It's likely that anyone who visits this blog will have heard of Stuff White People Like. Christian Lander has done a brilliant job of analyzing and mocking his subculture, the young middle- to upper-middle-class liberal white community. He has pulled off a Yankee Doodle-like feat of memetic warfare by taking the insults thrown at him and making them his own.
I'm not a white person by Lander's definition. I'm not remarkably liberal and I'm definitely not from an upper- or middle-class background. I'm of a different type, and I know a lot of others like me.
We came from different economic backgrounds, but we were all of proletarian origin. Our parents did not own the means of production and frequently did not own the houses and apartments where we lived. Many of us grew up in the south and southwestern United States. but not all. Many of us were raised in Republican-voting areas, but not all. The common thread in our childhoods is more cultural than geographic or political. We were working-class kids, and if we weren't raised in the country, we were not many generations removed from people who were.
We grew up, and we cultivated commercially useful talents that helped us earn our way into better financial shape. Along the way, we picked up some ideas that we hadn't encountered growing up. Some we accepted, some we rejected, but they all affected our way of thinking. "Uva uvam vivendo varia fit," as the sign read in Lonesome Dove.
We're not Lander's white people, but we're not quite like the people we grew up with. We haven't rejected our roots, but we're different. We are a separate subculture, with our own weird affinities and opinions.
This blog is my attempt to explore the strange hybrid that is the recovering redneck.
