While we’re at it, perhaps you (or someone else) could explain to me exactly what the difference is between making a joke about rednecks and flea-bitten couches perched on rotting porches and making one using the N-word about watermelon or fried chicken. Both are derogatory stereotypes with no particular basis in fact that persons of a particular heritage, aren’t they? Yet the former will get you a big laugh and the latter will get you prosecuted for hate speech.
Well the reason this sort of thing is acceptable is because the targets of the "edgy" humor are white folk. And if you beleive everything the media and world tries to tell you, white folk are supposed to have it all: all that privilege and power and money, nice things and good educations and the best things in life because well, they are white folk. If they are white and blue collar or even worse-poor, well they must have done something wrong. They, those super privileged above all white people-especially the male ones- they are supposed to, by legend and the annals of the Oppression Olympics and by sheer force and determination, have it all. The White Collar I Won the Game American Dream on a Silver Platter: a quiche (fixed by a domestic) in every oven, a BMW in every garage, a double mochachino in every hand, perfect partners and 2.2 children, headed for Harvard! White people are…special and lucky and rule the world right?
So if they don’t manage to oh, all that right stuff white people are fabled to have…well, then there must be something wrong with those under-achieving loathsome scum. They must be deeply flawed. They obviously failed at winning the white privilege game and thus they are: trash. Go ahead and rag on them, because even with all that white advantage (especially the men) they still managed to turn their lives into a giant slop sandwich and they deserve it. They have weird, un-hip and un-trendy ways and don’t fit in with the little white li(f)e and aren’t special. White folk-especially those sorts Weingarten is poking fun at, more than any other remaining group of people, are fair game for anyone and anything and no hit is below the belt. Hillbillies and Hicks and Rednecks and White Trash are the perpetrators of hate speech and hate crimes, right? They are never on the receiving end, right?
Except when they are, like right here in his article. True enough, if he had said ANY similar thing about African American, Latino, Asian, East Indian, gay, so on, kind of people folk would be looking for his head on a pike. But since he aimed his ire at an acceptable group to aim it at, it's okay.
-That's my humble opinion anyway...
