Over on Scalzi’s blog, people are discussing the phrase white trash. Says commenter Lysana at 61:
It’s often easy to spot white trash. One Confederate battle standard or American flag item on the wardrobe and my antennae go up. Sorry you seem to think it matters that some of us know the signs while you don’t.
“Well, sure,” says Other Bill, at 63, “I know the signs. Just like we all know the signs for poor black trash and poor puerto rican trash, right?”
Over here on our own blog, we’ve got a tiff going on in comments about how poor people shouldn’t buy nice things, since they’ve got to save up their money so they can break out of poverty. RonF says at 12:
The desire for better material goods/healthcare/housing/food/etc. is what motivates people to get better education/training and work harder and longer in order to move up to the economic point where they can afford those things.
People who presumably aren’t poor, and certainly aren’t the poor people in question, feel free to comment on the responsibility of poor people’s economic decisions, as Sebastian H says at 14: “Isn’t it kind of a question of which nice things? A TV may or may not be a good example of acting irresponsibly, but a Cadillac almost certainly is.”
But these comments come from the same assumption: that we know what poor people want, and it’s to escape poverty. They come from another assumption, too: that it’s possible for the poor people to escape poverty if they make the right decisions.
But people in generational, grinding poverty, may not share these middle class assumptions and experiences.
I’ll let Dorothy Allison speak to both arguments, with excerpts from her short story collection Trash.
From the introduction:
My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables…. We were not noble,not grateful, not even hopeful. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed…
I had sweet-tempered cousins and I saw them get ground down. I had gentle aunts and it seemed they almost disappeared out of their own lives. Is it any wonder that when I set out to write stories, I made up women like my grandmother, like my great-grandmother? Troublesome, angry, complicated women with secretive, unpredictable natures… I wrote to release indignation and refuse humiliation, to admit fault and to glorify the people I loved who were never celebrated…
I originally claimed the label “trash” in self-defense. The phrase had been applied to me and to my family in crude and hateful ways. I took it on deliberately, as I had taken on “dyke”–though i have to acknowledge that what I heard as a child was more often the phrase “white trash.” As an adult, I saw all too clearly the look that would cross the face of any black woman in the room when that particular term was spoken. It was like a splash of cold water, and I saw the other side of the hatefulness in the words. It took me right back to being a girl and hearing the uncles I so admired spew racist bile and callous homophobic insults. Some phrases cannot be reclaimed.
I agree that the phrase “white trash” is unacceptable, and it’s a marker of classism among people who use it. But I also agree with Lysana’s statement that it’s important for some of us to be able to spot people who fit this stereotype — because another marker of classism is the fact that poor white people have been encouraged for generations to think of brown people of any class as The Enemy, to be reminded of their “true” place in society (below whites) whenever possible. And some of them are violently wedded to the idea.
I don’t think this (the societal encouragement to view whites as The Enemy) is also true for poor black trash or poor Puerto Rican trash. So while I’m sympathetic with the idea that poor whites are the victims of pernicious classism, the intersection of white privilege must be incorporated into any conversation about whether and why people (especially PoC) might want to be able to recognize them on sight.
“But these comments come from the same assumption: that we know what poor people want, and it’s to escape poverty. They come from another assumption, too: that it’s possible for the poor people to escape poverty if they make the right decisions.”
This makes a lot of sense to me. It is certainly true that different people want different things.
nojojojo —
it’s important for some of us to be able to spot people who fit this stereotype — because another marker of classism is the fact that poor white people have been encouraged for generations to think of brown people of any class as The Enemy, to be reminded of their “true” place in society (below whites) whenever possible. And some of them are violently wedded to the idea.
Certainly some poor white people are racist and some will even enthusiastically enforce the racial contract with violence. But the same is true of middle-class and wealthy white people. Perhaps the latter two groups are more likely to use the police or military or prison guards to enforce the racial contract with violence than to do so own their own. This may even make middle-class and wealthy white people more dangerous than poor white people — you get the SWAT team, armed with assault rifles, instead of a fistfight.
`Some’ is pretty vague. It covers everything between about 10% and 90%. If 90% of poor white people will enthusiastically enforce the racial contract with violence, you’re right: poor white people pose the kind of threat to brown people that warrants marking them out and avoiding them at almost all costs. But if it’s only 10% then the `white trash’ markers aren’t a good indication of who’s safe and who’s not.
I suspect the percentages depend on a lot of factors, including things like the racial history of a town and the vibrance and character of its unions and labor movement. I’ve seen many mixed-race families among the poor and working class in South Bend, Indiana, far more than I would have expected based on my experiences in Chicago.
Mandonlin –
I’ve been reading quite a bit of Marxist and Marxist-influenced economic history over the last few months. This post reminds me of a common observation in that intellectual tradition: Immediately before the development of factories, most industry was piecework, where workers would work out of their homes and get paid based on the number of pieces they produced. Employers (early capitalists) had a horrible time increasing productivity in this situation because an increase in pay lead to a decrease in the number of pieces workers produced. They were perfectly content to work for a subsistence income and an increase in wages meant that you had to produce less to reach that level of income. Similar things happened in the first plantation colonies in the Americas: the indigenous population couldn’t be made to work as hard as the owners wanted; slaves, of course, could be.
Unlike their capitalist employers — and today’s consumers and the `rational man’ of neoclassical economics — these hunter-gathers-and-peasants-turned-workers didn’t want to be as rich as possible, didn’t want ever-increasing amounts of stuff and ever-fancier gadgets. They wanted enough to lead a good life. And economic and cultural institutions had to be developed that prevented them from doing exactly that on a subsistence income.
Nojojojo:
I hope you don’t mind my replying. I don’t mean to challenge your obvious authority here, but there are some places where I instinctively disagree, and I wanted to see if I could clarify my thoughts.
It seems to me like there are two potential areas of dispute here.
1) The phrase “white trash” is a problem, for both racist (as in racist against non-whites, with its implication that most trash is non-white) and obvious classist reasons. We seem to agree on this. Therefore, if the discussion had been about recognizing the traits of “racists” (and I’d agree that Confederate flag detailing is a hint), then I–at least–would have been fine with it. If there were some narrowing adjective, then I might be okay with it, depending on the adjective. Redneck racists? The term redneck can be a problem, but it’s not as upsetting as trash, at least to me, at least on first glance. Hick racists? Rural racists? Poor racists? Hm.
2) Okay, this is my best attempt to read you fairly, so I hope I’m not getting it wrong, and super apologize if I am. You’re saying people who may be targets of racism need to be able to identify people who fit into the classic “white trash” category. The “white trash” category as I understand it is basically defined as “poor people who can’t or don’t hide that they are poor” or possibly “poor people who give off some class-based social signals that middle class people find tacky, rude, or off-putting.” Which can range from behaviors which are fully chosen–such as shouting the n-word–to behaviors which are pretty much out of the individual’s control–such as having a number of missing or broken teeth.
The argument is further that, historically, people who fit the stereotype of “white trash” have been “encouraged over generations” to hate black people. Presumably, that includes familiar encouragement, as well as sociolopolitical encouragement from politicians who make their careers by encouraging poor whites to vote against their own interests–the “I’ll live in a mud hut, as long as those people have to live in shit” thing.
So: 1) The argument is that “white trash” is a sociologically valid group, and 2) That this sociologically valid group “white trash” is more likely to engage in interpersonal racist acts than other groups of whites.
You’re the one who has to live with racism, so if you say it’s true, then I expect it is. My immediate reaction, though, is that the number of poor whites who fall under the label “white trash” is actually pretty huge, and that it encompasses people who adhere to the stereotypes and people who don’t. I base this mostly on the time I spent living in West Virginia with one of my exes whose extended family and acquaintances ran the gamut from super-racist to involved in civil rights work, and it was relatively difficult to tell the difference between the ones who’d try to get you to agree that anyone who went on welfare should be sterilized, and the ones who agitated to integrate their work places.
I guess my question is what signs are being used to identify white trash? Is it Confederate flags? Cheers. But what I hear other white people use to identify white trash are more thing like last year’s clothes on a little girl who’s growing up too fast, leaving a child with a newly developed body in tight shorts and tiny tank tops that make her look like “a slut.” Or bad dental work. Or men who don’t cover their beer guts. Cars in disrepair. Fat people in an unclean house, who don’t take measures to prevent you from seeing it. Kids who say fuck you and ain’t. Kids who fuck early and get pregnant early. Forty-year-olds with false teeth. Ten-year-olds in good will clothes who always smell of B.O.
Are those all signs you would use to identify racist “white trash,” too? Or are there different signs you’d look for, like swaggering, cowboy-hat-wearing, aura-of-hostility kind of stuff? Are we talking about two overlapping, but not identical, groups when we each say “white trash?”
If it’s about spotting racists, it’s about spotting racists. A net that catches too many fish may well be better than one that leaves you unprepared by catching too few (assuming that I’m even right that this net catches too many fish). You know better than I do, of course.
Hmmm, would we be ok with this discussion if we said we were stereotyping poor blacks to avoid getting mugged?
I know the race reversal thing is frowned upon for lots of fair reasons. But here it really seems apt. The percentage of black muggers as a fraction of the population of black people is pretty small. The percentage of white trash racists who are a physical threat are also pretty small (though they may seem larger because they are a fraction of a larger whole–there are more white people in the US than black people). Is it a similar rhetoric?
Mandolin,
I’m going to partially answer Sebastian here too. I’m not sure whether you’re using the same definition/identifiers for white trash that I am; I’ve never really known how other white people viewed people labeled as white trash. What I was taught, as a little girl growing up in Alabama, was to watch out for white people, especially men since I was female (boys in my family were taught to watch out for white women, who would lure them into Compromising Positions that might get them lynched), who might follow through on the impulse to beat me, rape me, or chain me up and drag me behind a truck. Keep in mind that I was 9 years old when the Michael Donald lynching occurred, and his body was found about a mile from my grandmother’s house in Mobile. Naturally my family members talked with me about this, and tried to teach me how to be safe. It wasn’t the markers of poverty specifically that they taught me to fear, but the markers of “white people with nothing to lose if they hurt you”. Poverty was definitely part of that “nothing to lose”, but there was a certain attitude, too. A meanness of spirit. This was what my family meant when they said white trash.
And honestly, I agree with this distinction (though not the label). PoC need to learn how to deal with racists, and racists come in different forms. The different types of racists each require different strategies for survival. Of course racists of a different class are a threat too, and frankly middle-class and wealthy racists do much more harm in the grand scale — but I think they’re less likely to act on their hatred in a direct, unpredictable, and violent way, because (at least these days) it’s increasingly hard to get away scott-free with such behavior. I would not be very concerned for my personal safety if I were alone in a room with a middle-class racist, for example (and I have not been, on the occasions where that’s happened). With a poor white racist, especially a male one? Whole other story.
So I agree — we’re talking about poor white racists, not simply poor white people; sorry, I should have clarified. But I’m not talking about racists in general, because they are not all the same. Poor white racists pose a specific, unique threat, IMO.
My sense is also that in different times and in different places, the identifying characteristics have changed. I can remember my grandmother fretting about Irish Americans — back in her day, they had a vested interest in maintaining the racial status quo (c. f. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White — there were institutions within the Irish community overtly encouraging them to hate and fear black people as the most direct competitors for jobs, etc), and were quicker than non-Irish people to act violently on it. She couldn’t have told a white Jewish person from a hole in the ground, but she could spot an Irish guy at fifty paces. But that had changed by my day, so I never learned to differentiate between Irish-derived white people and any others, until I moved to Boston as an adult (and then I learned to spot the ethnic markers just through knowing a lot of Irish American folks). And I imagine that back in slavery times, the kinds of men who became overseers and slave hunters — largely poor whites of Scots-Irish background, I understand, per Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus and other stuff I’ve read — probably fell into the “white trash” category too. I don’t know what they looked like — but I suspect my ancestors did.
So to address Sebastian — if poor black bigots had a history of violently attacking whites because they’re white, and if institutions throughout that history encouraged and even rewarded them for doing so, and if they did it consistently enough to merit caution… then I think the conversation would be the same with the races reversed. But crime is usually intra-racial — poor blacks prey on other blacks, whites on whites, and so on. Hate crimes are a different story from muggings, too. So I don’t think the reversal fits in this case.
@nojojojo: Part of the problem with trying to nail down a definition of white trash is that everyone that uses the word uses it differently. I’ve noticed that the African Americans/American Indians that use the word tend to refer to rebel flag waving bigots that hate anyone with skin darker than a light tan. (Or hating anyone with anything that marks another person as “different”, be it religion, race, social class, or even not liking the same hobbies they do.) When Caucasians use the word, they’re generally using it as a class-based insult against anyone that happens to be poor and white at the same time.
The two mean entirely different things and refer to two groups that are often entirely separate without a whole lot of overlap. Frequently the confederate flag wavers work at what are considered decent or high paying jobs in the area, (In the South this usually means construction, paper/sawmills, or manufacturing.) while the really REALLY poor people that white folks tend to use “white trash” at are often too hungry to really give a damn about anyone’s race.
Of course I’m coming at it from the perspective of an AI/Caucasian that identifies as AI, so my experience could be (And likely was) entirely different from yours, even if we’re 5 years apart in age and 70 miles apart in area. One of the markers of “White trash” in the rural south seems to be the collecting of faux American Indian junk. Dreamcatchers, bizarre eagle/wolf shirts, stuff like that. So it’s possible the same people that would hurl insults at an African American may not have the same attitude towards an American Indian. Though the ones with confederate flags on their pickups generally hate anyone that isn’t completely white, and especially hate anyone that happens to be white + any other race.
I apologize if I hijacked the thread.
JThompson,
I would agree. For me, “white trash” refers to “people who might try to fuck me up.” And yeah, in my head, the term is synonymous with “racist”, even though I know full well that not all poor white people are (except in the sense that we’re all racist, from being immersed in a racist society). But in my head the division is also clear: there are poor white people who are decent, and then there are poor white people who are (racist, violent) trash.
There are usually visible markers of the threat — certain tattoos (e.g., the Celtic Cross, which I was taught was a sign of membership in some kind of neo-Klan; in Boston, however, I learned that it didn’t have the same meaning to all Irish Americans), the Confederate flag, gun rack in the car/truck, certain bumper stickers, an “aura of hostility”, as Mandolin said. Folks with that kind of hate in them don’t usually bother to hide it. You’re right in that they probably had decent-paying jobs — might be why they saw black people as so much of a threat, because when I was growing up those good jobs were drying up.
Nojojojo:
Got it. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
One reason I flinched, maybe, is that part of the white assumptions about white trash is *also* that they’re racist and violent. I don’t think white people are looking for markers that specifically denote hostility, necessarily… I think it’s just kind of a wash of assumptions that anyone who is one of the undeserving poor is both ignorant and racist.
I know the Confederate-flag-wearing, nothing to lose, aura of hostility/violence, gun rack people you’re talking about… The term white trash as I grew up with it would have included those people, but also lots of others.
Anyway, thanks again.
I grew up in the midwest, and have seldom even visited the south; my experience with the term “white trash” is that it’s used as both a classist and ethnic slur against a particular type of white people—usually either from the South or with roots in the South. Meaning: I’ve never heard the term used by white people to refer to (for lack of a better term) “white ethnics”, even if they were poor. Ethnic slurs were used instead.
Then again, the way white people use the term reflects a certain anxiety about whiteness……a need to prove “more whiter than thou” status. Keep the white pecking order in check; police the relative degrees of whiteness amongst the European tribes—it’s not just mere classism.
Nojojojo, that’s the first I ever heard of the Celtic Cross being associated with the Klan. Is that true? If so, that blows my mind! I mean, the Celtic Cross is pretty much synonymous with Irish Catholicism (as well as Irish pride) here in Illinois.
My mother’s family is white, and lower class – the women worked pink collar jobs and blue collar jobs for the men. I’m sure that were it not for the world wars providing steady jobs for the men, my great grandparents wouldn’t have had the money to move from rural indiana and the relative safety/poverty of farming alongside our amish relatives to Grand Rapids for manufacturing & industrial jobs. At any rate, they were the bad kind of lower class whites too. Men drank too much, beat the women, had too many children (averaging 6 to adulthood for the last few generations), etc. One family vacation to visit relations in florida was memorable for having a shotgun pointed at us by aunt linda’s husband telling us to get out and not come back. I was 5 at the time. Still hate florida.
That being said, for me, as a mixed race latina, white trash denotes the violent “white pride” type with the confederate flags and the big pick up trucks going to hunt with their guns. Not something the white half of my family was, despite barely clinging onto the bottom of the middle class.
Edited to add: this is also borne of my experiences living in texas, where this confederate flag pick up truck is often seen with a gun rack and a 6 pack of beer, cowboy costume, and an attitude of disdain for anyone not of pure german descent.
Then again, the way white people use the term reflects a certain anxiety about whiteness……a need to prove “more whiter than thou” status.
I must admit I’d never thought of it that way before…I wonder if the anxiety might be related to the fact that the average poor white person from the rural South is very, very unlikely to be “pure” white. My maternal grandfather’s family was supposed to be “white trash” but when my aunt started looking into the family history she found as many ancestors buried in the “colored” cemetaries as the “white” ones.
In my experience (growing up in central Texas), white trash was a definitely class moniker, something related to being country-folk (usually poor) and not valuing education.
However, this idea that white trash was only violent outward without receiving violence is untrue in my experience. It was a two-way street, such that in my mostly-Hispanic neighborhood, I was made fun of for being white and I had to learn an immaculate set of manners because I didn’t want to learn to fight. It was the same when I was bussed across the city to the mostly-Black school. I remember distinctly a young black girl holding the door open in front of me. I told her thank you, and she told me with hate in her voice, “I didn’t hold it open for you.” I pretty much ran away, not wanting to say anything to start a fight, but that level of hatred just for my skin color stuck with me.
I’m not trying to derail or say that my experience trumps any kind of overall discrimination. Just that adult discrimination isn’t the same when you’re a kid, because kids are all pretty much powerless except for physical might and if they can rally adults to their cause. As an adult I’ve distanced myself from that type of class conflict (I left the state and my family behind) but on visits back it still haunts me, both the level of poverty, and the divide between anyone with money and trash.
Just to say I’m glad this has been stated clearly and unequivocally. That term has nothing to reclaim whatsoever.
As for black people using that term, I feel it’s wholly illegitimate. The disgust accompanying it always seemed to reflect an internalized inferiority complex, that these white people were not even better than us.
IOW, they fell short of the ideal of whitness as stated by white supremacy; shame on them.
Seriously not a critique of racism amongst white people, it demeans us all.
I just wanted to thank you for how great this and other posts in this blog are. The myth of the American Dream is one of the issues I care the most about.
Race is also frustrating, because a very large number of Americans think that we live in a “post-racial” world and color-blindness is the right approach. Meanwhile, a lawful black man has a harder time finding employment than a white man with a prison record. The only way to address this issue properly is for everyone to acknowledge the fact that racist feelings exist and will always exist, and to be able to recognize those feelings within themselves and seek out actual “social justice” (Glenn Beck has made this into a curse word of sorts, like “socialism”).
I think these are good issues to focus on, because they’re also the easiest in which to prove your point. Statistics exist proving that the US has low social mobility and social mobility is higher in countries with robust welfare systems, and we also know that most people born poor die poor and vice versa. You can also easily show that black people are treated poorly even when you control for all other factors other than race.
How can anyone argue against that*?
*They can rattle of a couple anecdotes and/or claim that what you said is a lie :(
Simple Truth said in 13
Not on a systemic level, it isn’t. You don’t get denied benefits or asked to thoroughly prove your legal documentation in triplicate when you’re poor and white. Yes, it sucks that you were teased and bullied as a child, and I’m sure you’re not the only white kid living in a minority neighborhood to experience such. However, that in no way compares to the systemic and personal violence visited on poor latin@s every day.