To answer his query, I've given up on educating bigots out of their bigotry. I certainly spent more than enough of my life with a bigoted perspective (your basic racialized working-class infighting in a small city that was, until recently, almost entirely black and white), and no number of assigned readings of King's "I Have a Dream" speech could have shown me the error of my ways.
Only getting to know my class brothers on the other, melanin-enriched side of town (which was, in my case, about two blocks) could have done the trick. And I note in my defense that until they got to know me, most of them held perspectives on me that were every bit as bigoted as my own concerning them.
Carl harbors an irrational hatred of Southerners; I assume he includes only white Southerners, although the South's two major racialized ethnicities have nearly identical cultures, including similar accents, religious traditions, and food preferences. You heard it here first: all those jokes about fried chicken and watermelon would be legitimate if applied equally to all of us.
Basically, working-class Southerners are one people socially constructed as two. (When it comes to menthol cigarettes, though, the other guys are on their own.) And if evangelicals are the Jews of the left, as I've previously claimed, the rednecks are almost certainly its n-words. What could possibly differentiate us? Certainly not Carl's crude stereotypes.
As Jim Goad famously put it, "[t]he trailer park has become the media's cultural toilet, the only acceptable place to dump one's racist inclinations." Or even more bluntly: "Everyone needs a n-word."**
On 5/5/07, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
I'm only surprised Joe Catron hasn't smacked you down yet. He must be busy,
> out talking to actual workers.