“The Caucasian Panthers: Meet the Rednecks Armed, Ready and ’Bout That Anti-Racist Life”
“It turns out that Henson is a redneck. It also turns out that Henson is a UC Berkeley-educated economist and scholar with a Ph.D. in environmental science, policy and management and heads the Cooperative New School for Urban Studies and Environmental Justice. Henson doesn’t consider the term “redneck” a pejorative, and defines a redneck simply as “a white working-class Southerner.” He has been working for years to separate redneck culture from its neo-Confederate, racist past and redefine it according to its working-class roots.
“The only culture that white people and upper-middle-class white people have is whiteness,”Henson explains. “To fit in that class, you must strip yourself of everything else. What I would like to do is show white working-class whites that the neo-Confederate bullshit is a broken ideology. … A lot of the activism in anti-racism is all about white people giving up their privilege in regards to white supremacy. I believe that will never work with working-class whites. You have to find a way to show working folks that anti-racism is within the self-interests of working-class white people. And you have to do that with a culture.””
Related: “Anti-Racist Rednecks with Guns: An Interview With Dave Strano”
