Redneck Revolt is growing quickly. They are working hard to displace the old leftover SDS hippies and using a new and improved model to corrupt our youth.
Redneck Revolt: SURJ and Catalyst project focus on mobilizing white folks through white ally politics, inherently based upon a paternalistic model of white guilt.
This essay speaks to a lot of RR’s theoretical viewpoints as we believe firmly that white folks have an active stake in abolishing white supremacy, and that white working communities can only see an end to their misery and exploitation by ending white supremacy. This stake in the struggle is an important difference in the basic analysis of our organization and SURJ.
Our experiences with SURJ show that SURJ relies heavily on a more traditionally liberal understanding of whiteness, white privilege, and the role of white folks in that struggle. Far from acknowledging and advocating for white folks to see their actual daily struggles as connected to the struggles of white working and poor folk, SURJ relies on an “ally” model that assumes that white folks can only act from some altruistic and paternalistic model of struggle. SURJ’s model relies on the idea that white folks should struggle against white supremacy because it’s what “good folks should do” and bases the struggle off a fake moralism that posits that white working people still must always act from some level of guilt for their whiteness. Read more here.