Talk:White trash: Difference between revisions
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This of course raises all sorts of sticky questions about what the Wikipedia is and can do, and that may be a seperate discussion. I agree with your general uneasiness about the entry as it stands. As the principle author thus far, I can say only one thing with certainty: I ain't sure about it. My mom's old time white trash from West Virginia. But her earliest American ancestor was a Hessian soldier that switched sides. So, from a nineteenth century point of view she would be German, but no one knew her families heritage because they had all assimilated so completely (like everyone else) that they were part of the country at the time. They were poor, and their skin was pale, and that made them White Trash. It didn't make them White of the Trash variety. It made them White Trash which was its own separate mess. The name evolved because of notions of biology and class and category, and people might have imagined that they were accurately describing her family and her genetic heritage, but that was in their heads and had nothing to do with anything else. My Dad is half Swedish, half English. But both familes had been in the country for several generations, which makes him essentially American like my mom. But he had money when he was a kid in Michigan in the fifties. That made him middle class. My mom lived on a mountain with a tin roof and eight other siblings. That was what made her White Trash. Her whiteness was incidental to the term. It was her perceived "trashiness" that was important when she interacted with other people. She studied hard to minimize her accent and become an English teacher. She assimilated. But assimilation was not an empirical, biological act. It was cultural. It was subjective. --[[trimalchio]] |
This of course raises all sorts of sticky questions about what the Wikipedia is and can do, and that may be a seperate discussion. I agree with your general uneasiness about the entry as it stands. As the principle author thus far, I can say only one thing with certainty: I ain't sure about it. My mom's old time white trash from West Virginia. But her earliest American ancestor was a Hessian soldier that switched sides. So, from a nineteenth century point of view she would be German, but no one knew her families heritage because they had all assimilated so completely (like everyone else) that they were part of the country at the time. They were poor, and their skin was pale, and that made them White Trash. It didn't make them White of the Trash variety. It made them White Trash which was its own separate mess. The name evolved because of notions of biology and class and category, and people might have imagined that they were accurately describing her family and her genetic heritage, but that was in their heads and had nothing to do with anything else. My Dad is half Swedish, half English. But both familes had been in the country for several generations, which makes him essentially American like my mom. But he had money when he was a kid in Michigan in the fifties. That made him middle class. My mom lived on a mountain with a tin roof and eight other siblings. That was what made her White Trash. Her whiteness was incidental to the term. It was her perceived "trashiness" that was important when she interacted with other people. She studied hard to minimize her accent and become an English teacher. She assimilated. But assimilation was not an empirical, biological act. It was cultural. It was subjective. --[[trimalchio]] |
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My biggest beef with the article right now is that it refers to a previous Wikipedia article as such, which is not likely to be regarded as having much significance to anyone but Wikipedians. The same point can be made by referring to a "stereotypical" account of white trash, or something like that. |
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I think it would be great if we could get that Berkeley dissertation writer, or someone similar, to comment on the article now. --[[LMS]] |
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Revision as of 18:54, 11 October 2001
I'm afraid that the new, improved version strikes me as an overblown, long-winded, largely irrelevant (to the subject) exercise in politically correct WASP-bashing victimology. -HWR
I utterly disagree. In fact, I'm impressed by your ability to be "overblown, long-winded, [and] largely irrelevant" in only one sentence. What an ugly abuse of the English language: "politically correct WASP-bashing victimology". Try using something other than buzzwords some time if you actually want to make a point. --TheCunctator
Oh, I think you got my point. But perhaps not. Obviously the author is so committed to the "whiteness is privilege" mantra that he cannot see the absurdity of claiming that "white trash" are "non-white". -HWR
I'm fine with someone disagreeing with what has been put forward so far, but what is the alternative to it? It's not like "victimology" (a great word, by the way, like Delillo's "Hitler Studies") doesn't come from somewhere. That is, people really were victimized by upper class people who specifically identified themselves as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. They explicitly excluded anyone who wasn't that. And they implicitly believed that to be WASP was to be chosen by god. That was as true for the puritans as it was for Henry Ford.
But you are right, HWR. There isn't an easy answer, even if WASP bashing seems like it should be so true. Most abolitionists were WASPS. And even if Henry Ford was a fascist and desperately afriad of all of the "colored" people of the world, be they black or Italian or irish or german, his son and grandson established some of the most progressive and powerful charities in the western world.
So, I say again, what is your alternative? And more generally, how should we deal with these entries that are so clearly not about fact in the sense that we normally imagine in an encyclopedia. 100 years ago, they would have pretended or not been aware that a controversy even existed. I can't count the number of antique encyclopedias I have read which talk of the "five races of man" --the black, the white, the yellow, the red and the brown-- with a complete sense of authority and "factuality". I mean, how do we construct useful, factual entries about important concepts which are, by their very existence, controversial and opinionated? I personally reject the quasi-journalistic minimalist approach of saying only what is absolute fact as being both too dictionary like and generally useless. Rather than dealing with a problem, I feel that such an approach just avoids it. And avoiding these issues, letting them fester, is its own kind of action and therefore judgement. By saying noth we are expressing an opinion and affecting the debate.
But what should we do? --trimalchio
On this point: "the absurdity of claiming that "white trash" are "non-white". -HWR"
That's more fact than a lot of this debate. White was a real touchy word 100-200 years ago and CANNOT be judged on what we today might imagine is a clear and stable definition. Irish people were EXPLICITLY non-white. As were Swedes. As were all sorts of European immigrants. Even today you hear the epithet of "black comb irish" which singles them out as not belonging to the racial group defined as "white". Whatever that racial group might actually contain is unclear. It has always been more defined by what it DID NOT contain. And yes, that is a messy and unclear situation. But it is a factual one. A shorthand of the time was to say that, despite a person's physical appearance, it was easier to identify their whiteness by way of their pocketbook. But that wasn't always true either. Certainly there were grades of non-whites and grades of whites. French aristocrats in Lousiana, for example, were sort of white, but if they came to New York city their catholicism and Frenchness would have created distinctly racial problems. We still see this today in places like Northern Ireland, were the debate is not only political, but distinctly racial, ethnic and cultural, even though from an American point of view at least we would classify both groups as "white". -trimalchio
Granted that the definition of "white" as a term of racial identification is essentially subjective, and thus historically and geographically variable, nevertheless the term "white trash" clearly indicates a distinction within the racial category, however it is defined. -HWR
No it doesn't. If a racial category is pourous, then all sorts of illogical contradictions are not only possible, but generally the rule. In fact, I would submit that those illogical contradictions of arbitrary exclusion and inclusion are precisely the fact of racial categories. Racial categories are, I think, in almost every instance an exercise in just this sort of confusion. All of the terms are essentially subjective. What we are dealing with is a fundamental contradiction. A Racial Category is fundamentally flawed. It is a fallacy of metaphor. Race has NO biological foundation. So to establish categories and try to apply logical formulas of classification is doomed to failure from the start. There can not be a categorizing of Race in any emprical sense if Race is itself non-empircal (and without a biological foundation for race, I would submit that such an empirical foundation cannot be found). There is one species: Human. Everything else is just phenotypical variation. Race itself is an illdefined and slippery term that doesn't describe anything except misunderstanding. I don't deny that groups exist clustered around ideas and culture, and that culture exists as a result of the preception of race, and therefore there is something worth talking about when talking about race, something real in terms of the effect it has on individual lives (like lynching for example, or blacklisting Jews or all the rest), but it would be erroneous at the start to think that any of this stems from anything concrete and biological.
Classification requires empirical foundation. Race can only be proven to empirically exist if there is a defineable biological distinction. Without a biological foundation, race cannot be empircally investigated and therefore cannot be classified in any sort of concrete terms. Therefore it need not follow that White Trash be a defineable subset of the category of "white." It can in some cases be imagined in that way, but it is not empirically so. That is what it means for a term to be essentially subjective. If the term is subjective, it does not belong to a solidified hierarchy and therefore cannot be said to include or exclude anything with certainty. The discussion can only be about its possiblities, and about specific examples of those possibilities in action.
This of course raises all sorts of sticky questions about what the Wikipedia is and can do, and that may be a seperate discussion. I agree with your general uneasiness about the entry as it stands. As the principle author thus far, I can say only one thing with certainty: I ain't sure about it. My mom's old time white trash from West Virginia. But her earliest American ancestor was a Hessian soldier that switched sides. So, from a nineteenth century point of view she would be German, but no one knew her families heritage because they had all assimilated so completely (like everyone else) that they were part of the country at the time. They were poor, and their skin was pale, and that made them White Trash. It didn't make them White of the Trash variety. It made them White Trash which was its own separate mess. The name evolved because of notions of biology and class and category, and people might have imagined that they were accurately describing her family and her genetic heritage, but that was in their heads and had nothing to do with anything else. My Dad is half Swedish, half English. But both familes had been in the country for several generations, which makes him essentially American like my mom. But he had money when he was a kid in Michigan in the fifties. That made him middle class. My mom lived on a mountain with a tin roof and eight other siblings. That was what made her White Trash. Her whiteness was incidental to the term. It was her perceived "trashiness" that was important when she interacted with other people. She studied hard to minimize her accent and become an English teacher. She assimilated. But assimilation was not an empirical, biological act. It was cultural. It was subjective. --trimalchio
My biggest beef with the article right now is that it refers to a previous Wikipedia article as such, which is not likely to be regarded as having much significance to anyone but Wikipedians. The same point can be made by referring to a "stereotypical" account of white trash, or something like that.
I think it would be great if we could get that Berkeley dissertation writer, or someone similar, to comment on the article now. --LMS