Re: Woman fired for Aids Africa tweet.
Exactly and since redneck cannot be applied to every person of one race, it's not a racial slur. What else is there to argue?
The problem is feigned outrage. Some right wing American whites are
desperate to have their own racial slur. One that conveys the same feelings as nigger, wetback and maybe chink. The problem is that they run into 2 giant problems when they try to get worked up about "redneck" and "cracker". On one hand, these are the same whites that constantly argue that
historically these terms have been used for racist purposes. This fails on
two grounds, the first one is that "whites" as a collective in America's history is a relatively new term.
1. The Irish and Scots: They haven't been considered "whites" for a large part of US history.
2. Italians: They weren't even considered white until the 1920s. Each region of Italy has their particular epithet and have been singled out on merit.
3. German & Dutch: They were being called "krauts" as recently as the 1940s. Once again to separate them from other whites.
The second ground it fails on is the fact that whites in America have had their own separate struggles. At no point in US history have
all whites discriminated against. When I say this, I mean that they haven't been discriminated against as a group. Each group of white immigration has had their own period of discrimination and a none have had the chance of saying it was on grounds of
being white. For the most part, White Anglo Saxon Protestants have remained scathed. The Irish, the Scots, the Italians? They each took their turns. The same can't be said for Asians, Blacks & Hispanics. At one point or another, all members of such groups were discriminated against with federal/local laws supporting it.
That said, it's impossible for whites to come up with a collective term meant to discriminate against all whites. They simply haven't had a collective struggle in the US. From the onset, whites were the power holders in the US. Even though that influence has declined today, it's impossible for whites to say they're being oppressed. Most of the government leaders are white. Most of the army leadership remains white. Corporations in the US remain mostly white run. There US simply hasn't had the social dynamic required to create a slur to refer to whites collectively. Sure, some groups of whites face discrimination (Russians, Armenians etc) but there is simply no collective discrimination of whites in the US.
Going back to my initial point, the second problem that some whites who depend on feigned outrage want to have it both ways when it comes to racial history. They proudly claim that
nigger can be disassociated from its past because "nobody today owns a slave" and "blacks say it too". Well, that's fine - if we can disassociate it so easily, then I guess the same applies for redneck, right? Only it doesn't. Redneck is a term applied to a specific subculture. Movies are made on the subculture. TV shows are centered around it. Comedians call themselves that without necessarily being white. Is it the same for nigger? Nope. Not at all. The
word has a past that stretches beyond a subculture because it has historically been applied to everyone from a black Senator from Chicago to a poor black farmer in Georgia.
In conclusion: People like Marine have reverted back to the failed argument of "redneck" and "cracker" are the same as "nigger", "chink" and "wetback". Only they are not. Historically, redneck and cracker are references to VERY specific groups of whites and this is due to the US' racial history. Just as whites have their own hyphenated groups to refer to each distinctive group of white (Irish-American, Italian-American), they've had their own distinctive epithets ("Dago", "Mick"). Blacks, because of their past have had a single word to refer to them "nigger" and now have a single word to describe themselves "African-American". This isn't to say that words like "Dago" and "Mick" aren't racist, they, without a doubt are. However, words like cracker don't follow as they aren't references to either all people from a region or even every member of a race in that region. Redneck basically is a subculture word. You can be Southern and not be a redneck.
