Red-Neck Bashing

       In The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad describes the acceptable berating and open condescension that working class whites experience. These lower-class people, targeted as "red-necks" and hillbillies", have become the butt of American jokes and unlike African American jokes, which are reprimanded as racist, and religious jokes, which are deemed politically incorrect, these jokes are, for some reason, viewed as acceptable in our society.

    A perfect example of the patronization the working class endures from higher social classes can be seen on the site www.peopleofwalmart.com. 

         On this site, people post photographs, stories, and videos of people shopping in Walmart whom they view as "weird" or "different." Because the people being photographed (unknowingly) are judged as inferior to the photographer, there are then made fun of on the website. The structure of this website perfectly reflects the class racism that exists in today's society. Because middle class people judge working class behavior from the habitus of a middle class person, they think lower class people have chosen, out of freedom of choice, to live in that particular way. Thus, the lower class's obviously inferior quality, which the middle class seems to think is a chosen lifestyle, is viewed as due to ignorance, conformity, and bad decisions.  

         Middle class persons fail to realize that while the middle class might live a certain way by choice and have a taste for freedom, often times, the lower classes experience a "forced choice of necessity" and develop a taste for necessity. This taste develops, not out of deprivation, however, but out of preference. The workers are just more practical with confronting the needs and urgencies of making a living so they develop a different lifestyle.

       On the site, the photograph of the day is labeled "Feature Creature," referring to the person in the picture as a creature. Because dominant classes tend to use working-class lifestyles as a negative reference point for themselves, it is viewed as "acceptable" for them to refer to lower-class humans as creatures, and because the working class rejects the culture of the dominant class as "not for them," they manage to isolate themselves from mainstream society. Because of this separation between classes, different social classes fail to understand one another, which perpetuates class racism. Since the middle and upper classes do not understand why the lower and working classes might act in a certain way, they attribute it all to stupidity.

"The trailer park has become the media's cultural toilet, the only acceptable place to dump one's racist inclinations."