It occurred to me one day while helping another student with a vehicle. He could not get his car to start and being in no particular hurry, I offered to take a look at it. This other student, whose name I won't mention, is from a wealthier white-collar family. He is also admittedly much more intelligent and knowledgeable than I in general. However, he does not possess any knowledge about automobiles. What he intended to spend a few hundred bucks to have a mechanic look at, turned out to be a simple corroded battery terminal. A bit of scraping later, the car cranked just fine. At the time, it puzzled me that someone clearly much more intelligent than I, didn't know something so simple. Yet I did, the person from a poor public school and a blue-collar family.
The answer came to me after a bit of thought and time. Just as different disciplines in a college have a different set of knowledge, so do different classes and groups within a society. White-collar knowledge versus blue-collar knowledge in this case. In the same way, that a Neuroscientist does not possess the same knowledge as a Blacksmith, a white-collar worker and a blue-collar worker do not possess the same knowledge. Neither person is stupid, they simply possess different knowledge.
Stereo-typically, Rednecks embody blue-collar, particularly in this area, hence the title of the article. I've established that neither class is wholly ignorant, yet they are often looked down own as ignorant and foolish. So what gives? I found a crystallized answer to that in one of my sociology classes. It stated that society needed lower class workers to take care of societies' dirty work. The jobs are taken by the lower class. Mechanics, welders, construction, etc, are simply not seen as glamorous. So perhaps it would do us all some good to consider, before labeling someone as stupid,that perhaps they know something we don't.
