Some good people live in trailers. Some are even Dopers.
Because I know some great people who live in trailers?
Yeah, yeah, and the next person knows a fine upstanding choir boy with a mullet.
We need to come to a concensus, people!
Oh, wait a minute. No, we don’t. 
EXCATLY…somebody somewhere is going to be offended by anything you say.
Somebody will know a former Springer guest who is the finest person walking the planet. Somebody will know a mullet wearer who would give you the wife-beater T-shirt right off his back…
But…I still find the term nigger far more offensive than white trash…maybe it’s because I’m a white person living in Birmingham, AL? Maybe because I’ve seen how much hurt that word has caused people I love and care about where I can’t say the same about anyone being called white trash?
Why yes I would expect to get my face re-arranged. Just as I would expect that if I called someone a cunt, shitstain or assmuffin. Like I said before there is a distinction between a word that is rude in a Miss Manners sense and bigotry.
Living in a trailer is a function of income, not character. Looking down on people because they are poorer than you is, IMO, trashy. Looking down on people because they are rural or uneducated is also trashy.
What makes someone trash is lack of character–living in filth, abusing one’s children, hating other people because of the color of their skin. Take, for example, the characters in the book To Kill A Mockingbird. In that book, there are two dirt-poor families, the Cunninghams and the Ewells. The Cunninghams pay back their debts, work hard, complain little, and defend Atticus Finch against a lynch mob. They are poor and country as a chicken coop, but they are proud, hard-working people.
The Ewells, on the other hand, as exemplified by their pater familias, are a bunch of lazy, dirty, no-account welfare bums. The father commits incest with his oldest daughter and beats her, and then frames a black man for the crime. The Ewells are the type specimen for white trash.
People are called white trash because they lack character, not money or education. As Atticus Finch says in the book, no matter how fine a family a white man comes from or how educated he is, if he takes advantage of a black man because he can, that man is trash.
In any event, the OP title is offensive, and the content is poorly conceived and uneducated about the history of race relations in the US.
And as a Southerner, I take great exception to the unspoken stereotype that we are all one step away from burning crosses and marrying our sisters.
Or maybe you just don’t get out much. As a pejorative, “white trash” has a long history. And yes, its usage hurts many real actual live people.
And my maternal grandmother, a genteel racist if there ever was one (a former state regent of the DAR, she upbraided me when I was very young for using the n-word, saying that only white trash ever used that word), said, “One should call them ‘colored people’. After all, the servants have feelings.”
I’m sure it has…but based on my personal experiences of living in the South my entire life I have yet to see it happen. I believe someone earlier in the thread asked Dopers for any example where they knew someone was hurt by the term being used. I don’t think I’ve seen one yet.
I agree with gobear it is about character and not income or status.
I’ve gotten myself all up in a fit before about “redneck”, “white trash” etc., but I’ve changed my mind. Why don’t we all just quit being offended by anything. It just wastes energy.
[David Allen Coe]
There was fifty holes in an old tin roof
Me and my family we was livin’ proof
The people who forgot about poor white trash
and if that ain’t country I’ll kiss your ass
[/DAC]
Aries28
You know, it might not hurt you if you clicked a link now and then. In the event you care to climb out of your ignorance, I give you once again the history of the term.
Lib, you might wantr to read your own link:
As I said, it’s character, not poverty. Any Southerner knows the difference between po’ folks and white trash.
I did click on and read your link. I am not debating the context of the word. I am telling you my own personal experiences and that I personally find the term nigger much more offensive than the term white trash.
Thank you, gobear. As usual, you phrased it a lot better than I could have.
Naturally, I did read the link. Maybe we’re failing to communicate. The article as a whole, and especially the portion you quoted, makes the case that white trash is in reference to a class. And that was the point I made above to Diogenes.
From your quote: “White Trash in an informal sense a pejorative term often used to describe relatively uneducated white Americans with bad personal habits in a typically low socio-economic class.”
That means poverty.
Maybe you were focused on “bad personal habits”. But people can have bad personal habits while being of good moral character. Likewise, people can be nonsmokers, brush their teeth, bathe every day, and still have a corrupt moral character.
That’s not what they are talking about, as you know perfectly well. The bad personal habits are sloth, laziness, shiftlessness, parasitism, child and spouse abuse, and wallowing in filth. White trash are poor because if you are lazy and shiftless, poor is what you will be. (That is NOT to say that people are poor because they are lazy; just if you are lazy, you’re more likely to be poor than rich)
And it is my own opinion that cleanliness is next to godliness, or as we’uns say back in the hollers, “Ain’t nobody so poor that they can’t sweep.”
Lib,
The term is meant to describe someone who fits most, if not all of the characteristics, not just one or two. You’re picking one or two things out of the article that further your point, while ignoring it as a whole. It took special pains to point out that people the term is directed towards “are not necessarily happy with their economic status but do not attempt to better themselves through education or hard work.”
This is a rather relevant distinction IMHO and not one that should be glossed over for the purposes of furthering your argument. It deserves some comment.
spooje and Heloise, in Los Angeles, the influx of Armenians and the growth of the Armenian population over the last 20 years has caused a pretty severe backlash, predominantly in Burbank/Glendale. These days, the word “Armenian” is let out kind of like an angry whisper through clenched teeth. Our old office was in Burbank; almost all of our employees, vendors, UPS guys, mailmen and neighbors had stories to tell about Armenians.
As a transplant from Colorado, I had no such prejudice – in fact, I find the Armenian stories of the old and new countries quite intriguing – and found myself befuddled when I entered local shops and as a seemingly big white guy, was greeted with what felt like suspicion to the point of loathing.[ul]Right after Mrs. B and I moved into town, I went to one of the local shops, a battery specialist, to see if I could get a replacement for my network test kit. The place was on a side street, no more than a store front that appeared to be a converted delicatessen. Sure enough, they stocked my battery, and while the nice young lady was finding it through some oddly effective Dewey Decimal-style filing system, I recognized she was speaking Russian to a man squatting behind the counter and in intervals calling out in another language to the back room.
When she finally found my battery and handed the package to me, I said I recognized the Cyrillic on the package and made some small talk, which seemed to cause her further puzzlement. She told me the battery was imported from Armenia, her home country. We made some more small talk while she was ringing me up and I said “I’ll have to tell my co-workers about this place.” She thought about this for a second, and handing my change over the counter replied very pointedly “Don’t bother with that. They won’t come anyway.”[/ul]Not a glaring anecdote of a nascent racial divide, but an indicator that old demons die a long and painful death. The epithets are very cruel and display much more anger than has previously been meted out – in the words of a former vendor to my business “At least the Mexicans have a place here. You couldn’t beat an Armenian hard enough to get him to move your furniture.”
I know people who like to throw “white trash” around in jest, but none of them would ever be mistaken for any of the white trash stereotypes. I remember a friend of mine back in junior high getting furious because someone called him WT. I suspect it struck too close to home.
Actually, growing up in North Florida, the word was used for Blacks (to avoid saying the “N” word). It was explained to me because “they were always fishing for mullet.”
That makes absolutely no sense, but I definitely remember the term.