How to ruin Christmas: A holiday guide to arguing with conservative relatives

How to ruin Christmas: A holiday guide to arguing with conservative relatives

click link

snip


But let’s think about these duck guys, this Robertson family with the television show that millions of people watch. Maybe this is the north enforcing its cultural hegemony at the expense of an innocent southern man, tarred as a bigot and kicked off his own television show just for saying what he thinks. But if you are southern, maybe you should think some more about the Robertsons and their television show and what message it sends to the rest of the country.

The Robertson family is a gang of college-educated millionaires pretending to be backwoods hillbillies. The beards and camo are literally costumes. Before they had a television show they were clean-shaven yuppies in polo shirts and cargo shorts. The Robertsons are performing a pantomime of southernness, and it is making them even richer than they were before. They are performing for a nationwide audience that is probably not mostly southern, and that is definitely not mostly rural and southern. No one on reality television — especially in this era, when it’s more staged than ever — is being their authentic self. That’s not in and of itself a problem; entertainment is entertainment. But the Duck Dynasty guys are essentially doing a hillbilly minstrel act, filmed and aired by a network jointly owned by the Hearst Corporation and Disney. Maybe that doesn’t offend you. But for much of America, these people are the most prominent modern representatives of white southernness, and the duck guy just confirmed for them the stereotype that white southerners are bible-thumping bigots with twisted racist delusions.