‘Redneck Customs’: race and class at the demolition derby

Abstract

Using data collected from ethnographic research at demolition derbies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, this article focuses on the language used by drivers for car-naming practices in response to epithets routinely associated with rural, working-class whites. Briefly cast into mass consciousness by media coverage of the racialised 2008 US Presidential contest through a focus on the ‘Appalachian Belt’, the day-to-day experiences of rural working-class whites tend to stay below the news radar. This population, often publicly referred to by terms like ‘white trash’ or ‘rednecks’, has also received relatively little scholarly attention. That such language is used unproblematically in the public arena underscores the construction of the working-class white as embodying a complex mixture of racial privilege and class disadvantage. And while emerging studies of whiteness do address ‘redneck’ as a racialised class category, and research on poor rural Americans is attracting more researchers, studies on leisure activity associated with rural whites is very scarce. But over a million fans attend more than 2000 demolition derby events every year, and as a site where values centred on nationalism, citizenship and class are practiced and critiqued; I use the metaphor of creative destruction to explore the derby as a remarkable model of expressive culture and site of active resistance.