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==History==
==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'".<ref>Fannie Kemble, ''Journal'' (1835) p. 81</ref><ref>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</ref>
The term is derived from European living, when royalty lived in castles, had expensive tastes, behaved well and owned most of the money and all the land, and the lower class lived in slovenly conditions with little means. When migrating to America, opinions remained the same between the two classes of people.
The low class sector of society referred to behavior and money but today this is different. There are two types of low class; low class behavior and low class income. This happened over time as America's "melting pot" began to blend the different cultures.

⚫
The term ''white trash'' 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'".<ref>Fannie Kemble, ''Journal'' (1835) p. 81</ref><ref>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</ref>


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".<ref>Wray (2006) pp 57-58</ref>
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".<ref>Wray (2006) pp 57-58</ref>

Revision as of 23:48, 27 July 2012

For other uses, see White trash (disambiguation).

White trash is an American English pejorative term referring to poor white people in the United States, especially in the rural South, 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]

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 is derived from European living, when royalty lived in castles, had expensive tastes, behaved well and owned most of the money and all the land, and the lower class lived in slovenly conditions with little means. When migrating to America, opinions remained the same between the two classes of people. The low class sector of society referred to behavior and money but today this is different. There are two types of low class; low class behavior and low class income. This happened over time as America's "melting pot" began to blend the different cultures.

The term white trash 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]

Scholars in the late 19th and early 20th century explored the generations of families the authors considered disreputable, such as the The Jukes family and the The Kallikak Family (both were pseudonyms for real families).[9]

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.[10][11] 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.[12]

By the 1980s there appeared fiction written by Southern authors who themselves claimed a redneck or white trash origins, such as Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Tim McLaurin.[13]. Autobiographies sometimes mention white trash origins. Queer activist 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."[14]

It is used among blacks as an attack against whites.[15][16] Use of "white trash" epithets has been extensively reported in the African American culture.[17] Black authors have noted that blacks, when taunted by whites as "niggers," taunted back, calling them "white trash,"[18] and the black parents taught their children that poor whites were "white trash".[19] The epithet appears in black folklore.[20] 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."[21]

In literature

  • Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland's play Po' White Trash, published in 1900, exposes complicated cultural tensions in the post-Reconstruction South, at the heart of which is the racial status of poor whites.[22]
  • Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) explores images of 'white trash' women. Jackson (2000) argues that Hurston's meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the eugenics discourses of the 1920s.[23]
  • Jim Goad's Redneck Manifesto (1997) explores the history of the pejorative term "White trash", as well as details the history and class issues related to the impoverished European diaspora in North America.

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. ^ Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919 (1988)
  10. ^ John T. Edge, "White Trash Cooking, Twenty Years Later", Southern Quarterly 2007 44(2): 88-94; Smith (2004)
  11. ^ Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking (new ed. 2011); excerpt and text search
  12. ^ Sherrie A. Inness, Secret ingredients: race, gender, and class at the dinner table (2006) p. 147
  13. ^ Erik Bledsoe, "The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers," Southern Cultures (2000) 6#1 pp. 68-90 in Project MUSE
  14. ^ Amber L. Hollibaugh (2000). My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home. Duke University Press. p. 12, 209.
  15. ^ William Julius Wilson in Ernest Cashmore and James Jennings, eds. Racism: essential readings (2001) p. 188
  16. ^ Philip C. Kolin, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (2007) p. 29
  17. ^ David R. Roediger, Take Black on white: Black writers on what it means to be white (1999) pp. 13, 123
  18. ^ Philip C. Kolin, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (2007) p. 29
  19. ^ Festus E. Obiakor, Bridgie Alexis Ford, Creating Successful Learning Environments for African-American Learners With Exceptionalities (2002) p. 198
  20. ^ Anand Prahlad, The Greenwood encyclopedia of African American folklore (2006) Volume 2 p. 966
  21. ^ Claude H. Nolen, African American Southerners in Slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction (2005) p. 81
  22. ^ Hester, Jessica (2008). "Progressivism, Suffragists and Constructions of Race: Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland's 'Po' White Trash'". Women's Writing. 15 (1): 55–68.
  23. ^ Jackson, Chuck (2000). "Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics". African American Review. 34 (4): 639–660.

Bibliography

  • Berger, Maurice (2000). White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness. ISBN 0-374-52715-6.
  • Goad, Jim (1998). The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies Hicks and White Trash Became Americas Scapegoats. ISBN 0-684-83864-8.
  • Hartigan, John Jr (2005). Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3597-2
  • Rasmussen, Dana (2011). Things White Trash People Like: The Stereotypes of America's Poor White Trash. BiblioBazaar.
  • Smith, Dina. "Cultural Studies' Misfit: White Trash Studies", Mississippi Quarterly 2004 57(3): 369-387, traces the emergence of 'white trash studies' as a scholarly field by placing representative 20th-century popular images of 'white trash' in their Southern economic and cultural contexts.
  • Sullivan, Nell (2003). Academic Constructions of 'White Trash' , in: Adair, Vivyan Campbell, and Sandra L. Dahlberg, eds. (2003) Reclaiming Class. Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Temple University Press. ISBN 1-59213-021-6
  • Wray, Matt and Annalee Newitz, eds. (1997). White Trash: Race and Class in America. ISBN 0-415-91692-5.
  • Wray, Matt. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006)
    • Pitcher, Ben (2007). The Problem with White Trash - Review of M. Wray (2007) Not Quite White, Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3873-4. darkmatter journal
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