GUEST BOOK REVIEW: The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad

This is a guest book review from Cedar Sanderson. I have just posted an excerpt from the full review. You can check out the rest on her site in the link at the end. It’s a review that might stretch your thinking a little, and as for the book, I really think it would stretch your thinking.

“If I’d been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I’d merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching.” -Jim Goad

In the first chapter, Goad points out that ‘redneck’ appears often in contemporary journalism as a slur, having changed from the quaint but genial portrayals fifty years ago, to the cruel and often sadistic caricature it has become in this era. Even Webster’s dictionary, he says, calls a redneck “Ignorant, bigoted, violent…” seemingly without questioning this assumption. He wonders why, in a world where only the group of people can insult others in that group, it is permitted and even encouraged for all groups to pick on the white working class.

…

“When a bomb explodes or a plane crashes in America these days, people have taken to blaming hillbillies rather than Arabs.” Goad goes on to write a scathing denunciation of those who love to hate what they have termed ‘hate groups.’ He notes that those who are becoming intolerably shrill about white trash militia threats are in the pockets of big corporate interests. “So maybe all this chest-thumping about ‘hate speech’ has less to do with racism than it has to do with criticism of government.” Goad’s conclusion is that the mass media has carefully constructed a campaign against the very thing the government fears most: it’s own populace.

Read the rest of the book review over at Cedar Writes.