Snobbery and Assumptions

I passed the video with the large, scruffy-looking man talking about racism for several days without opening it.  It had "gone viral" according to the comment by the posting.  I still skipped it until my own insomnia made me look.

It was a selfie-video from a pickup truck.  His accent was thickly southern, self-proclaimed "redneck" and admitted racist.  That last part was not "I'm a white supremacist and proud of it"  It was more of an admission of self awareness.  He spoke at length about the USA, its past, its dominant culture, the effects of that on our country--he called us a white supremacist nation.  I was a little horrified.  Not that he said it while looking like he might just pull down a white pillowcase with eye holes when he finished speaking (my original assumption when I saw the post) but because he was so correct.

Those of us that consider ourselves well-educated, well-spoken, above the hoi polloi, frequently dismiss that earthy majority as if having certain accents, being part of the more "common" culture in some areas of the country makes them incapable of intelligence, of self-awareness, of goodness.

Why would that be true?  I am offended by women in my age group that still make comments about how scary it is to be alone in a hallway at work with someone that works in housekeeping because they are a male of another race or act as if they are in some way at the mercy of poor people in general so never drive to anything that takes them through neighborhoods that are "not like mine".  I suspect my own neighborhood would qualify as one of those, though it is so far out in the sticks that they are more likely to have trouble with the snakes and coyotes than "those people".  A lot of my neighbors or their children look like that "good ole boy" in the video.  I'm not friendly so long talks and discovery of unmined wisdoms and cognitive gold has not happened.  I have not assumed they were RACISTS as I have seen no evidence of that.  I always assume some lowercase racism with everyone.  We--humans in general--are so prone to the "us vs them" mentality that it is just part of the background noise of life.

So my shock was not so much the idea that our nation, our melting pot nation that started with colonialism and the eradication of the native cultures of the land and built using the slave labor of people that were treated like the natural resources of another continent that colonialism ravaged, was as racist in its own assumptions as the old apartheid system in South Africa.  (we all decried that as wrong--so much easier to identify wrong when it is them than when it is us).  My shock was that I had so rapidly dismissed the value of anything that man could say due to his appearance.  And yes, I almost turned it off again when he sounded so much like Billy Bob in Slingblade, (a movie I love, by the way)

I do not consider myself a snob.  I try not to make negative assumptions about people based on their appearance or their specific culture.  I try to keep an open mind.  If I didn't try so hard, with so much self-examination of my own motives, I might still be passing over that video.

What else have I missed due to my own snobbery and assumptions?