Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical Pedagogies

of Whiteness
Author(s): Jennifer Beech
Source: College English, Vol. 67, No. 2, Social Class and English Studies (Nov., 2004), pp.
172-186
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140716
Accessed: 25-06-2016 07:17 UTC

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172

Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the

Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical
Pedagogies of Whiteness

Jennifer Beech

s gifts for Christmas 2001, I received two different daily tear-off calendars,
the themes of which say something strange about how those near and dear

12 perceive me. One, a gift from my brother, who is a paper-mill worker in

Alabama, was the Oxford English Dictionary Word-a-Day Calendar. The other,
a gift from my partner, who also holds a Ph.D. in English, was Jeff Foxworthy's "You
Might Be a Redneck if ... " 2002 Calendar. As the days passed, I sometimes found
humorous and disturbing the juxtapositions of the pearls of wisdom gleaned from
those calendars. For instance, on Monday, December 30,I was informed that I might
be a redneck if I'd ever been the third through the bath water. Luckily I hadn't, but
a story my father has told over the years relates how he was lucky to be the oldest
child, for it was his youngest brother Paul who sometimes had the misfortune to be
the fourth through the bath water. On December 31, I learned that the word monad,
"from the Greek for oneness and alone means [... ] the number one, unity." Simon
Winchester, the calendar's editor, goes on to say, "The English language, for all its
internal complexity [. . .] unites educated peoples of the world, and as we approach
the coming year it is worth remembering just how valuable an entity it is, and that it
offers more opportunity for social and spiritual unity than any other single creation
of man." While Winchester's words are reminiscent of the stock we writing profes-
sors put in the transformative capacities of language, the joke in Foxworthy's calen-
dar reminds us that it is equally important to pay heed to the powers of language to
harm and to misinform.

Jen nifer Beech is assistant professor of English and writing center director at the University of
Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she teaches undergraduate writing courses and graduate courses in
composition theory and pedagogy. With scholarly interests in critical and working-class pedagogies, she
has published in Pedagogy, the IWCA Update, and the Journal of Teaching Academic Survival Skills. Dedi-
cated to academic labor reform, she is also pleased to serve as a member of the Academic Quality Com-
mittee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

College English, Volume 67, Number 2, November 2004

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 173

With this image of myself as both scholar and redneck, I attended with interest
a panel at the 2002 convention of the Conference on College Composition and
Communication exploring intersections of race and class in critical pedagogies. The
panel's chair proposed the frequent situation of a white male student resisting a
critical race pedagogy with his own bootstraps story and the suggestion that women
and minorities should "just quit whining!" After the panel, a lively discussion en-
sued, as concerned composition pedagogues together shared strategies for respond-
ing to resistance from such conservative, usually white, students. What to do, indeed!
One member of the audience stood to offer the following remark: "I know
exactly how the panelists feel because I teach in Texas and every time our readings
touch on race, I get so sick of the redneck in almost every class who feels he has to
say that people should just work harder and get over it!" This response demon-
strates the capacity for seemingly well-meaning educators to perpetuate mainstream
classist and racist ideologies. As LucyJarosz and Victoria Lawson point out in "So-
phisticated People versus Rednecks," such "assignation(s) of bigotry to a specific
working-class group operate to obscure the breadth of white racism, as well as to
construct class difference between middle- and working-class folks" (15). The au-
thors identify a number of cultural studies scholars who have likewise observed the
trend in mainstream media to displace racism onto poor, rural whites or "rednecks"
in ways that "[obscure] or [ignore] everyday acts of racism within mainstream white
America" (15).
In "Critical Pedagogy's 'Other': Constructions of Whiteness in Education for
Social Change," Jennifer Seibel Trainor critiques the tendency for scholarship on
critical race studies to position white students along one of two false binaries: narra-
tives of critical classrooms tend to demonize white middle-class students "who openly
express racism or sexism in the classroom" (631), while other texts "create a portrait
of whiteness that foregrounds its innocence by showing how working class whites
trade class consciousness for race privilege" (63 3). Neither perspective, Trainor con-
tends, allows for the complex subjectivities of white students, and neither figures a
position from which white students may imagine themselves "as legitimate social
actors" (634). From her classroom research, Trainor observes that white students
are best able to assume more complex stances toward multicultural issues when they
are able to imagine their own identities "in more fluid, less essentialized, ways" (642).
We should heed Trainor's argument that it is important for instructors to be mindful
of tendencies to create "rhetorical frames that demonize whiteness and white stu-
dents" (647). I would add that particularly because mainstream portraits of rednecks
or poor whites as racists allow middle-class and elite whites to ignore their own
racism, it seems all the more important for critical race pedagogies to include com-
plex images of poor and working-class whites. Further, I agree with Ian Marshall
"that a truly transformative, useful pedagogy [. . .] would have to attack one of the

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174 College English

last strongholds of whiteness: language itself' (257). Therefore, deconstructive

pedagogies will work to expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist
structures (such as historicizing and critiquing discriminatory epithets), while re-
constructive pedagogies will aim to provide students with the rhetorical tools for
employing language toward transformative ends. Such a pedagogy will not stop
short-as cultural studies approaches to composition sometimes do-of helping stu-
dents move beyond cultural critique to identifying opportunities for civic uses of
their literacy (such as letter writing campaigns and petitions).

ABOUT REDNECKS AND HILLBILLIES:

THE OBJECT OF OTHER PEOPLE'S GAZE

Most often, when people write about rednecks, hillbillies, and other poor white
groups, their use of such terms is pejorative. As Jarosz and Lawson note, "'Redneck'
is a polyvalent referent with multiple, shifting meanings across time and space" (12).
Several authorities trace the term to the mid-nineteenth century as a reference to
poor Southern whites (Jarosz and Lawson 12; Huber 107; Goad 83; OED). While
Patrick Huber, relying on the 1989 OED, traces the term to an 1893 Mississippi ref-
erence (107), Jim Goad, author of The Redneck Manifesto, contends that "[i]n America,
the earliest printed occurrence of 'redneck' is said to be from Southern Tour, an 1830
travel book by A. Royall, who applied the term [derogatorily] to Presbyterians living
in Fayetteville, North Carolina" (83). In the 1920s and 1930s, the term had taken on
communist connotations: "The meaning 'union member' for redneck was especially
popular during [those decades] in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, east-
ern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana, where it
came to be specifically applied to a coal miner who belonged to a labor union" (Huber
107). As our university is only miles from the Alabama border, my students and I
were especially surprised to learn from both the OED and the Dictionary ofAmerican
Regional English that a 1900 issue of the New York EveningJournal defined hillbilly as
"a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no
means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets
it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him." Likewise, with other terms, like
cracker and white trash, we discovered that if we were to believe most documented
references, poor whites seem mostly to reside in the rural South, suggesting that
these terms embody or reinforce mainstream classist, racist, and even regionalist
thought. While etymologies of such terms are intrinsically interesting, they can also
serve one of the aims of critical pedagogies: to denaturalize the familiar and, in this
case, to expose the cultural constructedness of race- and class-based epithets. Clearly,
such a pedagogy is as much about language study as it about critical inquiry.

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 175

In the English classroom, critical and cultural studies of whiteness will expose
how terms like redneck and hillbilly are regularly constructed as racial terms that
work to identify for mainstream whites other white people who behave in ways sup-
posedly unbecoming to or unexpected of whites. As Goad notes, "the mainstream
consistently depicts the redneck not as itself, but as a cultural weirdo. The redneck is
the watched, not the watcher" (76). Making a similar point, "J. W. Williamson notes
in Hillbillyland, an exhaustive study of representations of 'mountain people' in Hol-
lywood film, [that] the hillbilly figure designates a white who is racially visible not
just because he is poor, but also because he is sometimes monstrously so" (Newitz
134). As Annalee Newitz discusses in "White Savagery and Humiliation," examples
of media commodification of poor whites abound, moving beyond the comedic por-
trayals found in the original Beverly Hillbillies television series to images of menacing
backwoods folk on the big screen in such movies as Deliverance or in other popular
television series like Cops (136-37). Rednecks, white trash, and hillbillies, then, are among
the classes of whites who lack the power to define or shape cultural norms. As Michael
Zweig explains, "Class is about power some people have over the lives of others, and
the powerlessness most people experience as a result" (11). Zweig makes clear that
this power, although related to pay, is not about income. It is about power in the
workplace, in political arenas, and in cultural/media arenas. Jarosz and Lawson add
that pop culture representations of rednecks participate in a larger nationwide

"redneck" discourse [that] serves to obscure materialist processes of economic re-

structuring that are producing class polarization in three ways. First, rural working-
class whites are discursively constructed as obsolescent. Second, class status is under-
stood and defined as lifestyle. Third, white racism is constructed as redneck racism.
(10)

They point in particular to comedian Jeff Foxworthy's popularity as a prime ex-

ample of how "redneck discourse is currently being commodified" (12), suggesting
that "his jokes rely on themes of lack-of sophistication and education-and 'devi-
ant' desire" and, thus, reinforce "notions of poor whites as unsophisticated, out-
dated, and comic" (13). In one of his six best-selling books, Games Rednecks Play,
Foxworthy says, "A redneck is anyone with a glorious lack of sophistication" (qtd. in
"The Bubba Book"). Even though he follows up that statement by suggesting that it
"doesn't matter where you live or how much money you make," many of his redneck
jokes-like the opening bathwater joke-hinge on the circumstances of poverty of-
fered up for laughs.
Such jokes as that bathwater one work in an American cultural context where a
cleanliness industry perpetuates what Roland Marchand has dubbed the "parable of
the democracy of goods"-a belief that poor and working-class folks can erase class
differences simply by consuming the same products (toothpaste, soap, deodorant)

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176 College English

enjoyed by the middle and elite classes. (And here I am reminded of Lynn Z. Bloom's
"Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise," in which she identifies clean-
liness as a middle-class value: "Cleanliness is next to godliness in the middle-class
pantheon. Dirt, like disorder, is a privilege of the filthy rich and the slovenly poor"
[664]; I would disagree, arguing instead that cleanliness is a luxury of the middle
class. When water and cleaning products can be costly, quite often the poor have no
choice but to be dirtier than those with more resources. I have also witnessed my
brother wrestle with the grease on his hands and underneath his nails after a day of
working to repair his own vehicle.)
In a cultural studies classroom, teachers can facilitate student reflection upon
various mainstream discursive constructions of poor whites by bringing such texts as
Foxworthy's jokes into conversation with critical texts like Marchand's and with au-
thoritative/reference texts like the OED. In performing these cross-readings, stu-
dents learn how to use competing texts to denaturalize and historicize language,
and, simultaneously, gain valuable research and reading skills. While writing up their
research on a particular race- and/or class-based epithet, students will need to fur-
ther reflect upon the ethical implications of their own writing about a particular
group: what will their texts contribute to the conversation?

WRITING WITH AND EVEN AS REDNECKS AND HILLBILLIES:

CRITIQUE AND ADVOCACY

When we take seriouslyJohn Alberti's argument that the majority of American col-
lege students attend what he calls "second-tier" or "'working class' colleges [...]
that represent the majority of institutions of higher education" (563), in conjunction
with Michael Zweig's argument that most Americans are working-class, we are forced
to reconsider who specifically populates our classrooms and the degree to which our
pedagogies truly are inclusive and multicultural. Doing so, we will likely discover
that the number of "rednecks" (self-identified or otherwise) in our first-year En-
glish courses may be far greater than the one or two white students who explicitly
tout bootstraps narratives. As the pedagogical moments I relate below suggest, criti-
cal examinations of language's role in maintaining oppressive race and class struc-
tures can productively engage students oppressed by or comfortable with "normative"
whiteness, facilitating their ability to critique and resist (deconstruct) oppressive
mainstream stereotypes and even allowing for students to imagine and employ (re-
construct) more ethical discursive practices.
Recently, while teaching at a private university in the Pacific Northwest, I shaped
a first-year seminar around the theme "Rednecks, Crackers, and Hillbillies: White
Trash Deconstructed and Reconstructed," using as a primary course text Matt Wray

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 177

and Newitz's collection White Trash: Race and Class in America. As a number of au-
thors have suggested, although hillbilly, redneck, white trash, and cracker each has a
nuanced meaning, such terms are "discursively similar" (Jarosz and Lawson 14) in
the ways they position poor whites as deviant, obsolescent, and unsophisticated (see
also Goad; Wray and Newitz). I added the term "reconstructed" to the course theme
because I hoped that by exploring wider-ranging images of poor whites than are
readily available in the media, the students and I would gain greater critical insight
into American poverty and into the racial dimensions of whiteness and would, per-
haps, begin to reconstruct our own stances or even conceive of responsible rhetori-
cal action.

Knowing the high tuition at this private university, I wrongly assumed that the
students in our class would mostly be writing about, rather than as, rednecks or
white trash. However, on the first day of class, at least five students indicated that
they chose the course because they came from a "redneck town" or they graduated
from what their rivals had dubbed a "redneck high," and although no student at that
point self-identified as poor, several would do so later in the semester through posts
in our online discussion. Other students expressed empathy for poor whites, while
still others touted the power of the American dream, even suggesting that "people
should just work harder and ignore the mean things others say about them."
I'll give just a few representative student quotations that demonstrate a range of
complex thinking-from deconstructive critique to imagining or reconstructing more
ethical stances. In response to Roxanne Dunbar's "Bloody Footprints: Reflections
on Growing Up Poor White," one student, whom I'll refer to by the pseudonym
Sarah, wrote:

I associated very well with the author's need to stay true to her class. Having grown up
poor, I have had to learn not to be ashamed of my upbringing. There are only a few
people who make you feel bad for being poor, but those people are enough to send
you into a downward spiral of shame [. . .]. It is hard to be poor and to be around
people with money, but it is just one of those lessons you have to learn. Now, I think
that having grown up poor gives me more pride in my accomplishments, knowing
that I had to work that much harder. But the shame still comes from somewhere. I
haven't quite figured out where yet.

Here, Sarah bases her accomplishments on "hard work," suggesting that she is in-
vested in the myth of the American dream; yet, her poignant commentary on the
ability of others to "send you into a downward spiral of shame" indicates a growing
recognition that individual achievement is more complex than the American dream
myth figures it. Her last sentence indicates that our readings and this online discus-
sion have initiated for Sarah what will become an ongoing inquiry. One of Sarah's
peers, Alicia, responded to her in a way that shares Sarah's insights about the role
others may play in a person's sense of accomplishment and worth:

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178 College English

I can relate to the story "Bloody Footprints" like Sarah could relate. I am very proud
of where I am from yet at the same time, I sometimes feel embarrassed around people
of much higher social class.

In another post, Sarah continued her inquiry by, again, using our course readings
and online discussion to puzzle out complex class-based personal experiences. She
wrote,

My mom once joked about us being white trash, and I had to tell her, that we were not
white trash because we had a sense of humor about our situation. I don't know how
that fits in, but it is just another aspect of this oh-too-complicated phrase.

Sarah's comment was the closest any student came to self-identifying and writing as
white trash, and given mainstream constructions of poor whites as deviants, this is
understandable. Her puzzling over "this oh-too-complicated phrase" implies her
conceptualization of language's materiality: she recognizes words as things devised
in and applied to concrete situations and as having (in her case negative) conse-
quences. Both Sarah's and Alicia's posts indicate a common theme among those few
who proudly self-identify as rednecks: the tendency to "define themselves as honest,
hardworking, [and] resilient" (Jarosz and Lawson 9).
Students in our seminar were equally intrigued by the readily available popular
representations of poor whites in everything from Foxworthy's jokes to music videos
to movies and Web sites. Within pop culture, more widely circulated examples of
those willing to write with or even as rednecks have often come in a form of social
commentary regularly employed by non-mainstream groups: political or protest
songs. Huber, for instance, cites two labor songs popular among striking coal min-
ers in the 1920s and 1930s. One song, entitled "Red Necks," goes as follows: "Red
Necks, keep them scabs away / Red Necks, fight them every day/ [. . .] Red Necks,
don't admit defeat / Don't give up the fight" (109). Jarosz and Lawson also note
several popular country songs with similar messages that "underscore [redneck] as
signifying a working man who is honest, upstanding, and masculine-the American
individual, the populist, the hardworking white man" (11). The first is the Beaver
Brothers' 1978 tribute to President Jimmy Carter, "Redneck in the White House,"
and the second is the Charlie Daniels Band's 1989 "What the World Needs Is a Few
More Rednecks." The irony, as Jarosz and Lawson note, is that poor and working-
class whites "reworked the term [redneck and the social protest song] in ambiguous
and paradoxical ways to cement racial and class solidarity in the face of the civil
rights movement" (11). In that first-year seminar, these songs provided excellent
opportunities for cultural critique. After listening to and discussing them, students
brought to our attention other songs or Web sites where the authors proudly self-
identify as rednecks and white trash, often asking in online posts questions like, "Is
this just for fun? Is this person poking fun at himself or really proud? Are some
offended?"

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 179

Another complicated response comes in the form of a book like Jim Goad's The
Redneck Manifesto, published by Simon and Schuster. Indeed, even the editors seem
ambivalent about the nature of the cultural work the book accomplishes. Consider
the following excerpt on the book's inside jacket:

In a book that is destined to be praised, reviled, cited, denounced, loved, and hated-
perhaps by the same reader-cultural maverick Jim Goad presents a thoroughly rea-
soned, darkly funny, and rampagingly angry defense of America's most maligned so-
cial group-the cultural clan variously referred to as rednecks, hillbillies, white trash,
crackers, and trailer trash (provided they're white trailer trash, of course).

As The Redneck Manifesto boldly points out and brilliantly demonstrates,

America's dirty little secret isn't racism, but classism [... ]. In a nation obsessed with
race, this book switches the focus firmly back toward class, and it warns in a voice
loud and clear that America will never learn the true meaning of tolerance until it
learns to embrace the redneck.

Goad's book has its insightful moments, but it is largely provocative, for it falls prey
to the criticism Trainor notes of many texts that attempt to address class inequalities
among whites: race and class privilege are traded for each other. That is, while Goad
wants America to recognize that class inequalities exist in the United States, his
emphasis-as the editor's note on the inside jacket acknowledges-is on the inequali-
ties faced by poor and working-class whites, resulting in his playing the "we're just
as oppressed as other minority groups" game. Students need to gain skills for engag-
ing with dissonant texts like The Redneck Manifesto and with Web sites like "The
South's Best Lil' Country Humor Site," both of which simultaneously resist and
perpetuate notions of non-middle-class whites as racist. For instance, even though
the country humor site advocates "Pride and Heritage not Prejudice and Hate,"
articles posted on it-like Lewis Grizzard's "If You Don't Like Dixie, Delta's Ready,"
which expresses racist and homophobic white, male fears-indicate that the site
author's professed desires for tolerance may be overwhelmed by a more deep-seated
response. These texts require even more complex skills of engagement than do less
ambivalent responses to race and class relations.
Such a cultural studies pedagogy has the potential to open up discursive space
and possibilities for agency for students from a range of class backgrounds and has
provocative implications for students of color. For instance, consider the following
response from Kelly, who in another post clearly identified herself as upper-middle-
class. Here she takes up our discussion of the term redneck:

I disagree with the thought that Jeff Foxworthy's jokes are funny. What gives him the
right to make fun of others? I try to put myself into the shoes of the "white trash and
rednecks." Some don't have the option to be anything but that, and some choose to
live their lives that way. In my opinion, it all comes back to the competition of being
better than someone. People put down others for the benefit of their own self-es-

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180 College English

teem! I am not saying that I am not guilty of this action; I think that everyone has
done this before. But I just feel that so many people take it to extreme!

Kelly makes a critical point similar to those expressed by sophisticated race theo-
rists. For instance, in "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination," bell
hooks contends, "Stereotypes [... ] are a fantasy, a projection onto the other that
makes them less threatening" (44), and as scholar of Southern culture John Shelton
Reed has argued, terms like white trash and redneck allow elite whites "to think com-
forting things about themselves" (qtd. in Goad 74). What I find particularly pro-
vocative about Kelly's remark is that she moves beyond simple critique to reflect
upon her potential complicity with classist behavior and, we may infer, to begin to
imagine/reconstruct for herself a responsible discursive agency.
It is often students of color who more readily perceive the racial dimensions of
mainstream characterizations of rednecks, hillbillies, crackers, white trash. To clarify, I
offer an example drawn from a class that a colleague and I designed for two sections
of first-year composition in spring 2003. To facilitate a race- and class-based critical
pedagogy, we chose the generative theme "Everything Southern, from Traditions to
Stereotypes." On the first day of class, we did what Ira Shor calls "frontloading"
student discourse by inviting the students to do most of the talking in relation to our
course theme (see Empowering Education and When Students Have Power). As stu-
dents introduced themselves, we asked that they say whether or not they considered
themselves Southern and why or why not. Several white students qualified their "I
consider myself Southern" with the disclaimer, "but not a redneck!" It was during
our second class discussion, after the students had taken the Country Humor site's
"Southern/Redneck Test," that Angela, a young African American woman, posed to
our class the following question: "Can a black person be a redneck?" Without hesi-
tation, the other two African American students in the class, both male, joined an
almost unanimous chorus of student voices with a resounding, "No!" This opened
up space for a productive discussion about the racial dimensions of such epithets-
before we were to head off to the library for more academic, research-based inquiry.
As a number of race theorists have argued, students of color oppressed by nor-
mative whiteness may find critical examinations of whiteness empowering, and, as
bell hooks notes, students of color are often far more knowledgeable about whites
than whites are about people of color. Suggests hooks, "Since most white people do
not have to 'see' black people (constantly appearing on billboards, television, mov-
ies, in magazines, etc.) [...] they can live as though black people are invisible, and
they can imagine that they are also invisible to blacks" (42). She says as well that
because middle- and upper-class whites are invested in notions of sameness-not-
withstanding their projections of racism onto poor whites-they are deeply invested
"in the sense of whiteness as mystery" (41). Thus, whiteness studies circumvents the

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 181

usual white control of the person of color's gaze in ways that can be empowering for
black students and other students of color.
Students in that spring 2003 first-year composition course became especially
interested in one civic-minded effort to write with poor whites sponsored by the
Center for Rural Strategies and the Rural Education Special Interest Group of the
American Educational Research Association. Recently, these two nonprofit activist
organizations have formed with at least nine other nonprofits a national Rural Real-
ity Alliance, with the immediate organizing purpose of protesting CBS's proposed
"reality" television series The Real Beverly Hillbillies. In fall 2002, CBS launched what
one official inside memo identified as a "hick hunt" for a backwoods family to relo-
cate to a mansion in Beverly Hills. On January 7, 2003, the center sponsored an op-
ed protest ad that ran in newspapers across the country, including the New York
Times. According to the organization's Web site,

Rural Strategies President Dee Davis met with CBS President Les Moonves and
other network executives Tuesday, Feb. 11, in Los Angeles. Rural Strategies was able
to arrange this meeting in large part because of folks who took the time to express
opinions directly to the network. At the meeting, [Davis] presented the Rural Reality
Campaign's position: (1) CBS should scrap its plans to produce The Real Beverly Hill-
billies and (2) the network should examine the way it portrays rural people and com-
munities in its other programming.

In addition to writing for or with poor whites, the Center for Rural Strategies Web
site offers two opportunities for citizens to voice their concerns. The first is a link
that allows the site's visitors to sign a petition and to write comments, which are
archived and shared with television producers and with elected government offi-
cials. The second is an internal page offering contact information for CBS and ac-
tual rhetorical advice for how to "compose your message to CBS." Here are two of
the rhetorical strategies offered:

* Tell them who you are, how old you are, where you live, and your field of employment.
This will give them an idea of the range of people this notion offends.
* Letters should have a passionate tone. Tell what about the show repels you so much that
you had to write. Be brief at the same time. ("Rural Reality")

What I find rare about this campaign is that the Center for Rural Strategies goes
beyond writing for others not only to encourage others to take part in civic dis-
course but also to provide rhetorical strategies for doing so and even to explain the
reasoning behind the rhetorical advice offered. This organization and its Web site
and op-ed ad have, indeed, prompted letters from average citizens, as well as from
eight members of Congress (both Democratic and Republican). An update sent out
on the alliance's listserv notes, "Most recently Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky sent a
letter to [the] CBS President [.. .] asking him to drop any plans to create the pro-

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182 College English

gram [...] [and in February 2003], Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia made a speech on the
Senate floor opposing the show" ("Capitol").
Two students, who in their introductory remarks jokingly self-identified as
"rednecks," signed the petition. Provocative as well have been other student re-
sponses to the rhetorical strategies advocated on the site. While several students
employed some of the center's rhetorical strategies in their own argumentative es-
says, most of them took issue with one piece of advice. It reads:

* Handwritten letters carry more weight, due to the effort one must take to write them.

As many of these students come from rural areas and are concerned about negative
media stereotyping of poor people and of Southerners, they worried that handwrit-
ten letters would reinforce the misconception that people from these areas are be-
hind technologically and educationally. As a writing teacher, I live for such moments,
when students so clearly comprehend the rhetorical situation. These students' re-
sponse, along with the wide-ranging activism that has resulted from the alliance's
campaign, demonstrate the ability of activist groups to prompt civic discourse and
even to prompt reflection on rhetorical action.
If someone who visits the Center for Rural Strategies site does not write a letter
to CBS, that person still may benefit from the rhetorical advice offered when com-
posing other documents. As my students' responses indicate, the very act of consid-
ering the rhetorical efficacy of handwritten letters helps citizens conceive of rhetoric
as a self-conscious activity involving the deliberate consideration of the best avail-
able means of persuasion. Such considerations are important both in and out of the
composition classroom, particularly in a country where, as Jarosz and Lawson point
out, "the national discourses of redneck represent rural poverty as a lifestyle choice
[...] and [where] reproduction of [such discourses works to justify exploitation] by
naming others and blaming the persistence of rural poverty upon the poor them-
selves" (8).

CONCLUSION: THE ROLE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

IN STUDENTS' REPOSITIONING PROCESSES

Common criticisms of critical composition pedagogies have been that activist teachers
seem "more concerned about fulfilling the goals of critical teaching than with im-
proving the students' ability to write well" (Soles 269); that a particular class's "focus
appears far more social than textual" (Harris "Opinion" 580); or that recently advo-
cated working-class pedagogies privilege activism over "language instruction" (O'Dair
598). What I have been describing is a critical pedagogy steeped in language study,
a pedagogy that requires research using traditional sources (like the OED) and of
nontraditional sources (Web sites, listservs, student's situated/local definitions for

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 183

words, and so forth), but also a pedagogy that allows students from a variety of class
backgrounds to make use of knowledge brought from their home communities while
still making their way into academic discourse. Drawing upon Min-Zhan Lu's no-
tion of repositioning, I want to urge composition instructors away from the follow-
ing false binaries: all-or-nothing assimilation into middle-class discourse or total
legitimation of students' home dialects; attention to texts and writing instruction or
attention to social/political issues; and composition instruction as instrumentalist or
as activist.

In A Teaching Subject, Joseph Harris emphasizes the importance of conceiving

of the purpose of college composition as a space for something other than initiation
into middle-class/academic discourse:

The task facing our students, as Min-Zhan Lu has argued, is not to leave one commu-
nity in order to enter another, but to reposition themselves in relation to several con-
tinuous and conflicting discourses. Similarly, our goals as teachers need not to be to
initiate our students into the values and practices of some new community, but to
offer them the chance to reflect critically on those discourses-of home, school, work,
the media and the like-to which they already belong. (105)

On the contrary, Sharon O'Dair (agreeing with Jeff Smith and Russel Durst) argues
that critical pedagogues do a disservice when they ignore working-class students'
instrumentalist reasons for obtaining degrees and for taking on middle-class dis-
course-that is, to get better-paying jobs. She further suggests that we focus our
efforts on helping those working-class students who wish to successfully assimilate
by initiating them into middle-class discourse and that we also help those others
who really want working-class jobs to more quickly make the decision to get out of
college (604). What such a stance does not consider is the role that the repositioning
process can play for working-class students who either remain in or drop out of
college. That is, composition's cultural work may be all the more important for
those working-class students who do not graduate, who instead return to the manual
labor work force.
I tend to agree with Patrick Finn that "[t]eachers who see themselves as allies
for their working-class students can help their students see that literacy and school
knowledge could be potent weapons in their struggle for a better deal by connecting
knowledge with the reality of working-class students' lives" (xi). Yes, it is a struggle
for the better deal that motivates students in general to attend college, yet, as bell
hooks in Teaching to Transgress reminds us, too often working-class students in par-
ticular tend to see this better deal only in terms of economic rewards; students can-
not anticipate the "psychic turmoil" and the loss of connection to their families and
home communities that often accompany assimilation (182). Smith and Durst con-
tend that composition pedagogues should not ignore student instrumentalism; we

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184 College English

certainly do not have the right to dissuade students in their desires for economic
success. However, as Lu and Bruce Horner reason in "The Problematic of Experi-
ence," while we cannot dismiss students' desires, "neither should we forget that
those desires are not necessarily the full story-students may want to change the
demands society is placing on them, even to change who decides what is to be de-
manded by whom" (266). Critics of cultural studies and critical pedagogies like Smith
and O'Dair assert that students want to gain, rather than to critique, positions of
privilege.
Yet critics holding such positions do not seem to have considered the experi-
ences of those like my brother who acquire college degrees but who, out of a desire
to remain in their rural working-class communities, choose to return to the manual
work force or even those working in positions related to their degrees who experi-
ence oppressive work relations on a daily basis. (O'Dair scoffs at the working-class
student who obtains a "bachelor's degree in psychology to become a bartender"
[604].) Such experiences, when considered, highlight the need to encourage stu-
dents to think beyond income when they are grappling with how to get that better
deal, especially when they are considering how discursive practices may be useful in
getting a fair deal.
The critical pedagogy that I have described above fits well with the notion of
repositioning, as Lu and Harris describe it. Such assignments, which allow students
to research race- and class-based epithets that circulate in their local communities
and even in our national discourses, provide students with opportunities to reposi-
tion themselves in relation to these often-competing discourses. After completing a
combination of library and nontraditional research and after reflecting upon their
own discursive practices, students have the option of merely writing an academic
paper, but such assignments also offer students opportunities to learn and even use
strategies for civic engagement. The moments at which my students questioned the
rhetorical efficacy of handwritten letters and at which two students signed Rural
Strategies' petition, for instance, represent instances when students' conceptions of
writing moved beyond the college classroom.
A student who took that composition course but who later drops out of college
before completing his degree may have gained rhetorical strategies for addressing
those within positions of power in his home community (teachers, school board or
city council members, a supervisor). Those who complete degrees will have prac-
ticed a host of useful academic/middle-class language skills: researching library da-
tabases, CD-ROMS, and other authoritative reference works, as well as evaluating
electronic media; writing the academic research essay; participating in an online
discussion; engaging in close textual analyses of articles, songs, and even jokes; and,
perhaps, even voicing in forums beyond our classroom their advocacy for social
change. Should one of these earn a bachelor's degree and become a bartender, she

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 Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse 185

may have gained a firmer rhetorical place to stand in the face of difficult customers,
sexist bosses, or oppressive landlords.1

NOTE

1. I thank Irvin Peckham and the College English readers for their insightful comments on an earlier
version of this text.

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