“Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional
High Status: Unemployed and unemployable MFA (Master of Fine Arts) who is unfortunately in between arts grants and low paid teaching jobs at the moment, and has been for some considerable time.
Lower Status: Artist who makes decent money by selling reproductions of his art to the despised bourgeoisie, but has no MFA, never gets grants, and never holds a job in academia, in part because the pay is low, but mostly because they would not hire such an inferior and low status person anyway.
Lowest Status: Wealthy farmer, who was a farmer’s son, and makes lots of money by feeding thousands of people, his neck turning red in the process as he works outdoors.
Farmers who own a lot of land, and their sons (though strangely not their daughters) also “rednecks”, and hated and despised accordingly. They are discriminated against in university admissions. Are they poor and dysfunctional?
The hatred of rednecks is a less extreme form of the “Occupy Wall Street” demands for jobs in the virtue and cultural uplift industries. The ruling class thinks that producing value is low status, and producing value by working outside is really low status, regardless of income.
Just as an unemployed and severely dysfunctional Occupy Wall Street protestor, who has a Masters in Fine Arts and is therefore a genuine official artist, despises the mere peddler of kitsch, despite the fact that no one would pay for the MFA’s “art” with their own money, and right now his grant has run out, the lesser artist, though his status is inferior due to the fact that he got his money merely from members of la bourgeoisie buying his art, rather than grants, his status is nonetheless superior to that of the even wealthier farmer’s son, whose work is largely done outdoors, and whose neck is therefore red.
Redneck has had connotations beyond “someone who works outside”, “someone who does farm work”, or even “someone who is white and does farm work” for some time.
Yet strangely, the MFA at “Occupy Wall Street” whose grant ran out long ago, and whose teaching job is extreme low pay, would not consider a better paid job that involved working out of doors.
Indeed, he is reluctant even to consider jobs outside the virtue industry.
How is this a response to anything I said? Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”? But then, your last sentence seems to contradict that. They value working in their field, just like anyone else. Maybe they value it too highly, in the face of economic reality. Maybe there are other, additional pressures that are leading their decisions. Maybe they are turning their noses up at some specific jobs because they seem too “redneck” but you haven’t shown evidence of it. But this isn’t even the point I was making.
While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “redneck” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage. Or, for that matter, an inverse with an MFA. Blue collar work—particularly non-manufacturing blue collar work—is a feature of the stereotype, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine category membership.
“While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “[Jew]” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. [Such as hooked noses and penny pinching business practices]
Wow, you really love that negative karma, don’t you?
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity. If we wish to pick these apart into Jew(S), Jew(R), and Jew(E), then that would be an antiquated but reasonably accurate description of Jew(S).
There is no corresponding Redneck(R) or Redneck(E). There is a redneck as the term was originally used—Redneck(O), let’s say.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
An attempt to reclaim it is not necessarily unreasonable, but it should be explicit. Attempting to do it implicitly is inviting confusion of the nature that originally caused me to comment.
You should now see the mismatch of your FTFY—Jew(S) is not at all the most prevalent usage of Jew.
There are nonetheless still occasions when I would recommend someone interpret “Jew” as Jew(S); if, as I recall observing in Junior high, one person asks to borrow money, is refused, and responds “You Jew!”, clearly interpreting that as Jew(R) or Jew(E) would be absurd—doubly so when you are aware that the refuser is neither.
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity.
I would say there is at least one more. Jewishness is as much a cultural association as a religious one, and there are plenty of people who identify as Jewish culturally, but not religiously.
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity
When someone calls a penny pincher a Jew, that is not an alternate meaning for Jew, but a metaphor, like calling an overweight woman a whale. Jew means Jew by race or religion, and Redneck means someone who does a low status job, or whose ancestors did a low status job.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
Yet oddly, an Master of Fine arts can never be a redneck, however poor and socially conservative he may be, even though MFAs are infamous for being poor and dysfunctional. Nor can a slush pile reader be a redneck, even though slush pile readers earn the smell of an oil rag..
Just as Jew means Jew by race or religion, not a penny pincher, redneck means a person who works in a low status job—no matter how highly paid that job may be.
And similarly, “racist” merely means person of low status, or insufficient status for the role he attempts to perform. Thus that rednecks are “racist” merely means that certain jobs are low status.
Chris Rock claimed to redefine nigga as not meaning a black man, but merely meaning a black man that fits the stereotype—and then he said that when he withdrew money from the teller machine, he looked behind him for niggas. Actual usage of the term “redneck” is similarly revealing.
Indeed, Chris Rock’s famous rant about niggas begins and ends with punch lines that falsify his claim to redefinition, probably deliberately, as the falsification, combined with the claim, is comical.
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
When a group of people is stereotyped, this does not create a new meaning of the name of the group. Let’s review what a stereotype is. Using the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary, their definition of “stereotype” is:
a fixed idea that people have about what someone or something is like, especially an idea that is wrong
False fixed ideas (beliefs) about group G are not new definitions for the name of the group G. G is not split into two, G(O) and G(S). The false fixed belief is a belief about G(O). The stereotype concerns the (original) group, it does not create a new group.
Imagine if it were otherwise! Imagine if, every time some false belief about some thing T popped into your head, then T split into two, T(O) and T(S). For one thing, you would never again have a false belief, because rather than being a false belief about T(O), your belief would actually be a definition for a new thing T(S) about which it was true.
To put it more briefly, a stereotype is an idea, a belief, about something. A belief can be true or false. In contrast, a definition or meaning is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. So to call a stereotype a meaning is to commit a simple category mistake.
Your whole argument is stated in terms of this category mistake, so to salvage it you would need to toss it and start from scratch.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings. This doesn’t mean that anyone would have the guts (or possibly lack of good sense—that lack might be equivalent to guts) to produce such a dictionary.
A concept might be in many people’s minds, and yet be inaccurate. A dictionary might note that while listing the concept.
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings.
Merriam Webster and the other good descriptivist dictionaries do include meanings that match particular stereotypes when they are common meanings, which they rarely but occasionally are.
But importantly, it is only particular stereotypes of a given thing that become meanings—it has to be this way, in order to avoid confusion. For example, the verb “to jew” (which you can look up in any sufficiently comprehensive dictionary) has a meaning which matches a particular stereotype of Jews. That particular stereotype is not “the” stereotype of Jews, because to say it was “the” stereotype would be to imply that there is only one stereotype, and there are many stereotypes of Jews.
Also importantly, meanings corresponding to stereotypes are not automatically generated whenever stereotypes arise. It has to be this way, because it’s common that many stereotypes of a given thing arise, and if a meaning were automatically generated for each stereotype, then it would be difficult to tell, among all the stereotypes, which stereotype was meant when the word was used. Nor does a meaning automatically arise that includes all stereotypes together, as we know from the example of the verb “to jew”. Rather, on occasion, certain stereotypes are adopted as meanings. It doesn’t automatically happen, and it ought not blithely be assumed to have happened.
Here’s another pair of examples. Similarly to the verb “to jew”, there is also the verb “to dog”, which corresponds to one particular stereotype about dogs. And the verb “to wolf” (as in to wolf down) corresponds to another particular stereotype about wolves (and, as it happens, about their close relatives the dogs). Had linguistic history taken a different turn, the verbs “to dog” and “to wolf” might have had entirely different meanings, or might not have existed at all.
your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings
I seem to recall an Italian dictionary which did give something like “a miser” as one of the definition of ebreo, though with the annotation fig. before it. :-)
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Indeed. in case there has been any confusion, I did not argue otherwise. I wrote: “Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors.” Note my use of the word “originally”. This acknowledges that the term “redneck” has evolved since then. I was speculating about its origin.
It may well be—to speculate further—that the term “red neck” originally arose in the South, possibly applied by the Southern upper, indoors-dwelling (or otherwise sun-protected) classes to the Southern lower, outdoors-laboring classes.
This point does not take away from my argument as far as I can tell. Certainly I was aware of it, hence I used the word “originally”.
I’m pretty sure we’re talking past each other here. I think my usage of stereotype was actually reasonably correct, consider for instance:
In the analysis of personality, the term archetype is often broadly used to refer to a stereotype—personality type observed multiple times, especially an oversimplification of such a type[...]
As it stands, there are four meanings of “Jew”. The first three, the religion, the ethnicity, and the culture, have to do with individuals. The last is a fictional model of an individual comprised of various beliefs (true and false) that the are held, or have been held, in the community recently enough and prominently enough to be recognizable to most members of the community.
I contend that people do, in fact, make reference to these models in communication without necessarily adopting the belief that the model is valid.
This is not to say that I think they should do so; there is legitimate concern about propagating false beliefs when the models are commonly believed, and about bleeding over of associations when they are not.
It fixes part of it but I don’t think you capture what’s really going on. To use a fresh aspect of the concept of the redneck, as Nancy points out “redneck” has a regional component. MW’s definition of “redneck” for example, is: “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”. That’s an aspect of what you would call Redneck(O). So when you write:
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
you’re claiming that when people use the term, they predominantly do not use it to mean “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”, but rather, the stereotypes which we have been discussing, which were introduced by Sewing Machine, namely:
what people despise about American rednecks, when that term is used pejoratively, is their bigotry.
and elaborated or modified by konkvistador:
it seems to me “Rednecks” are despised because they are poor and dysfunctional
So here we have three stereotypes about rednecks: bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional. These are the stereotypes that were introduced, and that were given as reasons for rednecks being despised. I offered a quite different, and conflicting, theory as to why rednecks are despised, and I claimed that these stereotypes are in fact not reasons, but rationalizations, excuses, for the contempt so often and so publicly and so gleefully expressed about rednecks.
You’ve offered a new theory of the concept of the “redneck”, distinct from that of Sewing Machine and Konkvistador (the negative stereotypes on their expressed view do not constitute the concept, but are merely associated with the category). Your new theory amounts to an almost perfect excuse for the contempt. According to you, when people use the term, they predominantly mean Redneck(S). In context, then, what your statement amounts to, is the statement that when people use the term “redneck”, they mean “someone who is bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional”. If it were true, this would excuse the contempt shown to rednecks, maybe not the “poor” part, but “bigoted” certainly and “dysfunctional” probably. So when people say, “rednecks are bigots” and “rednecks are dysfunctional”, on your view of it, they are merely stating tautologies, i.e., “bigots are bigots” and “dysfunctional people are dysfunctional.”
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
In fact, the comedian Chris Rock did take something like your approach to a similar issue. He has a monolog in which he takes a common derogatory term for a whole group and redefines it (for the duration of his monolog) as referring only to those members to whom common negative stereotypes apply, and not to all members of the group. This is certainly not how it is normally used, and if you don’t belong to the group yourself, you would be well advised not to start using this term on the theory that it refers only to those members who satisfy the negative stereotypes. Chris Rock’s monolog, from wikiquote:
There’s a lot of racism going on. Who’s more racist, black people or white people? It’s black people! You know why? Because we hate black people too! Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people ,and there’s two sides, there’s black people and theres niggas. The niggas have got to go. You can’t have shit when you around niggas, you can’t have shit. You can’t have no big screen TV! You can have it, but you better move it in at 3 in the morning. Paint it white, hope niggas think it’s a bassinet. Can’t have shit in your house! Why?! Because niggas will break into your house. Niggas that live next door to you break into your house, come over the next day and go, “I heard you got robbed.” Nigga, you know you robbed me. You didn’t see shit ’cause you was doing shit! You can’t go see a movie, you know why? ’Cause niggas is shooting at the screen, “This movie’s so good I gotta bust a cap in here!” You know the worst thing about niggas? Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids.” You’re supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? “I ain’t never been to jail!” What do you want, a cookie?! You’re not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!
Someone who is not black would be well advised to avoid saying:
You can’t have shit when you around niggas, you can’t have shit. … Why?! Because niggas will break into your house.
If we were to apply your theory of “redneck” to “nigga”, then the above statement would be an empty tautology, since it would mean essentially, “black people who break into your house, break into your house.” This is indeed what this means in the context of Chris Rock’s monolog. But it’s not what it would mean in everyday language. It is no empty tautology.
Same applies to “redneck”. Redneck means what the dictionary says it means (yes, the dictionary can be wrong, but in this case it’s not). You might be able to cook up a comedy monolog in which “redneck” means “bigoted person”, but it’s not what it means in everyday English. Someone tweaked me for referring to a dictionary—if MW agrees with me, I must be right. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I do think that dictionaries are usually very good evidence about what words mean.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern of people in an out-group attacking the members of their own group who most resembled the negative stereotype. I’ve heard of (but not heard directly) Jews complaining about “kikes”.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern
I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. The question isn’t what he did or did not invent. The question is, what is the everyday, common meaning. I brought up Chris Rock to illustrate what it would be like if dlthomas’s analysis of “redneck” applied to “nigga”. Everybody would all the time be talking the way that Chris Rock talks in his monolog without any negative consequences since they would not be implying anything about blacks in general. But clearly, that is not the case. Furthermore, Chris Rock explains his own meaning early in his monolog where he contrasts “black people” with “niggas”, which demonstrates that he does not expect his audience to apply that meaning as a default. Evidently, then, Chris Rock’s meaning is not the default common, everyday meaning of “nigga”.
As with your earlier response, I wonder whether there was some miscommunication, since you brought up a point that I don’t recall denying explicitly or implicitly.
The Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in didn’t do this… we mostly ignored the Jewish stereotypes in the larger culture altogether. But the queer community I attached myself to as a late adolescent did have something like this.
I’ve never heard of anything like that in my jewish community either. Though honestly I’ve almost never heard the term “kike” actually used before. Even anti-semites just use the word Jew as far as I know.
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
That is a ridiculously Platonic view of language. These aren’t categories that apply entirely or not at all—applicability of words is gradual. If someone fits every connotation of “redneck” except “racist”, people will apply the label to them and they clearly do not deserve the portion of the contempt associated with the label on the basis of it’s containing the connotation of “racist”. Typically, showing contempt or praise to groups whose membership is not strict is messy enough to be a bad idea.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
Well, if Messrs. Merriam and Webster are on your side, you can’t be wrong!
Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”?
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
The word “redneck” has nothing to do with MFA’s employment choices, or the Ivy League’s selection criteria
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist for exactly the same reason as Herman Cain is supposedly an Uncle Tom—it has absolutely nothing to do with the political views of Cain or the redneck. Rather, Cain lacks the requisite ruling elite credentials.
I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands. How about an inverse who is a slush pile reader? Could he be a redneck? I don’t think so, even though slush pile readers are apt to be low paid.
You are probably correct that people would feel comfortable calling a guy who works in a garage a redneck if he had the demonized redneck attitudes, but they would consider it joking or ironic to call a bookkeeper a redneck no matter what his attitudes, and there is no way they are going to call an MFA a redneck, except ironically, regardless of what that MFA’s tastes and political attitudes are, and regardless of how infrequent and small the MFA’s grants are.
Indeed, I use MFA as an example, because MFAs are notoriously starving, while looking down their noses at those who succeed in doing grubby inferior jobs at decent pay.
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Neither Herman Cain (to say the very least) nor the modal tea party member are uneducated or work in low-status jobs.
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
An interesting claim. I don’t know enough of the socio-linguistic history to really comment. I still don’t really think it was a reasonable response to my original comment. You had seemed to be using “redneck” to mean farmers, generally; I still maintain that this is an unrealistic representation of what people typically use the phrase to mean, and will likely lead to misunderstanding in both directions.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
There are unquestionably social groups wherein academia is accorded the highest status, yes. People value status, yes. Undoubtedly, some people with an MFA belong to some of those social groups, and this factored in to their decision. I have no data either way to support typicality or atypicality of MFA’s in particular. I have basically no experience with Occupy Wall Street. From my limited direct observation of Occupy Oakland, however, this does not seem terribly representative of the protesters there.
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact. Nonetheless, it is certainly the case that knowledge work is accorded higher status in many circles.
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities.
“Redneck” is low status in my mind because it is associated with the puerile humor of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry The Cable Guy. Jobs involving a lot of manual labor are not inherently low status in my mind—that stuff needs doing too, and plumbers have saved more lives than doctors. I wouldn’t do it because I have a job that pays well that I find interesting.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because the term is associated predominately with the American south which has, in recent history, harbored a higher level of racism (particularly that directed toward blacks) than other regions. Yes, this is a stereotype—it doesn’t even necessarily represent the typical individual from the region—but it’s stereotypes we are discussing.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands.
Yes. As I said, blue collar work is a feature of the stereotype, and so an examples with that attribute are going to seem to fit better than examples without.
I don’t see any reason a slush pile reader wouldn’t be labeled a redneck, if he spent his off hours drinking cheap beer and making racist jokes while listening to country music and working on his truck. Unless he instead got the label “hipster”—which seems to also be low status, but I expect would be precluded by the country music.
It is conceivable that a part of this is just a regional difference in how liberally the term is applied—around here, there aren’t very many white farm workers.
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact.
Interesting. It would seem to be literally true, then, that “the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers.” I am not sure, however, whether the normative weight you give it is appropriate.
“The Ivy League discriminates” is trivially true—that’s what their admission’s board is for. The question is whether particular discrimination is justified. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate, if that is what is going on. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers on the grounds that they are associated with farming and we don’t like that is obviously inappropriate. If the examination of the ROTC, 4-H, etc, officership and awards controlled well for other factors, then this would be evidence of the latter, and should be fixed.
I could see it simply being a correlation, however—people who take officership in these organizations or earn awards there probably have some interest and time invested there, and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board is looking for; being that they are not an agricultural school, it makes sense that they prioritize other things. And if the student has a genuine interest in farming and wishes to pursue it further, they will probably benefit much more from attending UC Davis, Michigan State, or Texas A&M than they would from attending Harvard, Yale, or Brown.
Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate,
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwiseequal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
I was ambiguous—i don’t know whether it confused you. If there are farmers that would get less out of it and vice-versa, then they should be discriminated against exactly like anyone else who would get less out of it and vice-versa. I did not intend to assert that this is true of farmers universally, and whether it is true statistically more often than reference populations is an open question as far as I can tell.
If you want a potential reason this could be the case, I gave one previously—someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
“Seems obvious” leaves much room for bias. As I said—if it is “simple snobbery”, it should be addressed. It is obvious that this is possible—it is not obvious that some other explanation is impossible, or even unlikely. I have no direct experience of Ivy League admissions, and limited second- or third-hand knowledge.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
What then is your explanation for discrimination against ROTC members.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
Your reading is very strange:
The article states:
Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
UC Berkeley was originally an agriculture school and still maintains an ag department (now under the name of Agricultural and Resource Economics, but that’s common to several schools better known for their ag programs). Stanford’s got one, too. I’m on the wrong coast to know much about the Ivy League, unfortunately.
High Status: Unemployed and unemployable MFA (Master of Fine Arts) who is unfortunately in between arts grants and low paid teaching jobs at the moment, and has been for some considerable time.
Lower Status: Artist who makes decent money by selling reproductions of his art to the despised bourgeoisie, but has no MFA, never gets grants, and never holds a job in academia, in part because the pay is low, but mostly because they would not hire such an inferior and low status person anyway.
Lowest Status: Wealthy farmer, who was a farmer’s son, and makes lots of money by feeding thousands of people, his neck turning red in the process as he works outdoors.
Farmers who own a lot of land, and their sons (though strangely not their daughters) also “rednecks”, and hated and despised accordingly. They are discriminated against in university admissions. Are they poor and dysfunctional?
The hatred of rednecks is a less extreme form of the “Occupy Wall Street” demands for jobs in the virtue and cultural uplift industries. The ruling class thinks that producing value is low status, and producing value by working outside is really low status, regardless of income.
Just as an unemployed and severely dysfunctional Occupy Wall Street protestor, who has a Masters in Fine Arts and is therefore a genuine official artist, despises the mere peddler of kitsch, despite the fact that no one would pay for the MFA’s “art” with their own money, and right now his grant has run out, the lesser artist, though his status is inferior due to the fact that he got his money merely from members of la bourgeoisie buying his art, rather than grants, his status is nonetheless superior to that of the even wealthier farmer’s son, whose work is largely done outdoors, and whose neck is therefore red.
Redneck has had connotations beyond “someone who works outside”, “someone who does farm work”, or even “someone who is white and does farm work” for some time.
Yet strangely, the MFA at “Occupy Wall Street” whose grant ran out long ago, and whose teaching job is extreme low pay, would not consider a better paid job that involved working out of doors.
Indeed, he is reluctant even to consider jobs outside the virtue industry.
How is this a response to anything I said? Do you mean to contend that any given out-of-work MFA at OWS, according to your model of reality, would turn down an outdoor job exclusively or primarily because it would be associated in their mind with the label “redneck”? But then, your last sentence seems to contradict that. They value working in their field, just like anyone else. Maybe they value it too highly, in the face of economic reality. Maybe there are other, additional pressures that are leading their decisions. Maybe they are turning their noses up at some specific jobs because they seem too “redneck” but you haven’t shown evidence of it. But this isn’t even the point I was making.
While I understand it’s origins, by my observation “redneck” is now associated with some specific stereotypes. I think applying the label to a farmer who is feminist, left wing, and wealthy, and who dislikes NASCAR and country music, would strike people as far more jarring than the inverse who worked in a garage. Or, for that matter, an inverse with an MFA. Blue collar work—particularly non-manufacturing blue collar work—is a feature of the stereotype, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine category membership.
This is not to say that I think the stereotype to be a useful generalization.
You clearly understand the reasons why sam’s post was irrelevant gibberish. So why did you respond to it?
Personal edification.
Fixed it for you.
Wow, you really love that negative karma, don’t you?
As it stands, there are three meanings of “Jew”—the stereotype, the religion, and the ethnicity. If we wish to pick these apart into Jew(S), Jew(R), and Jew(E), then that would be an antiquated but reasonably accurate description of Jew(S).
There is no corresponding Redneck(R) or Redneck(E). There is a redneck as the term was originally used—Redneck(O), let’s say.
My point was that when people use the term, they predominately use it to mean, and understand it to men, Redneck(S) not Redneck(O).
An attempt to reclaim it is not necessarily unreasonable, but it should be explicit. Attempting to do it implicitly is inviting confusion of the nature that originally caused me to comment.
You should now see the mismatch of your FTFY—Jew(S) is not at all the most prevalent usage of Jew.
There are nonetheless still occasions when I would recommend someone interpret “Jew” as Jew(S); if, as I recall observing in Junior high, one person asks to borrow money, is refused, and responds “You Jew!”, clearly interpreting that as Jew(R) or Jew(E) would be absurd—doubly so when you are aware that the refuser is neither.
I would say there is at least one more. Jewishness is as much a cultural association as a religious one, and there are plenty of people who identify as Jewish culturally, but not religiously.
Oh, absolutely.
When someone calls a penny pincher a Jew, that is not an alternate meaning for Jew, but a metaphor, like calling an overweight woman a whale. Jew means Jew by race or religion, and Redneck means someone who does a low status job, or whose ancestors did a low status job.
Yet oddly, an Master of Fine arts can never be a redneck, however poor and socially conservative he may be, even though MFAs are infamous for being poor and dysfunctional. Nor can a slush pile reader be a redneck, even though slush pile readers earn the smell of an oil rag..
Just as Jew means Jew by race or religion, not a penny pincher, redneck means a person who works in a low status job—no matter how highly paid that job may be.
And similarly, “racist” merely means person of low status, or insufficient status for the role he attempts to perform. Thus that rednecks are “racist” merely means that certain jobs are low status.
Chris Rock claimed to redefine nigga as not meaning a black man, but merely meaning a black man that fits the stereotype—and then he said that when he withdrew money from the teller machine, he looked behind him for niggas. Actual usage of the term “redneck” is similarly revealing.
Indeed, Chris Rock’s famous rant about niggas begins and ends with punch lines that falsify his claim to redefinition, probably deliberately, as the falsification, combined with the claim, is comical.
You are citing or inventing dubious linguistics. If you look at the meanings of “Jew” found in the dictionary, none of them are the stereotype. Definition 3 at Webster is ethnicity, and definition 4 at Webster is religion. Definitions 1 and 2 are biblical and historical. None of them are the stereotype.
When a group of people is stereotyped, this does not create a new meaning of the name of the group. Let’s review what a stereotype is. Using the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s dictionary, their definition of “stereotype” is:
False fixed ideas (beliefs) about group G are not new definitions for the name of the group G. G is not split into two, G(O) and G(S). The false fixed belief is a belief about G(O). The stereotype concerns the (original) group, it does not create a new group.
Imagine if it were otherwise! Imagine if, every time some false belief about some thing T popped into your head, then T split into two, T(O) and T(S). For one thing, you would never again have a false belief, because rather than being a false belief about T(O), your belief would actually be a definition for a new thing T(S) about which it was true.
To put it more briefly, a stereotype is an idea, a belief, about something. A belief can be true or false. In contrast, a definition or meaning is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. So to call a stereotype a meaning is to commit a simple category mistake.
Your whole argument is stated in terms of this category mistake, so to salvage it you would need to toss it and start from scratch.
Actually, your post has caused me to think that a good descriptivist dictionary would include stereotypes if they’re common meanings. This doesn’t mean that anyone would have the guts (or possibly lack of good sense—that lack might be equivalent to guts) to produce such a dictionary.
A concept might be in many people’s minds, and yet be inaccurate. A dictionary might note that while listing the concept.
As for redneck, I’d say it consistently has a regional connotation—it’s not just about doing outdoor work.
Merriam Webster and the other good descriptivist dictionaries do include meanings that match particular stereotypes when they are common meanings, which they rarely but occasionally are.
But importantly, it is only particular stereotypes of a given thing that become meanings—it has to be this way, in order to avoid confusion. For example, the verb “to jew” (which you can look up in any sufficiently comprehensive dictionary) has a meaning which matches a particular stereotype of Jews. That particular stereotype is not “the” stereotype of Jews, because to say it was “the” stereotype would be to imply that there is only one stereotype, and there are many stereotypes of Jews.
Also importantly, meanings corresponding to stereotypes are not automatically generated whenever stereotypes arise. It has to be this way, because it’s common that many stereotypes of a given thing arise, and if a meaning were automatically generated for each stereotype, then it would be difficult to tell, among all the stereotypes, which stereotype was meant when the word was used. Nor does a meaning automatically arise that includes all stereotypes together, as we know from the example of the verb “to jew”. Rather, on occasion, certain stereotypes are adopted as meanings. It doesn’t automatically happen, and it ought not blithely be assumed to have happened.
Here’s another pair of examples. Similarly to the verb “to jew”, there is also the verb “to dog”, which corresponds to one particular stereotype about dogs. And the verb “to wolf” (as in to wolf down) corresponds to another particular stereotype about wolves (and, as it happens, about their close relatives the dogs). Had linguistic history taken a different turn, the verbs “to dog” and “to wolf” might have had entirely different meanings, or might not have existed at all.
I seem to recall an Italian dictionary which did give something like “a miser” as one of the definition of ebreo, though with the annotation fig. before it. :-)
(Wait… by produce you meant “exhibit” not “manufacture”, right?)
Indeed. in case there has been any confusion, I did not argue otherwise. I wrote: “Someone with a red neck is originally probably a caucasian who works out of doors.” Note my use of the word “originally”. This acknowledges that the term “redneck” has evolved since then. I was speculating about its origin.
It may well be—to speculate further—that the term “red neck” originally arose in the South, possibly applied by the Southern upper, indoors-dwelling (or otherwise sun-protected) classes to the Southern lower, outdoors-laboring classes.
This point does not take away from my argument as far as I can tell. Certainly I was aware of it, hence I used the word “originally”.
I’m pretty sure we’re talking past each other here. I think my usage of stereotype was actually reasonably correct, consider for instance:
from the wikipedia page on Archetype
But it is probably better to simply taboo it:
I contend that people do, in fact, make reference to these models in communication without necessarily adopting the belief that the model is valid.
This is not to say that I think they should do so; there is legitimate concern about propagating false beliefs when the models are commonly believed, and about bleeding over of associations when they are not.
To your mind, does it fix things if you read “model of a stereotypical X” for “stereotype”? That is closer to how I intended it.
It fixes part of it but I don’t think you capture what’s really going on. To use a fresh aspect of the concept of the redneck, as Nancy points out “redneck” has a regional component. MW’s definition of “redneck” for example, is: “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”. That’s an aspect of what you would call Redneck(O). So when you write:
you’re claiming that when people use the term, they predominantly do not use it to mean “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class”, but rather, the stereotypes which we have been discussing, which were introduced by Sewing Machine, namely:
and elaborated or modified by konkvistador:
So here we have three stereotypes about rednecks: bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional. These are the stereotypes that were introduced, and that were given as reasons for rednecks being despised. I offered a quite different, and conflicting, theory as to why rednecks are despised, and I claimed that these stereotypes are in fact not reasons, but rationalizations, excuses, for the contempt so often and so publicly and so gleefully expressed about rednecks.
You’ve offered a new theory of the concept of the “redneck”, distinct from that of Sewing Machine and Konkvistador (the negative stereotypes on their expressed view do not constitute the concept, but are merely associated with the category). Your new theory amounts to an almost perfect excuse for the contempt. According to you, when people use the term, they predominantly mean Redneck(S). In context, then, what your statement amounts to, is the statement that when people use the term “redneck”, they mean “someone who is bigoted, poor, and dysfunctional”. If it were true, this would excuse the contempt shown to rednecks, maybe not the “poor” part, but “bigoted” certainly and “dysfunctional” probably. So when people say, “rednecks are bigots” and “rednecks are dysfunctional”, on your view of it, they are merely stating tautologies, i.e., “bigots are bigots” and “dysfunctional people are dysfunctional.”
My view of your theory is that your theory is all too convenient. Your approach to this issue could be applied to excuse pretty much any contempt shown by any group toward any other group. Contempt shown by whites toward blacks, for example.
In fact, the comedian Chris Rock did take something like your approach to a similar issue. He has a monolog in which he takes a common derogatory term for a whole group and redefines it (for the duration of his monolog) as referring only to those members to whom common negative stereotypes apply, and not to all members of the group. This is certainly not how it is normally used, and if you don’t belong to the group yourself, you would be well advised not to start using this term on the theory that it refers only to those members who satisfy the negative stereotypes. Chris Rock’s monolog, from wikiquote:
Someone who is not black would be well advised to avoid saying:
If we were to apply your theory of “redneck” to “nigga”, then the above statement would be an empty tautology, since it would mean essentially, “black people who break into your house, break into your house.” This is indeed what this means in the context of Chris Rock’s monolog. But it’s not what it would mean in everyday language. It is no empty tautology.
Same applies to “redneck”. Redneck means what the dictionary says it means (yes, the dictionary can be wrong, but in this case it’s not). You might be able to cook up a comedy monolog in which “redneck” means “bigoted person”, but it’s not what it means in everyday English. Someone tweaked me for referring to a dictionary—if MW agrees with me, I must be right. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but I do think that dictionaries are usually very good evidence about what words mean.
I’m pretty sure Chris Rock didn’t invent the pattern of people in an out-group attacking the members of their own group who most resembled the negative stereotype. I’ve heard of (but not heard directly) Jews complaining about “kikes”.
I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. The question isn’t what he did or did not invent. The question is, what is the everyday, common meaning. I brought up Chris Rock to illustrate what it would be like if dlthomas’s analysis of “redneck” applied to “nigga”. Everybody would all the time be talking the way that Chris Rock talks in his monolog without any negative consequences since they would not be implying anything about blacks in general. But clearly, that is not the case. Furthermore, Chris Rock explains his own meaning early in his monolog where he contrasts “black people” with “niggas”, which demonstrates that he does not expect his audience to apply that meaning as a default. Evidently, then, Chris Rock’s meaning is not the default common, everyday meaning of “nigga”.
As with your earlier response, I wonder whether there was some miscommunication, since you brought up a point that I don’t recall denying explicitly or implicitly.
I’m not sure about miscommunication—I may be trying to read too fast, and doing some pattern-matching.
The Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in didn’t do this… we mostly ignored the Jewish stereotypes in the larger culture altogether. But the queer community I attached myself to as a late adolescent did have something like this.
I’ve never heard of anything like that in my jewish community either. Though honestly I’ve almost never heard the term “kike” actually used before. Even anti-semites just use the word Jew as far as I know.
If you hear from a member of group X that group X says Y, it is usually true.
If you hear that group X says Y, from those who do not like group X, it often true.
If you hear that those who don’t like group X say Y, from those who don’t like those who don’t like group X, it is seldom true.
That is a ridiculously Platonic view of language. These aren’t categories that apply entirely or not at all—applicability of words is gradual. If someone fits every connotation of “redneck” except “racist”, people will apply the label to them and they clearly do not deserve the portion of the contempt associated with the label on the basis of it’s containing the connotation of “racist”. Typically, showing contempt or praise to groups whose membership is not strict is messy enough to be a bad idea.
Well, if Messrs. Merriam and Webster are on your side, you can’t be wrong!
Entirely the other way around. The job is not low status because associated with “redneck”. Redneck is low status because associated with the job.
The MFA would turn down a job that required him to do physical work out of doors because such a job is lower status than a low pay, zero security, academic job,
The fact that the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers shows that manual work is low status, regardless of income, and working outdoors is especially low status, regardless of how successful the worker is economically.
The word “redneck” has nothing to do with MFA’s employment choices, or the Ivy League’s selection criteria
Rather: redneck is low status in your mind, because it is associated with such low status jobs, associated with the work done by your inferiors, associated with jobs that an MFA will not do, no matter how hungry, jobs that damage your application to elite universities. Rednecks are supposedly racist because such jobs are low status, and “racist” in dialect of your group is merely another word for low status, having no relationship to a person’s mode of reasoning from racial characteristics. Examples: “The tea party is racist” “Herman Cain is an uncle Tom”.
Rednecks are supposedly racist for exactly the same reason as Herman Cain is supposedly an Uncle Tom—it has absolutely nothing to do with the political views of Cain or the redneck. Rather, Cain lacks the requisite ruling elite credentials.
True: But notice your inverse is man who works for his hands. How about an inverse who is a slush pile reader? Could he be a redneck? I don’t think so, even though slush pile readers are apt to be low paid.
You are probably correct that people would feel comfortable calling a guy who works in a garage a redneck if he had the demonized redneck attitudes, but they would consider it joking or ironic to call a bookkeeper a redneck no matter what his attitudes, and there is no way they are going to call an MFA a redneck, except ironically, regardless of what that MFA’s tastes and political attitudes are, and regardless of how infrequent and small the MFA’s grants are.
Indeed, I use MFA as an example, because MFAs are notoriously starving, while looking down their noses at those who succeed in doing grubby inferior jobs at decent pay.
Neither Herman Cain (to say the very least) nor the modal tea party member are uneducated or work in low-status jobs.
An interesting claim. I don’t know enough of the socio-linguistic history to really comment. I still don’t really think it was a reasonable response to my original comment. You had seemed to be using “redneck” to mean farmers, generally; I still maintain that this is an unrealistic representation of what people typically use the phrase to mean, and will likely lead to misunderstanding in both directions.
There are unquestionably social groups wherein academia is accorded the highest status, yes. People value status, yes. Undoubtedly, some people with an MFA belong to some of those social groups, and this factored in to their decision. I have no data either way to support typicality or atypicality of MFA’s in particular. I have basically no experience with Occupy Wall Street. From my limited direct observation of Occupy Oakland, however, this does not seem terribly representative of the protesters there.
I have not seen it demonstrated that that is a fact. Nonetheless, it is certainly the case that knowledge work is accorded higher status in many circles.
“Redneck” is low status in my mind because it is associated with the puerile humor of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry The Cable Guy. Jobs involving a lot of manual labor are not inherently low status in my mind—that stuff needs doing too, and plumbers have saved more lives than doctors. I wouldn’t do it because I have a job that pays well that I find interesting.
Rednecks are supposedly racist because the term is associated predominately with the American south which has, in recent history, harbored a higher level of racism (particularly that directed toward blacks) than other regions. Yes, this is a stereotype—it doesn’t even necessarily represent the typical individual from the region—but it’s stereotypes we are discussing.
Yes. As I said, blue collar work is a feature of the stereotype, and so an examples with that attribute are going to seem to fit better than examples without.
I don’t see any reason a slush pile reader wouldn’t be labeled a redneck, if he spent his off hours drinking cheap beer and making racist jokes while listening to country music and working on his truck. Unless he instead got the label “hipster”—which seems to also be low status, but I expect would be precluded by the country music.
It is conceivable that a part of this is just a regional difference in how liberally the term is applied—around here, there aren’t very many white farm workers.
Once again, my favorite and much repeated citation, favorite because it reveals the same pathology as “Occupy Wall Street” and “Joe the puppeteer” reveals, but provides statistics rather than mere anecdote:‘”Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”’
Interesting. It would seem to be literally true, then, that “the Ivy League discriminates against farmers and the sons of farmers.” I am not sure, however, whether the normative weight you give it is appropriate.
“The Ivy League discriminates” is trivially true—that’s what their admission’s board is for. The question is whether particular discrimination is justified. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers because they will be getting less out of the institution and the institution will be getting less out of them seems perfectly appropriate, if that is what is going on. Discriminating against farmers and the sons of farmers on the grounds that they are associated with farming and we don’t like that is obviously inappropriate. If the examination of the ROTC, 4-H, etc, officership and awards controlled well for other factors, then this would be evidence of the latter, and should be fixed.
I could see it simply being a correlation, however—people who take officership in these organizations or earn awards there probably have some interest and time invested there, and thus correspondingly less time invested in things more related to what the admission board is looking for; being that they are not an agricultural school, it makes sense that they prioritize other things. And if the student has a genuine interest in farming and wishes to pursue it further, they will probably benefit much more from attending UC Davis, Michigan State, or Texas A&M than they would from attending Harvard, Yale, or Brown.
Care to produce a rationale why the institution will get less out of farmers and the sons of farmers, academic qualifications otherwise being equal?
That this is simple snobbery seems obvious, and if you doubted it, the numerous anecdotes of snobbery emanating from thoroughly dysfunctional members of “Occupy Wall Street” should have confirmed it.
The comparison was on an all things considered basis—the qualifications were otherwise equal, except that they also had interests in low status activities.
I was ambiguous—i don’t know whether it confused you. If there are farmers that would get less out of it and vice-versa, then they should be discriminated against exactly like anyone else who would get less out of it and vice-versa. I did not intend to assert that this is true of farmers universally, and whether it is true statistically more often than reference populations is an open question as far as I can tell.
If you want a potential reason this could be the case, I gave one previously—someone interested in pursuing farming would find more of use at a school with more focus on agriculture.
“Seems obvious” leaves much room for bias. As I said—if it is “simple snobbery”, it should be addressed. It is obvious that this is possible—it is not obvious that some other explanation is impossible, or even unlikely. I have no direct experience of Ivy League admissions, and limited second- or third-hand knowledge.
On my reading, this was not stated in the article.
Which presupposes that high status institutions don’t bother themselves with such vulgar low status occupations as agriculture.
What then is your explanation for discrimination against ROTC members.
Your reading is very strange:
The article states: Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
Emphasis added
UC Berkeley was originally an agriculture school and still maintains an ag department (now under the name of Agricultural and Resource Economics, but that’s common to several schools better known for their ag programs). Stanford’s got one, too. I’m on the wrong coast to know much about the Ivy League, unfortunately.
Ahhh! That’s where the name redneck comes from. I hadn’t even thought about it enough to wonder.