THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

This is the first graduate seminar in history in which the professor has explained why he calls himself a hick and a redneck.

In Stormfront there was some discussion among my commenters, who are really making me hop, about my constant reference to myself as a redneck and a hick. That discussion made me think the question in a complete way that no man can do on his own.

Here is what I came up with From Bob's Blog:

In response Don says, "I like the hick bit. I like that fact that hicks can have more common sense and be more in touch with reality than a thousand social scientists combined. Ha ha, what a joke, these idiots think that by using this word that can take advantage of the cachet attached to real scientists. Long live hicks."

"Having said that, what is a hick anyway?"

At the far end of Long Island away from New York City is a city called Hicksville. The island of Long Island is larger that the state of Rhode Island and so Hicksville was a long way from New York until fairly recently. Long Island was in fact mostly farm country, so Hicksville was very much a country town.

On one end of Long Island you were in New York City. On the other end you were a hick, which I suppose is a shortened form of hickvillian or something similar. This endeth the etymological lecture for today.

I call myself a hick for the same reason I called myself a Methodist when that was still a church. The word "Methodist" was a term of abuse invented by Wesley's enemies. But I don't know what the church was called before because Methodists were so proud of the condemnation that they adopted it as their official name very early on.

You know the "Yankee Doodle" was written by a Britisher to make fun of Americans and it was quickly adopted as the official song of the Revolution.

The term "Baptist " was originally a word invented by people making fun of the insistence on full immersion at baptism. If you ask a Baptist minister or a Methodist minister what the name of his church was before it adopted the term of abuse as a matter of pride, he won't know.

I am very bad at coming up with lists, but the list of names people proudly use for themselves that were originally terms of abuse would make a very long paragraph.

I know that in my youth Southerners proudly referred ot themselves as "Rebels" and that is still the name of the University of Mississippi football team.

When I worked in the Polish steel district of Chicago in the 1960s they would not let me refer to them as "Polish." They were "Pollacks" and proud of it.

British conservatives call themselves Tories, which originally meant an Irish highwayman.

The main opposition party in America before the Republicans was The Whig Party. American revolutionaries had called themselves Whigs as opposed to the Loyalists, who called themselves Tories.

But Whig, the name opponents to the Tory Party called themselves in England, was originally exactly the same as Tory, a term of abuse. In fact, just as tory meant an Irish highway robber, whig meant a Scottish highway-robber.

In fact to people a century before, the adoption of names like whig, rebel, tory, methodist and baptist would be as strange as the NAACP changing its name to "The Niggers."

In fact the latter incident has already happened. When blacks started calling THEMSELVES blacks, it was an act of defiance. The switch from "Negro" to "black" occurred at the same historical moment that blacks elected the first black president of the NAACP that it had had in its sixty-year history. It came with Black Pride. No one ever mentioned "Negro Pride" or "COLORED pride." A "Negro" or a "colored" man was above a non-white man, and his ambition and the ambition of Boasian Jews was to get rid of that color and assimilate him into the white community.

When I say "hick" I am associating myself with the old Hicksville side of Long Island. I have not the slightest ambition to be good New York City type or a Yankee - hence "Rebel" - nor was my circuit rider grandfather the least bit interested in being mistaken for an Episcopalian, the folks who labeled us Methodists in the first place.

When you adopt the term of abuse the enemy uses it is an open declaration that you are anxious above all for people to know you are NOT one of the group doing the abusing. The worst name they can think of is much better than being mistaken for one of them. In fact, when people ADOPT the term of abuse it is the most vicious insult you can throw at your enemies.

In have already seen a number of conservatives use the term "respectable" for the exact purpose of distancing themselves from it, "The respectable answer to this would be ..." That deprecation of the word "respectable" is a symptom I have seen many times before when I have turned a word into a killing insult. The delay between the time I started using "respectable conservative" and the appearance of other terms and arguments I came up with into the public dialogue.

The term "respectable" was never a term of abuse among conservatives before my introduction of "respectable conservatives" in Whitakeronline in 1998. It must come up a LOT at conservative cocktail parties in DC. Like "Political Correctness", the term "respectable conservatives" gave a NAME to something people were heartily sick of but could not identify quickly.

I have routinely told people that the term "redneck" now just means any white man with balls. It wasn't many years after I started saying that the top country hit was "Redneck Woman." And by the way, "country music" was also originally a term of abuse.