White trash is a derogatory term in American English for poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class within the white population, especially those perceived to have a degraded standard of living. It is used as a way to separate the "good poor", who are "noble and hardworking", from the "bad poor", who are deemed “lazy, undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting". The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the social status of poor whites, who cannot enjoy the same class privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior.
The term has been adopted for white people living on the fringes of society, who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for political, legal, or moral authority. While the term is mostly used pejoratively by urban and middle-class whites as a class signifier, 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.
In common usage, "white trash" overlaps in meaning with "cracker", used for people in the backcountry of the Southern states; "hillbilly", for poor people from Appalachia; "Okie" for those with origins in Oklahoma; "Hoosier" used in St. Louis to mean "poor, rural, white trash"; and "redneck", for those with rural origins, especially from the South. The primary 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 and interaction with the modern world, while "white trash" – and the modern term "trailer trash" – emphasizes the person's supposed moral failings, without regard to their upbringing. While the other terms suggest rural origins, "white trash" and "trailer trash" may be urban or suburban as well.
Scholars from the late 19th to the early 21st century explored generations of families who were considered "disreputable", such as the Jukes family and the Kallikak family, both pseudonyms for real families.Schinko, Carsten. "Why Trash? Thirteen Ways of Looking at Poor (White) Folks." Amerikastudien/American Studies (2010), pp. 143-164. p. 147: "Families like 'the Jukes' and 'the Kallikaks' entered 'the public imagination as poor, dirty, drunken, criminally minded, and sexually perverse people'"Harkins, Anthony. "Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People." The Journal of Southern History 73:2 (2007), p. 507.
Terminology 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 historically considered inferior and without honor, such as "menials, swineherds, peddlers and beggars".
"Poor white trash" signifies the "bad poor", in contrast with the "good poor" who were romanticized as "noble and hardworking". One word applied to such people was "tackeys" or "tackies". 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."tacky (adj. 2) etymonline.com It now generally refers to anything that is cheap, shoddy, gaudy, seedy, or in bad taste."tacky" Merriam-Webster Online
Academic Jacqueline Zara Wilson suggests the term is partly rooted in the British class system, brought to North America by British settlers, which tended to privilege English settlers over their Scottish, Welsh and Irish counterparts. Wilson describes hierarchies within this framework, such as early Scots-Irish (Presbyterian) immigrants who saw themselves as better than later Irish (Catholic) immigrants.
In her book White Trash, Nancy Isenberg argues that the British saw the American colonies as a "wasteland", and a place to dump their underclass — those people they called "waste people", the "scum and dregs" of society. The early term "waste people" gave way to "squatters" and "crackers", used to describe the settlers who populated the Western frontier of the United States and the backcountry of some southern states, but who did not have title to the land they settled on, and had little or no access to education or religious training. "Cracker" was especially used in the South.
Isenberg also lists other derisive names that have been used to refer to poor whites:
As a racial epithet
Writing in the journal Critique of Anthropology, Jacqueline Zara Wilson suggests the term is a "form of invisible racism" which implicitly blames poor whites for their own circumstances. She says that, when used by whites in particular, it "declares the accused to be poor and in one way or another un-civilized, without the excuse of being racially oppressed". She writes that this may be distinct from the way it was historically used by people of color as "an implicitly anti-racist judgement" or a "vengeful" racialized insult against those who were oppressing them, and that its use reveals hierarchies within whiteness itself.
Journalist Annalee Newitz and sociologist Matt Wray state that "white trash" is both a classist slur and a "racial epithet" that casts poor whites as "a dysgenic race unto themselves".
Society and culture Economic status Many poor whites in the 19th century South were only able to locate themselves on the worst possible land available to whites, since the best land had already been taken by the white slaveholders, large (such as the large-scale plantations owned by the planter class) and small. They lived and attempted to survive on ground that was sandy, swampy or covered in scrub pine and not suited for agriculture; for this, some became known as "sandhillers" and "pineys". These "hard-scratch" inhabitants were seen to match their surroundings: they were "stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as the land they lived on". Many ended up in the mountains, at the time the first frontier of the country. After the Civil War, these people began to be referred to as "hillbillies".
In the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, "poor white trash" were a "curious" breed of degenerate, gaunt, haggard people who suffered from numerous physical and social defects. They were seen as dirty, ragged, emaciated, and disgusting, and had feeble children with distended abdomens who were wrinkled and withered beyond their physical years, so that even 10-year-olds' "countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to sight", according to a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The skin of a poor white Southerner was described as waxy, "ghastly yellowish-white" like old parchment, or so white they almost appeared to be albinos. The parents were listless and slothful, neglected their children, and were alcoholics. They were looked on with contempt by both upper-class planters and yeoman farmers – the non-slave-owning smallholders.
Harriet Beecher Stowe described a white trash woman and her children in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, published in 1856:
White Southerners of the period equated coarse and disagreeable appearances with immoral thoughts and uncivil or criminal behavior – an evil countenance often meant a villainous character. In this way poor whites with unhealthy or ugly bodies – the result in large part of poor diets, lack of personal grooming, and a toxic environment – were condemned by the larger white community at first sight, with no thought given to investigating or ameliorating the conditions that were responsible for their appearances.
The physical characteristics of white trash were thought to be inherited in nature, 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". Hundley considered the white trash population to be morally inferior not only to other whites, but to the black slave population as well. His evaluation was seconded by Randolph Shotwell, a future Ku Klux Klan leader, who described them as "a distinct race of people ... thriftless, uneducated, unthinking beings, who live little better than negroes".Fitzgerald, Michael W. (2007) Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. pp.8-9
W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) writes in his description of the mythical Old South that beneath the aristocratic Cavalier planters was perceived to be:
...a vague race lumped together indiscriminately as the poor whites – very often, in fact, as the "white-trash". These people belong in the main to a physically inferior type, having sprung for the most part from the convict servants, redemptioners, and debtors of old Virginia and Georgia, with a sprinkling of the most unsuccessful sort of European peasants and farm laborers and the dregs of the European town slums. And so, of course, the gulf between them and the master class was impassable, and their ideas and feeling did not enter into the make-up of the prevailing Southern civilization.
Cash goes on to explain that those who arrived in the New World under these circumstances – at least early in the history of European settlement – were as likely to end up in the planter class or as yeoman farmers as they were to become poor whites, as land, at first, was cheap and available, and hard work could pay off in a rise in economic and social status. But there were some who did not succeed,
...the weakest element of the old backcountry population ... those who had been driven back [by the plantation system] to the red hills and the sandlands and the pine barrens and the swamps – to all the marginal lands of the South; those who, because of the poorness of the soil on which they dwelt or the great inaccessibility of markets, were, as a group, completely barred from escape or economic and social advance. They were the people to whom the term "cracker" properly applied – the "white-trash" and "po' bukra" ... [They exhibited] a distinctive physical character – a striking lankness of frame and slackness of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and misshapeness of head and feature, a peculiar swallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar and a not less faded-out colorness of skin and hair.
According to Cash, this physical appearance is not, for the most part, genetically determined, but is the result of the brutal circumstances in which this group had to survive.
Cultural traditions Child rearing