Po' White Trash And Other One-Act Dramas
Yetta Fraunfelter
White trash is a derogatory racial and class-related slur[1][2] used in American English to refer to poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class inside the white population and especially a degraded standard of living.[3] It is used as a way to separate the "noble and hardworking" "good poor" from the lazy, "undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting" "bad poor". The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the poverty and powerlessness of poor whites, who cannot enjoy those privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior.[1]
The term has been adopted for people living on the fringes of the social order, who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for political, legal, or moral authority.[4] While the term is mostly used pejoratively by urban and middle-class whites as a class signifier,[5] some white entertainers self-identify as "white trash", considering it a badge of honor, and celebrate the stereotypes and social marginalization of lower-class whiteness.[1][6][7][8]
The expression "white trash" probably originated in the slang used by enslaved African Americans, in the early decades of the 1800s, and was quickly adopted by richer white people who used the term to stigmatize and separate themselves from the kind of whites they considered to be inferior[12] and without honor, thus carrying on "the ancient prejudice against menials, swineherds, peddlers and beggars."[13]
"Poor white trash", then, is the term applied to the "bad poor", not the romanticized "noble and hardworking" "good poor"[1] One word applied to such people was "tackeys" or "tackies".[13] According to the Oxford Dictionaries, it was once applied to horses of little or no value, then was transferred to people seen to have little or no value.[14] There may have been an intermediate time when it was used to describe those who may have been wealthy but had no family roots or good breeding.[15] It now generally refers to anything that is cheap, shoddy, gaudy, seedy, or in bad taste.[16]
In the journal Critique of Anthropology, J. Z. Wilson argues that the term "white trash" "stands as a form of racism",[18] and Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, writing in The Minnesota Review consider it an instance of "Yoking a classist epithet to a racist one."[19] It is described as a "racial slur" by Lucas Lynch,[20] and filmmaker John Waters considered it the "last racist thing you can say and get away with."[21][22] In 2020, Reader's Digest included "white trash" on its list of "12 Everyday Expressions That Are Actually Racist".[23]
The physical characteristics of white trash were thought to be completely genetic in nature, passed on, parents to children, from generation to generation, serving to separate poor whites from the Southern gentility and those yeomen who shared patrician values. Slavery apologist Daniel R. Hundley's 1860 book Social Relations in Our Southern States includes a chapter entitled "White Trash". He used the existence of poor whites with supposed "bad blood" to argue that genetics and not societal structure was the problem, and that therefore slavery was justified. He called white trash the "laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth", describing their appearance as "lank, lean, angular, and bony, with ... sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief."[30] "Who ever yet knew a Godolphin [ideal man] that was sired by a miserable scrub?," asks Hundley as supposed proof for his theory, "or who ever yet saw an athletic, healthy human being, standing six feet in his stockings, who was the offspring of runtish forefathers or wheezy, asthmatic, or consumptive parents?"[31]
The Southern style of child-rearing paralleled that of the Native Americans who were a constant presence in post-colonial America, especially in the backwoods areas.[38] Thus it is not unusual that another theory for the existence of the white trash population held that the degraded condition of poor white southerners was the result of their living in such close proximity to blacks and Native Americans. Samuel Stanhope Smith, a minister and educator who was the seventh president of Princeton College, wrote in 1810 that poor white southerners lived in "a state of absolute savagism," which caused them to resemble Indians in the color of their skin and their clothing, a belief that was endemic in the 18th and early 19th century. Smith saw them as a stumbling block in the evolution of mainstream American whites,[39] a view that had previously been expressed by Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur in his 1782 book, Letters from an American Farmer. Crèvecoeur, a French soldier-diplomat who resettled in the United States and changed his name to J. Hector St. John, considered poor white southerners to be "not ... a very pleasing spectacle" and inferior to the prototypical American he celebrated in his book, but still hopes that the effects of progress would improve the condition of these mongrelized, untamed, half-savage drunken people who exhibit "the most hideous parts of our society."[40]
Restricted from holding political office due to property qualifications, their ability to vote at the mercy of the courts, which were controlled by the slave-holding planters, poor whites had few advocates within the political system or the dominant social hierarchy. Although many were tenant farmers or day laborers, other white trash people were forced to live as scavengers, thieves and vagrants. But all, employed or not, were socially ostracized by "proper" white society by being forced to use the back door when entering "proper" homes. Even slaves looked down on them: when poor whites came begging for food, the slaves called them "stray goats."[42]
Despite poor whites being looked down on by both the planters and the yeoman farmers, and their "rage" at being referred to as "white-trash", they, as a group, held the Blacks of the South in deep contempt. Cash writes that the slave system "bred [in common whites] a savage and ignoble hate for the Negro, which required only opportunity to break forth in relentless ferocity..."[43]
Northerners claimed that the existence of white trash was the result of the system of slavery in the South, while Southerners worried that these clearly inferior whites would upset the "natural" class system which held that all whites were superior to all other races, especially blacks. People of both regions expressed concern that if the number of white trash people increased significantly, they would threaten the Jeffersonian ideal of a population of educated white freemen as the basis of a robust American democracy.[46]
Even before there was any scientific investigation into the roots of the poor white people of the South, social critic H. L. Mencken, in his 1919 essay "Sahara of the Bozart", challenged the prevailing myth at the time that "poor white trash", and, indeed, most of the South's population, were primarily of Anglo-Saxon stock. Mencken wrote:
The first use of "white trash" in print to describe the Southern poor white population occurred in 1821.[56] It 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'".[57][58] This term achieved widespread popularity in the 1850s,[56] and by 1855, it 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.[59]
In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the chapter "Poor White Trash" in her book A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also "a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe." The plantation system forced those whites to struggle for subsistence, becoming an "inconceivably brutal" group resembling "some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way." Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces the existence of this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their communities, and remarks that both blacks and whites in the area look down on these "poor white trash".[60][30]
After the war, President Andrew Johnson's first idea for the reconstruction of the South was not to take steps to create an egalitarian democracy. Instead, he envisioned what was essentially a "white trash republic", in which the aristocracy would maintain their property holdings and an amount of social power, but be disenfranchised until they could show their loyalty to the Union. The freed blacks would no longer be slaves, but would still be denied essential rights of citizenship and would make up the lowest rung on the social ladder. In between would be the poor white Southerner, the white trash, who while occupying a lesser social position, would essentially become the masters of the South, voting and occupying political offices, and maintaining a superior status to the free blacks and freed slaves. Emancipated from the inequities of the plantation system, poor white trash would become the bulwark of Johnson's rebuilding of the South and its restoration into the Union.[68]
A number of commentators noted that poor white Southerners did not compare favorably to freed blacks, who were described as "capable, thrifty, and loyal to the Union." Marcus Sterling, a Freedmen's Bureau agent and a former Union officer, said that the "pitiable class of poor whites" were "the only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau's] great benevolence and its bold reform", while in contrast black freedmen had become "more settled, industrious and ambitious," eager to learn how to read and improve themselves. Sidney Andrews saw in blacks a "shrewd instinct for preservation" which poor whites did not have, and Whitelaw Reid, a politician and newspaper editor from Ohio, thought that black children appeared eager to learn. Atlantic Monthly went so far as to suggest that government policy should switch from "disenfranchis[ing] the humble, quiet, hardworking Negro" and cease to provide help to the "worthless barbarian", the "ignorant, illiterate, and vicious" white trash population.[70]
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