White trash

White trash is an American English pejorative term referring to poor white people in the United States, suggesting lower social class and degraded living standards. The term suggests outcasts from respectable society living on the fringes of the social order who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for authority whether it be political, legal, or moral.[1] The term is usually a slur, but may also be used self-referentially by whites to jokingly describe their origins. In the humorous book The White Trash Mom Handbook: Embrace Your Inner Trailerpark, Forget Perfection, Resist Assimilation into the PTA, Stay Sane, and Keep Your Sense of Humor by Michelle Lamar and Molly Wendland (2008) is one such example.[2]

Contents

White trash versus cracker, hillbilly, Okie, and redneck

In common usage "white trash" overlaps in meaning with cracker (regarding Georgia and Florida), hillbilly (regarding Appalachia), Okie (regarding Oklahoma origins), and redneck.[3] The main difference is that "redneck," "cracker", "Okie", and "hillbilly" emphasize that a person is poor and uneducated and comes from the backwoods with little awareness of the modern world, while "white trash" emphasizes the person's moral failings.[4]

History

The term white trash first came into common use in the 1830s as a pejorative used by house slaves against poor whites. In 1833 Fanny Kemble, an English actress visiting Georgia, noted in her journal: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash'".[5][6]

In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the chapter "Poor White Trash" in her book A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe tells the reader that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also poor whites who are even more degraded and miserable. The plantation system forced those whites to struggle for subsistence. Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their community, and says that both blacks and whites in the area look down on these "poor white trash".[7]

By 1855 the term had passed into common usage by upper class whites, and was common usage among all Southerners, regardless of race, throughout the rest of the 19th century.[8]

White popular culture

Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking (1986) enjoyed an unanticipated rise to popularity. The cookbook, which is based on the cooking of rural white Southerners, features recipes with names such as Goldie's Yo Yo Pudding, Resurrection Cake, Vickies Stickies and Tutti's Fruited Porkettes.[9] As Inness (2006) notes, "white trash authors used humor to express what was happening to them in a society that wished to forget about the poor, especially those who were white." She points out that under the humor was a serious lesson about living in poverty.[10]

Autobiographies sometimes mention white trash origins. Author Amber L. Hollibaugh says, "I grew up a mixed-race, white-trash girl in a country that considered me dangerous, corrupt, fascinating, exotic. I responded to the challenge by becoming that alarming, hazardous, sexually disruptive woman."[11]

Black popular culture

It is used among blacks as an attack against whites.[12][13] Use of "white trash" epithets has been extensively reported in the African American culture.[14] Black authors have noted that blacks, when taunted by whites as "niggers," taunted back, calling them "white trash,"[15] and the black parents taught their children that poor whites were "white trash".[16] The epithet appears in black folklore.[17] In it, slaves (when out of earshot) would refer to harsh overseers as a "low down" man, "lower than poor white trash," "a brute, really."[18]

In literature

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006) p. 2
  2. ^ also making use of the term: Ernest Mickler White Trash Cooking (1986), and Kendra Morris, White Trash Gatherings: From-Scratch Cooking for down-Home Entertaining (2006)
  3. ^ Wray (2006) page x.
  4. ^ Wray, Not Quite White (2006) pp. 79, 102
  5. ^ Fannie Kemble, Journal (1835) p. 81
  6. ^ Wray suggests that the term may have originated in the Baltimore-Washington area during the 1830s when Irish and blacks were competing for the same jobs. Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006) pp 42-44
  7. ^ Wray (2006) pp 57-58
  8. ^ Annalee Newitz & Matthew Wray, What is White Trash?, in Whiteness: a Critical Reader, Mike Hill, ed., (NYU Press, 1997), pg. 170.
  9. ^ John T. Edge, "White Trash Cooking, Twenty Years Later", Southern Quarterly 2007 44(2): 88-94; Smith (2004)
  10. ^ Sherrie A. Inness, Secret ingredients: race, gender, and class at the dinner table (2006) p. 147
  11. ^ Amber L. Hollibaugh, My dangerous desires (2000) p 12
  12. ^ William Julius Wilson in Ernest Cashmore and James Jennings, eds. Racism: essential readings (2001) p. 188
  13. ^ Philip C. Kolin, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (2007) p. 29
  14. ^ David R. Roediger, Take Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white (1999) pp. 13, 123
  15. ^ Philip C. Kolin, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (2007) p. 29
  16. ^ Festus E. Obiakor, Bridgie Alexis Ford, Creating Successful Learning Environments for African-American Learners With Exceptionalities (2002) p. 198
  17. ^ Anand Prahlad, The Greenwood encyclopedia of African American folklore (2006) Volume 2 p. 966
  18. ^ Claude H. Nolen, African American Southerners in Slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction (2005) p. 81
  19. ^ Hester, Jessica (2008). "Progressivism, Suffragists and Constructions of Race: Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland's 'Po' White Trash'". Women's Writing 15 (1): 55–68. 
  20. ^ Jackson, Chuck (2000). "Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics". African American Review 34 (4): 639–660. 

Bibliography

External links

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