LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
White Trash Have Feelings Too [Contains some potentially offensive language]
Don’t you just hate them? They are gap-toothed, inbred, and uncivilized, violent and hopelessly dumb. For the love of god, how can you not hate them? There’s no class of people with less honor or dignity. There are no people more ignorant or gullible. Their breed is primitive with prehistoric manners, unfit for anything beyond petty crime, rape and bloodletting. Their stunted, subhuman minds are mesmerized by cheap alcohol, Lotto fever and the asinine superstitions of poor-folks’ religion. They kick their dogs and only stop beating their wives just long enough to let her squeeze out another deformed rug rat. They breed encephalic, mouth-breathing children. Vulgarian’s every last one of them. They really bring down their race.
Luckily I did not identify a race here. If I was talking about black trash, I might be labeled racist and lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I would merely be one more torchbearer in the ongoing assault on impoverished whites in America. The only difference between vile racism and precision social satire all depends on the “Nigger’s” color.
This short museing will explore the general treatment of a unique social culture in America thru the media and it will touch upon the areas of religion, race relations, work and lifestyle in defining what has come to be known as white trash or to some trailer park trash.
Those who consider themselves superior to this unique group use pejorative labels such as “white trash” and “redneck” just to name a couple to identify those whose manners differ from their own and to keep those “others” in their proper place. Naturally, the labeled “others” usually resist such derogatory classification. Today of all the slurs, “redneck” is the most socially acceptable term used to disparage members of a particular group. As Will D. Campbell has pointed out, “Like the nouns nigger and kike, redneck is most often used pejoratively. And, as a descendent of people disparaged by that word I ask why the first two terms are eschewed by even the most blatantly racist and bigoted publications, while redneck and white trash is used routinely in virtually every respectable, sophisticated and allegedly responsible newspaper and magazine in America?”
In 2005, after a limited survey of the way the words “nigger” and “redneck” were used in two newspapers, Jim Goad summarized that whenever the word “nigger” occurred, the writer was directly quoting someone else, but whenever the word “redneck” occurred, in more that two out of three cases, the writer himself was using it as a noun or adjective to describe lower-class whites. “If the Neck’s red,” says Goad “the light’s green.” As I typed the above paragraph, I could not help notice that the spellchecker on my computer refused to recognize “nigger” as a word, but had no such problems with “redneck.”
Webster’s New World Dictionary mirrors this semantic double standard, Its one-word definition of “nigger” (negro) is followed by a fifty eight word disclaimer: USAGE—originally simply a dialectal variant of negro, the term nigger is today acceptable only in black English; in all other contexts it is now generally regarded as virtually taboo because of the legacy of racial hatred that underlies the history of its use among whites, and its continuing use among a minority as a viciously hostile epithet. Compare its definition of “redneck”: A poor, white, rural southerner on regarded as ignorant, bigoted, and violent.” Nor does it mention that persons who use the word “nigger” often regard their targets to be ignorant, violent, and sometimes bigoted, too. While nothing short of apologetic in its use of “Nigger”, their definition of redneck wants to help one hate poor white people.
Equality is simultaneously the greatest accomplishment and worst failure of America. It is the place where idealism and reality come to blows in American culture, despite the glossy veneer of “political correctness” which has been painted over the rust and corrosion of centuries of classism and racism, the enduring American necessity for a social outcast has chosen working class whites as the social scapegoat of our time.
Digging through the white trash bin has never been a priority for sociologists. Few academics see value in peering beyond the mascara or peeling off those painted-on blue jeans or those Lee press on nails. How did this sub-culture come to be? If we look back, it will lead us to southern politics, which has shaped the words white trash, redneck or hillbilly. For the purposes of this story these terms will be used interchangeably. According to the OED2 (Oxford English Dictionary 2), the first definitive example of redneck was used to describe rural white laborers of the American South which dates back to 1893: “redneck [is] a name applied by the better class of people to the poorer inhabitants of the rural districts” Yet during the 1890's, redneck also entered the political discourse of Mississippi when Democrats used it to denigrate farmers within their party who supported populist reforms. As we can see, this would be the recorded beginning of the classism of white trash in America.
The working class white has always been an ideal candidate for this role in society, and mainstream society has revealed their fright. As Jim Goad explains in the Redneck Manifesto, the “Redneck stereotype is especially fitting because is fills all the scapegoat requirements: biological differences--inbred, less intelligent, unattractive; geographic and regional differences—trailer parks, rural south, hillbilly; economic difference—poor, sick, lazy, dirty; cultural differences—fundamentalist, superstitious, loud, kin networks; and last but not least there are the moral differences—trashy, racist, violent.
From this time if not before we can see “Americans love to hate the poor” and, in particular, to hate poor white trash, observe Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz in their analysis of the white trash phenomenon In America. White trash is a “classicist slur” and a racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves “white trash is the most visible and clearly marked form of whiteness.” The fact that the term “trash” means “social waste and detritus” points to the social degradation and shame implicit in the derogatory class designation. Referring to whites that live in poverty—classically in rural poverty—this term also invokes long standing stereotypes of poor whites as “incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy and stupid.
The mass media is the propagator of this stereotype. The portrayal of white trash in the media, particularly in film, is especially telling about American attitudes towards race and class. Films such as Forrest Gump, Dumb and Dumber, Wild at Heart, True Romance, Deliverance, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers are just a few examples of Hollywood’s depictions of white trash as either idiot savants extraordinaire or amoral criminals, but always as products of an inherited inferiority, a kind of natural born white trash. Another example that sticks out in being one of America’s most beloved white trash exploited by the media is Elvis Presley. As one author wrote “Elvis, the ultimate media hillbilly, was also the ultimate mountain mama’s boy.”
White trash is an aesthetic of ultimate marginalization: to call someone white trash is, as filmmaker and avowed white trash aficionado John Waters holds, “White Trash and Redneck are the last racist thing you can say and get away with. White trash is our own, no matter how far we try to push them towards the margins of mainstream society. They will be a part of us, white trash is not dark or foreign or any other demonized group, but rather our very own pasty and pale soul. The demonization of white trash can be read as a disavowal of racism, displacing evil, degeneracy, and criminal typing in to the white class, white trash, while distancing such hatred away from the groups of the minority population that was becoming increasingly vocal and militant, Mainstream culture uses the same insults and generalizations (lazy, shiftless, dirty, in-bred, bad blood) that were once the common discourse against blacks, Spanish and Chinese. But while it is “politically incorrect” to demonize minorities, is always open season on white trash: It seems that everyone has a license to hate the poor in our “classless” society but whether he’s called a hillbilly, redneck, good ole boy, or just plain bubba, the term we all repress is the one we all mean: White Trash.
Now moving on to religion. It of course is the most telling class indicator. It has become an accepted fact within the academic and well educated worlds that religious zeal is centered in lower classes. The idea is that lower socioeconomic classes desperately need to believe in a better world to come (the meek shall inherit the earth), that being poor and trampled on is a good thing (turn the other cheek), or as a crutch to make it through this life that is harsher on them than most. Reliance on nature for livelihood, or a lack of material goods, creates the need for faith in religion more so than other lifestyles.
America is a country that values rational over religion in its politics and rhetoric. This is vital to understanding the method of separating or “othering” working class whites. Their culture operates parallel to the mainstream and upper classes of society, not as a subset, but as a unique and completes system of beliefs and lifestyles that is distinct and completely apart from the commonly accepted societal norms.
On the subject of race relations the mockingly scornful treatment of working class whites by middle and upper class whites stems from two emotions within themselves: fear and guilt. Working class whites are the embodiment of uppers worst fears, fear of slipping in the class system, fear of social isolation and fear of this socially unstable class that retains an emphasis on physicality rather the intellect and moral judgments rather than ambiguous relativity.
One opinion is to take the worst historical attributes of whites and placing them on those whites that are most powerless and isolated in society, then you can blame and hate them for their crimes against humanity and your own. Upper class whites can join with blacks and other minorities, there by alleviating their guilt, taking attention off themselves and bonding with minorities against poor whites. Upper class whites are still pitting the two groups against each other; they have merely switched sides. For proof historian Eugene D. Genovese has shown that even during the era of slavery the ideological condition of the underclass whites were so low that to quote the title of one of his articles, one would “Rather Be a Nigger than a Poor White Man”, but white trash reveals the lie at the heart of racism: that the “inferiority” of the blacks is embedded racially, rather than in conditions of poverty and deprivation.
In summary, if every American thought about class instead of race for only five minutes a day some revolutionary things might happen. So how do we propose to snatch away the oily blanket of cultural misunderstanding that hangs between most of America and this wondrous thing called white trash? What combination of punches will get white people to respond? It is conceivable that if white people stop asking, what is fair to minorities? And start asking, what will work for white people? We will begin to come up with better solutions for everyone. Then the fog will lift. The sun will burn through the clouds and everyone’s neck will sizzle to red.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by delirium
Bookmarks