Jim Goad believes that anyone who is of low income is a nigger. That’s the reason he titled the chapter “White Niggers Have Feelings Too”. To Goad, a nigger is a nigger regardless of their color of skin. What makes someone a nigger is their low role in society. What makes someone called a nigger versus a redneck is the color of their skin. They both mean close to the same thing today, even though the word nigger is rooted in oppression.
According to Goad, white rednecks are hated by upper class whites since white rednecks are basically niggers too. Goad hates the way white trash is treated far beyond being called white trash. He makes the connection of how black culture was once treated and that they are the ones in the crosshairs now in the media by saying: “If the necks red the lights green” (20). He also says that the low class whites are falsely blamed for America’s problems even though it couldn’t be true.
4.What Goad means is that a person’s social class determines their privileges and not the color of their skin. Goad isn’t a cavalier for the white whose fight is against the black; he’s Robin Hood. Goad is a fighter for the low class, doing battle with “the man” (in this case his bosses) who try to belittle his existence as a human being. He feels exploited by the elites of America. Sure there may not be physical separations like race labeled drinking fountains of the past, but there are certain areas of towns that blue-collar workers just don’t go (Goad 105).
Free labor and wage labor don’t make sense to Goad because they are perceived to be a free person even though they work underneath another person. That sounds a lot like a modern form of slavery to Goad and he indeed classifies it as that saying America’s elite own the lower class.
The South’s elite included owners of plantations because of the way that they used low class whites, sharecroppers, and obviously black slaves. These people had no privileges, rights, or assurances on the land where they worked, forever used. Goad relates this to a story about rich boys from the East who traveled to the Appalachian Mountains. The boys went to the mountains and planned to exploit its natural resources for profit, but the hill folk lived there. The rich boys wrote up deceiving contracts in order to trick the hill folk and take the land. This left the hill folk poor and helpless.
5.Playing hard means the tribulations that the white working class has to go through. The white working class has to use this “play” in order to make it through the work week. During the work week, this mostly means the use of crank, which does terrible things to the body but makes a person very productive. On the weekends, “play” means drinking heavily. When Goad says heavily, he means about three times the legal limit in order for a person to let loose from the stress of life. The drinking problem leads to so many crimes in the town like drunk driving, violence, and even more drug use. Not to mention junk food and bloody sports mixed in.
The small town lifestyle consumes these people and it becomes their own world inside of the world. A good way of explaining it is when Goad said “the residents know not a whit about global diplomacy, but everyone knows how he got the black eye and why she aborted the baby” (Goad 126). He means that everyone knows everyone else’s business. The gossip of the town is the social aspect of