The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies Hicks and White Trash Becames America's Scapegoats

by Jim Goad

Book Overview

Culture maverick Jim Goad presents a thoroughly reasoned, darkly funny, and rampagingly angry defense of America's most maligned social group -- the cultural clan variously referred to as rednecks, hillbillies, white trash, crackers, and trailer trash. As The Redneck Manifesto boldly points out and brilliantly demonstrates, America's dirty little secret isn't racism but classism. While pouncing incessantly on racial themes, most major media...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684838648
• ISBN13: 9780684838649
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Goad hit the nail on the head

Jim Goad, in his "Redneck Manifessto" assumes a role most white-bread middle Americans would probably never cast him in. For a self-proclaimed piece of "white trash", Mr. Goad proves not only unusually insightful, but extremely articulate in a manner those same middle Americans would not expect from a "hillbilly". The actual topics of conversation are ones that have suffered from a terribly long run of having been either ignored, repressed, or completely mis-handled and misunderstood by people in general. Mr. Goad deftly brings many subtexts to the surface regarding American race issues and convincingly sets them in a clear light; a light that makes far greater sense than the pablum the American people have been spoon fed for many decades. Perhaps the greatest message radiating from the pages of his work is that race is not the significant factor in so-called "race relations", but rather power; money power and the political power that it buys; the tendency to preserve power at all costs, no matter who gets hurt. The real enemy lies elsewhere, but you will have to read for yourself and see how we have been lead down the garden path and sold a bill of choicely rotten goods. Black, white, or otherwise, any American interested in the truth about race relations owes it to themself to take up this volume and read carefully. In fact, black Americans might profit more from the reading than any others. I promise you will not be disappointed.Goad speaks very directly and colorfully, and I will say that all his strong language is offered in the best spirit of honest inquiry into the issues addressed therein and I believe the volume would actually be diminished in value without it.

Superbly entertaining; makes good points as well.

This wonderful little gem is something I would assign in a second were I a teacher of American history in a liberal school like Berkeley where, contrary to the alleged situation in the rest of the country, undergraduates are forced, via a required class, to be sensitive to American diversity, which (in the class I took there) ended up containing a great many cliched leftist attacks on white males, heterosexuality, Christianity, and many favorite targets of Bay Area lefties. This book attacks the liberal scapegoating of poor, uneducated whites that is prevalent in the "liberal media." It does this with a rather impressive array of evidence combined with a hilarious argumentative style which, regrettably, will almost ensure the book's absence in American history courses. Jim Goad doesn't hate anyone but jokingly advocates the enslavement of all white liberals. (It's a joke.) But on the way he points out American hypocrisy in, for example, thinking it abhorrent to ridicule poor, uneducated blacks but hilarious to ridicule poor, uuneducated whites. He explodes the conflation between the Old Boy Network and Good Old Boys and writes the funniest critique of liberal free weekly newspapers that I have ever seen -- for he worked for one himself and knows them intimately. This book will have you listening to Elvis in no time, if you don't already. If you are one of those humorless uptight liberal types who haunt my steps in the Bay Area, you will probably dislike this book; but, if, like me, you are somewhat left of center but enjoy reading viewpoints from many angles, especially if they are written well, you will adore this book.

Razor Sharp

If you decide to read this book, you are in for a major treat. This is a book unlike any other. As I read the book, I kept wondering how it ever got published. Jim Goad is one angry redneck, to be sure. His goal is to show how poor white trash has become the only acceptable scapegoat left in this country. Along the way, he rides roughshod over every type of politically correct supposition known to man. Goad doesn't care a whit about whiny blacks or liberal do-gooders. He doesn't give a fig about conservatives with their big-business loving mentality, either. Goad is concerned with one thing: the mistreatment of people, regardless of their skin color.Goad reduces the ills of poor white trash to one simple formula: economic exploitation by the wealthy. Goad believes that the rich, throughout history, have consistently played off classes against each other in order to maintain their privileged status. The recent black vs. white warfare is just the latest incarnation of this exploitation. Goad disproves the widespread belief that blacks suffered alone. The majority of whites in America got here as indentured servants, many of whom were kidnapped and tossed on a boat against their will. America also served as a dumping ground for poor white criminals. The indentured servants were often treated worse than black slaves. Owners of indentured servants knew that they only had a limited amount of time to exploit these white slaves, so they worked them to a frazzle. Goad cites statistic after statistic to show that the vast majority of whites had it as bad, if not worse, than blacks.Most of the book concerns razor sharp insights into white trash values. Goad looks at Elvis, Bigfoot and snake hugging Christians and sees within them new religions of the trash class. Militias and conspiracy addicts are also examined and shown to have somewhat of a basis for their paranoia. Probably the best part of the book, in my opinion, is when Goad describes a night out on the town in a poor white bar. His observations on the denizens of this bar are hilarious and sad at the same time. Most of the time that is the charm of this book: it is thigh-slapping funny. I would love to quote to you some of the witty aphorisms contained in this book, but I can't because they are so obscene. If you are not a fuzzy-wuzzy liberal, you'll laugh at this gem of a book too. After reading this book, I'm sure my reparations check is only a trip to the mailbox away. Highly recommende

A book that puts an awful lot in perspective....

I've got an awful lot of education in me, and this might be the most important book that I've read left off of every syllabus ever....In haute culture and academia, the only acceptible slurs allowed are against those poor and white. Whereas a person raised impoverished in Harlem (where I live...) or South Central L.A. might be given compassion, a person raised in Boone County, West Virginia or Paducah, Kentucky would be derrided as "ignotant" or "white trash". The ways in which the poor are portrayed/exploited on Jerry Springer for the entertainment of the masses would be attacked by the Cornell Wests of the black community if the people shown were generally African-American (and rightfully so...) The rich and white just view the people on them as scum, beneath them, and not worth neither time nor pity.Jim Goad searches for a reason why in this book. It's humor betrays some of the bitter points that it makes; if it was a strictly academic book, it would have never been published outside of Appalachia and then, only read by the small subgenre of people into Appalachian studies (read: the study of poor white people and the black people who live near them.... there aren't people of any other color...) As it is, it's found a rather marginal audience. It's a really important book. Everyone should read it: especially those who've read out the Fanon, and W.E.B. du Bois, and Malcolm X... and the people who don't read at all.... and search for an answer WHY the last person who did any meaningful work on the problem of poor white people was Karl Marx..... (betcha someone is going to write me on that point...) PLEASE read this book!!!