So you disagree with my claim that there is an inherent aadvantage, for the most part, to being born white?
I think his position is that “white trash” is hate speech, but that hate speech is such an arbitrary class of words that the rule should be revoked.
That’s also my position, so hopefully I’m not projecting. 
And yes, I think that racial slurs should be allowed. HOWEVER, I imagine there’d be a pit thread spawned pretty damn quick if someone used it, and I think that if a poster started using it in every post, repeatedly used it despite being called out, etc., that it would probably be jerkish behaviour.
I’m asking you to pretend you’re a moderator and make the judgement call. If you were running this board single-handedly, what specific rule would you have regarding hate speech?
Bullshit. Then just drop the modifier and say “trash.”
“White Trash” is just a term white people can use to make themselves feel superior to other white people, usually followed by several pages of justification as to why it’s not racist or non-PC.
It’s on par with redneck, just a condescending insult. It’s OK to use these, since they apply more to social status and not a genetic trail like skin color or sexual orientation (the “white” part of white trash doesn’t really relate to skin color since it goes without saying that white trash are indeed white).
This is the part I like:
If you had started out as a died in the wool white trash liberal, maybe it wouldn’t have taken you so long to get sick of it.
Sure, hate speech is based on historical use of words or terms to describe members of a group not your own…this was based solely on their physical apperance, they’re otherness.
The term white trash, was created to single out those whites who were so low in behaviour, that they wasted their gift of whiteness…they “threw it away” and their only redeeming quality was that they were white and could never be lower than a black person. While it was an insult, it wasn’t based on otherness, but on failure.
If the origin of white trash was created by whites to describe whites who failed to live up to their potential, then when used within the context of it’s origins, it can’t be considered hate speech; since it’s describing a group of people who happen to be white, as opposed to decribing a group of people because they’re NOT white.
clearer?
i don’t understand why you consider white trash hate speech and high yella not to be…perhaps you can clarify?
I will have to give this some thought. I am not prepared for this question. (But thanks for asking it.) I wil not log on again until tomorrow, perhaps. Sorry, I use a borrowed computer.
Ecept that the whole phrase is already in the language and that phrase has already lost its racial overtones for much of the country.
(“Hate speech,” of course, is its own can o’ worms–or bag o’ hornets.)
Fair enough, but what if we had a large influx of new posters who routinely used racial slurs as insults, but who otherwise followed the rules? All of a sudden the message board devoted to fighting ignorance reads like a white supremacy newsgroup. What then?
Historically, “nigger” is a curruption of negro, which is simply a descriptive term. Would this justify my use of it?
As I said, it was for the sake of the argument. My undersatnding of “high yella” is that it is a term refeerring to a mixture of white and black ancestry. If you tell me it is hate speech I will take your word for it.
They’d get ridiculed, flamed, pitted, etc. and they’d either change or loose interest; there’s no way they could blend in here.
Kinda like how we don’t have a “don’t use leetspeak and talk like you’re in a script kiddy IRC channel” rule, yet we don’t get large influxes of new posters who write like they’re a 12 year old on AIM. And when a poster like that does show up, community pressure is usually fairly intense. 
But it is a phrase that only refers to one ethnic group. It would make no sense referring to a group of Japanese as “white trash,” so your assertion that the two words are somehow necessarily linked rings false to me.
“Shiftless niggers” has been around for a long time without losing racist overtones. Could you point toward some of the previous discussions, or other cites, that suggest that “white trash” is not racist?
Classist swine! 
I think we can agree that, though it may be tacky*, Polish Americans can tell Polak jokes, Norwegian Americans can tell Ole and Lena jokes**, and African Americans can call each other “nigger” and the rest of us will keep our distaste to ourselves. “White trash” should be given the same consideration: Honkie Americans should be able to use it without explanation and if members of other ethnicities should only use it after considerable consideration of ones motivations to use a term; one should know if he is intending to tar an entire ethnic group with the same brush, so to speak. However, I believe there are some examples that most of us will agree are pure-D white trash, like the Hilton sisters, and they most emphatically do not come from Appalachia. As further proof that the lifestyle implied by white trash and redneck is not limited geographically, several of Blue Collar TV’s “Redneck Yards of the Week” are in Wisconsin.
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- My fellow posters who have spent time in the South understand the seriousness of that charge.
** - Ole and Lena got married. On their honeymoon trip they were nearing Minneapolis when Ole put his hand on Lena’s knee. Giggling, Lena said, “Ole, you can go a little farther now if ya vant to”… so Ole drove to Duluth.
So here is an interesting point of debate: Is something hate speach, as Contrapuntal seems to be saying, simply because it singles out a group to insult or belittle them or does there have to be a component of members of that group actually being offended and hurt by the speach? In other words, do we define something as hate speach for a group of people (like the poor abused white folks) or does that group get to decide what collectivly offends it and what does not?
I’m not dropping the modifier. It’s a descriptor. If you are white and you are trash, you are therefore “white trash.”
I feel bad enough saying the word “black.” Really. If I’m in a public setting relating an anecdote to my friends and I say, “…so this black guy walks up to me and…” I feel awkward. It’s a description of the person that I encountered. I say Hispanic, I say Asian, I say Indian. And, ohmigosh, I say white.
I don’t see why if you are what you are, why anyone is offended to be called that.
Maybe I’ll stop referring to Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Catholics and Church of Christ followers by their denomination because it demeans and segregates them to refer to them in a distinctive way.
Same for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Communists.
Oh, and I no longer want to be refered to as caucasian, American, Tennessean, Nashvillian or human. I am simply a collection of matter arranged in such a way that it has the ability to distinguish itself from other collections of matter, sentient or otherwise. I don’t want to be an individual or a member of any specific group because it implies others are excluded from that group/individuality, and I don’t want to hurt any other mattercollection’s feelings, regardless of whether that mattercollection is capable of feeling anything at all (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
What do you call that black person? Edward? What if you don’t know their name? Do you call them African-American? What if they are African-English, or African-Spanish, and they get annoyed at the idea they might be American?
A person?
I’m going to agree that the word ‘white’ has a value roughly equal to ‘trailer’ in the term ‘white trash’, and is the rough rural equivalent of the urban ‘ghetto’. Except, of course, being urban, ghetto is cooler. I’ve heard black people called ‘white trash’ or ‘black white trash’, on occasion. It’s a turn of phrase that may be best to avoid, but it’s not all that racial a slur, and more economic and social class. Actually, the ‘white’ in it tends to indicate isolation and inbreeding as much as color, given demographic trends in this country of ours. There’s still whole counties that have never seen a black face for more than an hour, some places, I gather.
Well, we DO have to distinguish between the different kinds of trash, don’t we? White trash, trailer trash, mall trash…
Perhaps we can substitute inredneck for white trash, just to keep the color theme going…
Me: What do you call a black person, if not their name??
Me, later, trying to find out someone’s name from across the room: “Hey, do you know that person’s name?”
Women: "Which person? The one with the hat? The one with the guitar?
Me: No, the one on the right!
etc.