Almost Politically Correct Redneck

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About

Almost Politically Correct Redneck is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a young shirtless man with a mullet hairstyle standing next to a pickup truck. The captions typically portray the man as earnest and well-meaning but unaware of his own stereotypical redneck prejudice.

Origin

The man behind the photo is Zach Downey, a photographer who worked at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. According to a post on Reddit^[18], Downey cut his hair into the mullet as a joke for his Halloween costume back in 2003. At the time, his wife, Tricia, snapped a quick shot of him the morning after Halloween and uploaded it online where it spread and became a meme.

"Two of my friends were going out on Halloween as superheroes," Downey recalled. "They had special clothing, glitter on their faces, they went to a lot of trouble. I got some clippers and cut my hair in 10 minutes and I was the hit. The mullet is associated with rednecks or hillbillies for sure," he said. "I'm not like that, but I mean no disrespect. I have friends that I'd call and they'd call themselves rednecks or hillbillies. That's fine. It's just not me."

According to the post, Downey had the haircut for just about 16 hours. His wife posed him in front of friend Jen Owen's 1979 GMC truck and took some photos the next day. Then they hauled out the clippers, cut the mullet into a mohawk, took more photos, shaved his head completely and snapped a few more.

"Actually, and this was the plan all along, I donated my hair to Locks of Love. It's kind of funny that some young person out there actually benefited from my haircut," Downey said. "Mullets of Love?"

Originally uploaded to a mullet photo gallery website by a friend, it was named "Mullet of the Month" on the site, and after that, it spread to other places online.

The photo was then used as early as July 2005 as a response photo on the internet humor site Fark. On July 3rd, 2005, Fark user sens posted the image^[9] in response to a story claiming Toyota would be building a plant in Canada because they did not want to train southern Americans. The photo was used on Fark in this manner on at least 2 other occasions in 2005^[10] and 2009.^[2]

On May 12th, 2012, Redditor IanL27 submitted an image macro to the Advice Animals subreddit in a post titled "I present to you: Somewhat Politically Correct Redneck"^[11], which featured the caption "Not against gay marriage / unless the couple is colored." Within three days the post received over 3,700 up votes, earning 1124 points overall.

Spread

On May 13th, 2012, Redditor larkable submitted a post titled "A kid at my school was getting picked on for being a 'faggot', so this guy gets up and grabs the bully by the throat and says this"^[1] to the Advice Animals subreddit, containing an image macro with the caption "What's wrong / with faggots, queer?" This post gained nearly 17,000 upvotes, 1971 points overall and nearly 600 comments.

The following day, men's humor blog Guyism^[7] published a post titled "New Meme You Should Know: Almost Politically Correct Redneck", which reported that the meme was born out of North Carolina's gay marriage ban earlier that week. The same day, BodyBuilding Forums^[4] member BBmisc420196 posted a thread titled "New meme: Almost politically correct redneck", which included several example image macros and received 23 responses in 24 hours. Also on May 14th, an example with caption "I fully support the right of my daughter to express her love for her girlfriend in public / it's pretty hot" was posted on the Internet humor site FunnyJunk^[5] and a Facebook^[3] page for "Almost Politically Correct Redneck" was created.

Series of Almost Politically Correct Redneck instances have also been shared on BroBible^[16], Uproxx^[6] and Slacktory.^[13] In November 2012, the image macro series came in at #17 on Buzzfeed's list of the Best New Memes of 2012.^[17] As of December, 2012, the Quickmeme^[8] page has received more than 5000 submissions and the Meme Generator^[12] page hosts an additional thousand. There have also been 760 submissions of Almost Politically Correct Redneck to Reddit^[14] and new instances continue to be posted on Tumblr.^[15]