It happened just recently.

After reading a piece I wrote on the post-modern relevance of Atticus Finch, a man we’ll call ‘The Man’ called me the r-word.  That’s right, he used the red n-e-c-k word.  The Man called me a redneck.  He laughed at me and my kin.  “It seems you have had race issues in your family for a long time.”

Now pardon me for being sensitive, but that is hardly the point of the Atticus Finch article – unless bigotry is the lens through which you happen to view life, and then I guess you might see it anywhere.

My redneck-ness comes as news to me because for about twenty years my position on people has been this: we are all God’s children, all equally valued by our Maker, and by us if we dare.  Each of us is God’s favorite kid.  To believe otherwise is to believe God makes junk.  I think more of God than that.

Admittedly this is a departure from some I know, but to me it is a conservative position.  To love and honor our Creator is to love and honor all of Creation without regard to difference, or similarity.  It seems basic.  Love God?  Love the world!

But redneck…I am having a hard time with the label.

What’s worse is an e-mail I received that same day from The Woman.  “I read your unique extended essay on Atticus Finch.  I find it very interesting how you string together seemingly unrelated ideas.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your ability to move beyond your own inbred prejudice.”

Inbred?  Uh-huh.  Yes, she did.

Now any Southerner worth her salt immediately recognizes the buzz words ‘interesting’ and ‘unique’ to mean nothing less than how special, bless your heart.  ‘Inbred’ is an added bonus, sprinkles on the icing of the cupcake of insult.

All day this e-assault has gnawed away at me.  As Patty Griffin put it:

I’ve had some time to think about it

And watch the sun sink like a stone

I’ve had some time to think about you

On the long ride home

My conclusion at the end of today’s commute: I don’t really like you.  Further, you insult God.  Now don’t for a minute think that I believe I am so important that God would be insulted at the passive-aggressive status check meant to keep me humble.  But I think God reads that heart with the same special read that I do.  It is ugly.  You, my friends, have an ugly streak.

Honestly, the labels – inbred and redneck – baffle me.  What do The Man and The Woman really mean?  Further, what could be the point in defining me by these words?

The words themselves are as divisive as the n-word.  In fact, two African-American friends kindly pointed out The Woman did in fact evoke the n-word and not any other word.  As one put it, “Welcome.  Now you a [n-word], too.”

Another friend tells me people label other people so they can control them.  But why?  In this case I wrote an essay on the current application of Atticus Finch that is in the end my virtual theological dissertation, my ‘Here I Stand.’  It is a position that is open and embracing of all of humanity, even the everyday bigots among us, which if we admit it, is most of us a good bit of the time.  Why would anyone feel the need to control or contain me for that?  I am simply not that interesting, controversial or important.  My ideas are not new.

This vicious passive-aggressive attack is nothing less than the latest evidence of S-O-S violence: Southern-on-Southern violence.  It is a sad commentary on life in Dixie.

I often ask young women: why be so hard on yourself?  It’s the world’s job to kick you; don’t help it out.

The same can be said of the South.  There are plenty of folks from all parts who exercise the old stereotypes.  We are slow, ignorant, prejudiced.  Never mind it takes one slow, ignorant, prejudiced SOB to assume such a thing without taking a minute to get to know us as individuals.

I will admit to representing some fellow North Carolinians who say in defending their homeland to outsiders, “At least I’m not from South Carolina.”  Many times I have said this very thing.

S-O-S violence is a scourge.

~~~

A response to my situation has evaded me.

 

Defensive response #1:

But I have all my teeth.  How can I be a redneck?

Defensive response #2:

Perhaps some I know but not me.

Offensive response #1:

You’re damn right you sorry son…

Humorous response #1:

(picking teeth with straw)  Whut?  Me?  A redneck?

Hell, I’m not even sure I know what the word means, exactly.

~~~

Mark Twain said, “When in doubt, tell the truth.”  Let’s take a look at the facts.

–          My maternal grandfather was a land-rich yet dirt poor tobacco farmer who once owned about 200 acres.  He was a self-taught engineer with little formal education.  He designed tools for the Navy and for this work earned some awards.  He lived in Norfolk and came home to tend the farm only every two weeks or so.  His nine children and one very tired wife worked the place in the meantime.  They had food but struggled to keep the stair-step clan clothed in anything but flour-sack dresses and hand-me-down shoes.  They were the poorest people most neighbors knew.

–          This grandfather was also known as the most honest man in our community, Lowe’s Grove.  He was known for doing the right thing when doing the right thing didn’t pay.  In fact, it cost him quite a bit.

–          My grandmother was known to me as Heidi.  This is because she greeted me as a small child by exclaiming the country greeting, “Hei-di!”  I thought it was her name.

–          Heidi was always short on money but extraordinarily generous in spirit.  She lived in a broken-down house with a bunch of kids until she moved next door into a 1968 New Moon model mobile home.  She still lived there when she died in 1995.  Heidi shared this home with a ‘retarded’ son of whom few outside our family spoke.

–          My mother is smack in the middle of this farm family.  She is the only child blessed with the luxury of post-secondary education or training, with a 38-year career as a surgical nurse at Duke.

–          My father was the first in his family to attend college.  Mind you, the guy was half-starved before it was over, mostly because he refused to ask for financial help.  But he graduated with a degree in English and put it work at IBM, where he worked until retirement as a programmer and technical writer.  He was a nonprofit board member, an ordained vicar and member of the vestry at our Episcopal parish.  Later he served on the call committee that brought the first woman pastor to our nearby Lutheran church.

–          Dad’s father was a supervisor at Cannon Mills, the son of an Italian immigrant.  Dad’s mother was the daughter of a life-long nanny, cook and housekeeper for families with more money.  Dad’s paternal grandmother: the Belle of Raleigh.

I don’t know that any of this smacks of redneck directly.  Most people, if pressed, can tell you where they come from, as we say.  Most of us will at some point tell the whole truth – if only under the influence of alcohol and in the company of trusted friends.  We will reach back to the big Family Secret or admit our humble beginnings.

In this way most of us can relate.  The term redneck, however, implies a level of ignorance and crudeness that I simply don’t see in looking at my family.

~~~

That’s our history.  Here is a short set of defining characteristics and experiences I gained from this history:

–          I thank my family, most especially my father, that I can relate to most any person in any social position.

–          I look people in the eye and acknowledge them, even while driving down the road.  I see you.  It matters that you exist.

–          I enjoy fishing but never really understood the hunting thing.

–          I stop for funeral processions and believe strongly in respecting my neighbors.  For this reason I drive rather slowly on dirt roads.  Someone lives there, you know.

–          I got the farmers’ common sense.  I also got Dad’s interest in ideas and his ease with people.  Win, win, win.

–          I did well in school.  I edited our high-school yearbook and ran cross country.  This brought a scholarship to a liberal-arts college.

–          This college greatly influenced my nonprofit career path and my sense of service to the world.

–          After college I traveled to Central and South America to build homes in partnership with families in need.

–          From my Southern father I learned to appreciate “Car Talk” and “A Prairie Home Companion.”

–          I play the piano, violin, viola and cello.

–          I know a guy who once chased chickens with Pope John Paul II and who also couriered portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the trunk of his rusted-out Chevrolet while earning his Ph.D. at Duke.

–          Some time ago I lived way down south in GA and worked with Habitat for Humanity, and Jimmy Carter was my sometime Sunday school teacher.  (He was usually there on Sunday; it was my attendance often in question.)

–          My dad’s youngest brother was once second in line for appointment as rector at the Anglican Cathedral in Paris.  He also vied for this position at the National Cathedral.

~~~

Redneck?  No?  I don’t see it, either.

To know me is to know all of the items listed above.  There are no State secrets here.

One can only conclude the label, redneck, is incorrect.  [I’ll be the first to tell you that if redneck = respecting passing funeral processions by stopping in solidarity, you can sign me right up!]

The question is not whether I am a redneck – or even the definition of redneck.

The issue at hand is the need or drive behind the “friends” who so graciously imposed upon me my new labels.  That’s right – it’s not about me; it’s on them.

This Southern-on-Southern violence I mention is actually not Southern at all.  The specific infraction I wish to call out is straight-out ugly classism.  The Man and The Woman, you see, are snobs.

It’s a relief to see it written in such simple terms.  Yet this universal, region-less flaw of human nature brings my blood to the boiling point more quickly than any insult related to race, gender, ability or most anything.

Do you really think you’re all that?  Do you really believe you’re grits don’t stink?  I mean, I’m a Southerner, and I don’t like anyone’s grits.  To me they all stink.  Tell me yours are different.

The person who believes she deserves to be born the mill owner’s daughter and not the mill worker’s granddaughter fools herself.  You are not worthy of your inheritance.  You believe happenstance actually means you are more important, more valid.  God likes you better.  (The reverse, therefore, must also necessarily be true for some others.)

It is the passive-aggressive way of saying someone else is less.  I am more.  It is borne of fear: I, too, might be that low, that little.  But no!  I am me.  Look at my estate, my lineage, my mountain home.  Never mind our families are from neighboring small towns that share similar cultures, even the same brand of the same faith…just down the road to our west.

The Baptist preacher, Clarence Jordan, who founded the ‘experiment in Christian living’ that gave birth to Habitat for Humanity, called out such class differentiation frankly and often.  Clarence was known to walk into the finer homes of the finer people of Sumter County, GA, and say things like, “Yes, sir, this is a fine piece of plunder you have here.”

But returning to The Man and The Woman, to understand them is complicated.  The Man actually did come from nothing – nothing much anyway.  He will admit it, too.

So on the one hand there is the one who came from privilege and is driven to prove she is worthy of the accident.  On the other hand there is the one who came from nothing and now scorns those he perceives as being similar.  One hates others, and the other hates himself.  Both are driven by fear and low self-esteem.  Both disrespect the innate (yes, inbred) value and dignity of God’s Creation.

~~~

This class-distinction thing has been eating at me for a few months.

I live in a town of geniuses – the city with the most Ph.D.s per capita in the country.  Ours is piled much higher and deeper than yours.  Our community is rich in thought and discourse.  (You thought I was going to say rich something else, didn’t you?)

We are intentional and textured.  We are roughly half Black and half White, with some other “stuff” thrown in the mix for good measure.  This makes us all quite proud.

Just recently at a local service club meeting, I was struck by two comments.  (By this, I mean I was struck upon the head and beaten about the face.)  In one day I was told two things:

1. “We were just saying we don’t know anything about your family.  Are you really from Durham?”
2. “I cannot belieeeevve you went to a no-name school.  You could have gone anywhere.”

It seems pedigree is even an issue for the likes of the public servants among us.  Who are your people?  Are you good enough for us?  What genius says such a thing at a Rotary meeting?  There must still be red clay on my shoes…even though I never did a single tour of duty in a tobacco field and could only be convinced to help pick the family garden at risk of losing my allowance, for which I already had premeditated consumerist intentions.

~~~

Every once-marginalized group of folks has its own ‘made-it’ set.  They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and they ain’t looking back.  Attempting to remind them of their modest roots is an exercise in futility; they have permanent amnesia.

Am I calling the South marginalized?  Why yes.  I know it was a long time ago, but if you step back to that Late Unpleasantness, we kind of got our butts kicked.  For that reason, people continue to look down on us.  Some of us still carry a chip ourselves.

To view it from a broader perspective, how many Americans from any region can claim they arrived with steamer trunks loaded with treasure, wealth and status already intact?  Very few.  Did your daddy always own the textile mill?  Not likely.  Chances are you can trace your roots to some ship that hit the East coast at some coordinate or other, pitching your people headlong into one very long journey.  Chances are they worked very hard, making you quite lucky.

[It is worthy of note that Durham is particularly hard on its successful African-Americans.  I hear all the time that we have more African-American millionaires per capita than any city in the Southeast…but where are they and why aren’t more involved in helping others move forward?  My question as the kid of mill workers and tobacco farmers is why we don’t ask the same probing question of the likes of me?  My people aren’t exactly lined up waiting to serve our local nonprofit boards or serve dinner at the soup kitchen.  Pardon me for pulling the race card, but I call this out for what it is.  It is an unfair expectation that this group be any different than all the others with its varying responses to ‘making it.’]

~~~

Here is my point: every culture, group, society has its made-it set.  Every race, group or class also has its struggling, its snobs, its more or less genuine and ‘real.’  So-called class comes in all income brackets and in every shade.  The same is true of trash, and ignorance.  The South is no different than any other group in this regard, so why should I pick on it?

Because I love it, that’s why.

My hometown has a slogan.  We have a few, but this particular phrase is some local marketing genius’ admonition.  It is a bumper sticker seen daily across our town: Durham, Love Yourself.  For all our wealth of culture, our texture and grit (not grits, okay, I don’t like them), we sometimes serve as our own worst enemies.

The same can be said of the South – Black, Latino, Native, White, Other.  Our region is similar to Durham in its grit, texture, beauty and diversity.  We have something good here, you know.  We have our own periodicals and even our own fiction section at Barnes & Noble.  Let’s preserve, protect and defend this thing.  But, no, we have our own modern-day Civil War playing out each day.  We are at war with ourselves (internally), and we project that onto one another.

People tend to judge other people only as harshly as they judge themselves.  Love yourself I say to The Man and The Woman.  Then apply that same grace to others, even the inbred rednecks among us.

Call me redneck, self-righteous or just plain real.  It’s okay, I can take it.

Whoever you are, from whatever you come, please, at the very least have some class.

~~~

I must close by noting that no egos were damaged in the incident that led to the writing of this post.  No laws were violated, no civil rights or access denied.  The bottom line is I am insulted.  I am deeply, annoyingly insulted by two so-called friends who work too closely to social justice to cling to old-school classist beliefs.  Simply put, there is no room for snobbery in our ranks.  And the most basic truth is it’s on them, their problem and their loss that they choose to miss out on much of the simple truth and beauty in the world.

There are still plenty of ‘isms’ out there – some right here in Durham – that matter far more.  It is actually a gift that a White, middle-class generally privileged woman should have this experience.  My internal struggle with The Man and The Woman is an important reminder of what’s out there.  After all, I was not pulled over for DWR (driving while redneck) or any other unfair but all-too-common thing in our world.  A harmless reminder that prejudice and hate still exists is a good thing, as long as I am changed by the experience and choose to make the world better for it.  In the end I am even more aware that I am blessed by a rather easy life.

~~~

My parting shot is not at The Man and The Woman.  It is a fresh perspective for us all.

Someone once wisely stated that to compare my minor income and benign careless consumption to my rampantly consumerist Durham neighbor in a better zip code is silly.  To the woman living in a lean-to shack in Tacna, Peru, we North Americans are all the same: fat and wealthy.  To see ourselves with global eyes, our superficial divisions are laughable.  They do not exist.  In essence, I am The Woman.  (Oh Jesus, that hurt.)

My local and regional reading glasses are limited.  From the standpoint of much of the world, not many of us are expected to have much class.  We are entirely self-absorbed, and we have no idea.  I mean, to the Mexican kid negotiating one very scary journey to follow the North Star of hope, every one of us in these parts has default membership in the made-it set.  But that is another thought for another time.

© Mitzi Viola, 11/23/09