Dwayne Dixon of Silver Valley Redneck Revolt spoke at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy shortly after Charlottesville.

This article originally ran in The Guardian. Recent waves of protests and strikes in West Virginia invoke the memory of a now notorious figure in American history: the redneck. To call someone a “redneck” now divides us, when the term was created to unite us. And this distortion only benefits rednecks’ original enemies – corrupt politicians and big companies who don’t care about a multiracial alliance of hardworking Americans. In West Virginia, the term “redneck” dates back t