No Redneck Days?

This is getting simply ridiculous. First they insisted on diversity and acceptance of cultures "different" than your own. But now some parent up near Pensacola has declared that Redneck Day at school is a celebration of the "ignorant, white racist."

Bull. The term redneck applies to any white manual laborer who works outside. Planting crops, harvesting them, digging ditches, mowing lawns all involve looking down at the ground which has the effect of exposing the back of the neck to the sun. On us white folks, this will normally lead to a sunburn on the neck, hence the term "redneck."

"Redneck" does not connotate racism. We already have a term for that, it called racist. If you don't like that term, we also have an adequate synonym, bigot. If the person is of a lower socio-economic background we have to word poor to append as an adjective. You could possibly even use the phrase low-class. Why the necessity to twist the meaning of a perfectly good word when we already have a decent vocabulary with which to describe a low-class, poor, racist bigot?

Is it because it is a word that is often used to describe white people, particularly some of us in the South?

It doesn't have the historical connotations of a word like "cracker" (which is another I'm not particularly thrilled that they have turned into a racist term) which was a description originally of white, slave owning Floridians - a corruption of the sound, or crack, of the whip. It later, during the last part of the 19th century and into the 20th century became a term used to describe Floridians who wanted nothing more out of life than to sit on the front porch of their cracker homes, watching the world go by and the crops growing.

It doesn't have the undertones of Klansman or supremacist. It's a term to describe a hardworking, low wage earning white person. Why are we looking to automatically declare that person a racist?

At my kids' bus stop in the morning there is a parent like the one who made the racist quote. Everything that might possibly even be thought that it could be construed as a racist comment is over-reacted to and blown completely out of proportion. In this case, the parent is reacting to a stereotyped prejudice against poor, rural white folks. Is that not racism itself?

Kind of sounds like the pot calling the kettle black to me.