Redneck

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 and Florida), hillbilly (especially regarding Appalachia and the Ozarks), and white trash (but without the last term's suggestions of immorality).

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.

Rednecks (song)

"Rednecks" is a song by Randy Newman, the lead-off track on his 1974 album Good Old Boys.

Lyrics and interpretation

"Rednecks" is sung from the perspective of a Southern "redneck". In it he expresses his dismay at the way that the North looks down upon The South. In particular the narrator describes his ire at watching a "smart-ass, New York Jew" mock Lester Maddox on a television program. (This is an allusion to Maddox's 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show whose eponymous host is actually a gentile.) In response to his frustration at the television show, the narrator goes on to list, sarcastically, a litany of negative qualities that Southerners are reputed to have. He focuses especially on institutionalized racism, or, as the narrator puts it: "keeping the niggers down."

As the song ends, the narrator turns the knife on judgmental northerners, calling them out as hypocrites. He achieves this by singing that the "North has set the nigger free" and then sings African-Americans are only "free to be put in a cage," and then lists a number of black ghettos in northern cities (e.g. Roxbury in Boston, East St. Louis and Harlem in New York City) The song's final lyric is: "They [the Northerners] gatherin' 'em up, from miles around/Keeping the niggers down."