identities around hating us. This represents yet another undeniably attractive quality of the Redneck: He is, by his very nature, independent. The freedom these impulsive beings, with their leisure-tinged lives, possess lies at the very heart of their appeal.
The Redneck’s identity is tied to nature and corporate interests are often suspicious of and downright hostile to the natural world. At once immovable in the face of change and unsympathetic to capitalist ideas of “progress,” both the natural world and rednecks have proven a formidable threat to modernity. Because of his kinship with the wild, the Redneck represents a kind of possibility beyond the alienation of modern society.
We’ve gotten a taste of this with these recent depictions, who are both traditional in character but wholly modern, and even downright idealistic, in their motives. These new rednecks are allowed to dream: Beyond toxic masculinity, beyond class disparity, beyond climate disaster.
They exist at the intersection of the traditional, masculine stereotypes of previous depictions, Frankensteined together with modern ideologies. Overall, they represent hopeful heroes for a new world.
What’s that? There’s another thing they’re known for? Oh.
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I first encountered what we now call the Confederate flag when I was 12, stitched into the socks of a classmate. I admitted that I didn’t know what country the flag came from prompting ridicule from her. Which, like, okay, you’re wearing Confederate flag socks you probably picked up from the Drugs ’n’ Gun and you’re making fun of me?
I went to middle school with a bunch of would-be “rednecks” who went muddin’ on weekends and wore camo with the worst of intentions. For three years, I received an education in a type of Southerner I thought only existed in our popular imagination.
The Redneck’s revolutionary spirit is a besieged one, caught between a rock and a racist place. Huber says of the racist attitudes and ideologies inherent to the Redneck’s early identity: “For their part, textile mill owners benefitted from a less militant white workforce that identified not so much with the class interests it shared with Black workers as it did with the racial interest of its employers. A racially divided workforce, moreover, dealt textile mill owners a trump card — the threat of replacing white strikers with Black strikebreakers.”
Despite their potential opposition to capitalism, rednecks were at the end of the day class traitors who applauded their own exploitation to leech whatever small amount of power they could from white supremacy. As Huber writes, “The redefinition and use of the term by these self-styled rednecks speak powerfully to their racial and class consciousness as an economically exploited and yet racially privileged group.”
My complicated feelings about the rednecks I grew up with come from the resentment that can only grow from familiarity. It’s the frustration of being unable to convince them of what the rest of us already figured out: That on the other side of your prejudice is your freedom.
The Redneck has been defined by his inability to adapt to modern mores. At its worst, this has meant allegiance to historical systems of power and oppression like white supremacy and patriarchy as a way to carve out a modicum of power within their powerlessness under free-market capitalism.
However, it also leaves room to imagine alternatives to our current culture. If the Redneck has long been a receptacle for America’s shame and a comedic figure for public ridicule, these days he’s become a symbol of the much-applauded death of the fable of the American Dream.
And the popularity of these new rednecks attests to audiences’ hunger for heroes outside the dominant systems of power — those in direct conflict with corporate greed, who commit to resistance rooted in solidarity, masculinity without violence, passion without ego. If they could tie their self-interest to the collective good, perhaps together we could toss out the status quo as carelessly as an empty, shotgunned can of beer.
Previously on Southern Gothic Week
Our Southern Gothic
The South is a thing I feel when I can’t feel anything at all.
OH GIRL YOU ARE COOKING LATELY