Editor’s Note: E. King Alexander, Jr., the author of this post, is a Louisiana, California, and Texas attorney engaged in indigent defense in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. He currently serves, with Julie Hayes Kilborn, as Co-Chair of the Amicus Committee of LACDL.  Before dedicating himself to indigent defense, King focused on civil litigation including intellectual properties and was a longtime professional musician.

This has only to do with social, versus criminal, justice, but it was inspired in part by Dr. Alan Bean’s post on Rep. Joe Wilson and this writer’s second response to it, which caused thoughts to gel that have been percolating for awhile. It concerns use of the R-word. In order to be clear, the word itself will be spelled out now lest someone assume that the R-word is “Republican”: the R-word is “redneck.” Some of the comments on this site (not posts, but comments to posts) have employed it, certainly not a unique situation on the Internet, but that is only the free or tolerated speech of the public at large, not condoned by the site or the foundation and people behind it.

The R-word is a racial epithet, and should be retired. No gold watch, no pension.

The R-word is an exonym. That means it is a word that at least formerly was used only as a pejorative and by persons outside the subject group. (Another example of an exonym also starts with an “R”– namely “Redbone,” signifying a group for which there is no polite term, and which some say, with correctness as it turns out, does not truly exist as a single ethnicity. Like the R-word at issue here, there are today persons who identify with that group and who have in fact embraced the exonym, giving it a second life as an ethnonym, though by and large the term remains at best controversial, and at worst, fighting words. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redbone_(ethnicity) ).

One need only visit any of numerous political debate chats and public comment sites online and pretend to be white and to espouse some conservative viewpoint, in order have the R-word hurled like a javelin of invective in the most hateful and vitriolic manner, often by the very amateur polemicists who claim to represent positions of tolerance and equality. Throw in the suggestion that one hails from the South, even without a view associated with the political right, and one may find that the regional component complemented by the racial is enough that people who may not otherwise have a dog in the fight will blurt out the R-word. It is manifestly unfair to apply a racial epithet selectively according to mainstream political views that any American is entitled to hold, or according to region as indicator of lack of sophistication and of genetic bottlenecking. The same views may be held legitimately by a person of any race, or any part of the country. As for rusticity, the South certainly has no monopoly on it. Eh? Yah.

Moreover, persons having a Scots or Ulster Scots, Presbyterian background or heritage (formerly the “Covenanters,” what in Ulster is now simply called “Protestant”) have further reason to take offense at the R-word. When it is applied to them, they are being name-called not only for their ethnicity, but also for their religion. See,http://www.scotshistoryonline.co.uk/rednecks/rednecks.html . During the Second Great Awakening, in 1810 the “Old Side” Presbyterian Church gave rise in Kentucky to the revivalist Cumberland Presbyterians, whose ordination did not require a higher education degree. It soon grew throughout Appalachia and beyond. Presbyterian William Boardman’s 1858 book The Higher Christian Life, emphasizing the personal relationship with Christ, influenced the Holiness Movement and Pentecostalism, eventually expanding the variety of white Americans who would come to be seen as fair game for targeting with the R-word. The religious component is also seen in the “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) racial-religious stereotype. This includes notably the Anglicans, who arguably are Protestant only in their schism from the Pope of Rome and certain doctrinal leavings of the Puritan Interlude which were later hidden in the hinter pages of the Book of Common Prayer. Some white Southerners may attempt to distinguish themselves from the nefarious R-word by claiming liberal politics (which is often the very goal of the person using it), or a Roman Catholic dispensation, or some other non-Protestant, non-Christian, or ethnic exception. It is quite understandable that they would wish to escape the ignominy which has accrued to the label.

Here is a true anecdote that illustrates the wrongheaded use of the R-word by someone who should have known better. New Orleans blues harmonica ace and bandleader J. Monque’D was performing with his band in the 1990’s in England, when he noticed a scowling woman standing at the edge of the club stage, shouting something over and over at him as the band played. J. is a Creole of color, very light-skinned and straight-haired, tall, and often wearing a white plantation-style hat. He identifies as African-American, or black, and certainly under the one-drop rule, so would have the law considered him when he was born. The main clue of his ethnicity to strangers is the yellow gold dental work which is part of his constellation of trademarks, familiar to those who have seen him in a memorable Louisiana Lottery television commercial in which his broad smile in the final frame serves as the punch line. His gold teeth would not have been apparent that night in England as he played the harmonica. When he finally figured out what this odd person was yelling at him repeatedly, he realized it was the R-word. It seems that she perceived him as white, and felt compelled to heckle and condemn him in public for coming into her country and “stealing the black man’s music.” She expressed what she considered her superior social consciousness by trying to shout down his performance with a racial epithet. How ridiculous is that?

Thus there can be no question that the R-word is used, with the intent to discredit or cause emotional pain to others, as an insulting shorthand for a set of demeaning racial, ethnic, regional, and religious stereotypes. As such, the R-word can have no place in the civilized exchange of ideas, nor in polite society, much less in our schools, but rather must go the way of every other ethnic slur: into disapprobation, and ultimately into oblivion.

Some will ask, “What about Jeff Foxworthy?” It is true that there are those who in good humor toward themselves, their relatives, or their community and race, use the R-word. Does that make it okay? The late great comic Richard Pryor formerly used the N-word prominently in his routines. However, after visiting Africa at the height of his career, and before his life-threatening freebasing accident and the diagnosis of his Multiple Sclerosis, he had an epiphany and announced that he would never again use the N-word in his standup comedy routine. Users of the R-word for comic purposes should follow Richard Pryor’s great example in keeping with the Golden Rule: there can be no same-race humor exception to the condemnation of a racial slur. Jeff Foxworthy, therefore, should be the first to receive a cease-and-desist letter from the USCDL (Unsophisticated Southern Caucasian Defense League).

 Should there be a musical exception? After the notorious Don Imus radio incident in early 2007, and in agreement with such black leaders as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Def Jam Records co-founder Russell Simmons searched his soul and concluded that the N-word, as well as certain other terms which were demeaning of women, had to go. Whites who have used the R-word in music should follow this additional great example of self-improvement from the black community: there can be no same-race music exception to the condemnation of a racial slur. The second USCDL cease-and-desist letter should go to Jerry Jeff Walker.

What about those people whose manners, conduct, and mode of life closely correspond to the R-word stereotype? May we not at least call white Southern social conservatives by the R-word, because they are such A-words (props to Van Jones )?  No, there can be no “call a spade a spade” exception for the R-word. It should not be forgotten that there were, and are, stubborn people who insisted that there are black people, and then there are N-words. In each case the word itself is wrong precisely because of the hurtfulness and the stereotyping, and it has to stop.

The seriousness of the final point here cannot be left to inference, no matter how adequately the “USCDL” references may telegraph the tongue-in-cheek component. Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if …” one-liners date from the early 1990’s. He has substantially moved on. The song “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” was actually written in the 1960’s by Ray Wylie Hubbard, and made famous in 1973 by Jerry Jeff Walker, who recorded his seminal album “Mr. Bojangles” in 1968, the title song honoring the great African American showman Bill Robinson. BMI lists no fewer than 390 songs with some form of the R-word in the title. ASCAP lists another 146 R-word-titled songs. These figures exclude those songs that only use the R-word in their lyrics. There will be no stopping the R-word’s comic and musical use in our lifetimes. Nevertheless, this writer believes, as Russell Simmons realized, that the target group’s using a pejorative to defuse it is only a transitional strategy, prelude to the preferred one of eliminating it altogether.

The final point is this: there is, emphatically, no moral equivalency between the R-word and the N-word. The writer has learned to vet these forays into sensitive issues, and is indebted to, prepublication readers who are neither white nor Southerner, yet live among them. Though the Covenanters who were the original targets of the R-word were in their time and place a people hated and subjugated by an oppressive majority in a society that was not, for them, entirely free, the R-word as used then and today cannot compare to the N-word which has been applied to an entire race who were literally enslaved and subsequently oppressed legally, economically, and socially here in America right to the present time, which has seen Barack Obama shatter the ultimate glass ceiling well before many thought possible. While the R-word is a much lesser concern, it is nevertheless an evil that it is applied with great hostility and frequency especially to conservative whites of any or no religion, from any part of the country, in the attempt to discredit them, shout them down, and silence their views. As such, it is an odious race-based weapon against political free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

How long will it take for sensibilities and consciences to close this last loophole in the Golden Rule and generally-accepted doctrines of political correctness, to reject and condemn the R-word?

 King Alexander