I am a proud redneck. I don't try to hide the fact that I am a country boy and always will be. I am not all the stereotypes that come with rednecks though such as the fact that I don't listen to a great deal of country music, I spell correctly and actually did pretty well in school, I am not terribly racist, and I can't stand NASCAR. That's just to name a few. I do embrace a great deal of the rest of redneckdom though.
I probably harp on about it a bit too much but honestly, I don't think there is anything wrong with living a simple life, enjoying the outdoors, being a bit of a survivalist, working in manual labor, and if you can find a more useful car than a pickup truck I would love to know what it is.
Unfortunately, not all rednecks are just the things I listed above. There are a lot of us that give the entire community a bad name. I recall when I was in high school that there was a rather large group of rednecks that did very poorly in their classes and they didn't seem to care. This wasn't necessarily a redneck thing, this was more of a deadbeat parents thing. The redneck kids that I knew in school who didn't seem to give a damn about education were almost always from rather broken homes where the parents were alcoholics and struggled to hold down a job at all. The kids were very well looked after and I don't think there were any repercussions for doing poorly with their grades. I think kids need a little healthy fear of their parents to be motivated to do well in something like education because when we are young there is this strange phenomenon where we are literally "too cool for school."
Doing poorly in class was almost a point of pride for some of my redneck brethren. Thankfully the community that I grew up in encouraged these same kids to get involved in trade skills like plumbing, construction, and electrical work and unbeknownst to us at the time, these jobs ended up being a lot more lucrative than most of the college grad stuff anyway. All they had to do at this point was stay off of drugs and try not to become a raging alcoholic.
Here another thing about the redneck community that I don't think gets enough attention and it should. As a whole, rednecks generally don't get addicted to drugs like other segments of society do. At least in my community there was very little in the way of hard drugs being used at all, let alone to the point of life-destroying addiction. There is a stigma of rednecks and meth but that really isn't all that true. For most rednecks the notion of being stoned on meth for 10 hours straight isn't something that we are interested in at all. I don't even know very many people that have ever even done meth, let alone got hooked on it. I don't know what that demographic would be called but it isn't us.
This came across as more of a rant than a prideful statement. I'll try to be more eloquent in the future :)