I accept food stamps, welfare checks, and government cheese. And I’m sorry, but I can’t take Discover.
Trust me, it is not tolerated on the SDMB - there are a number of posters who will jump on you for using the term because it is derogatory.
I’m not sure who is “allowed” to mock poor whites. Jeff Foxworthy? He would seem to get a pass by virtue of originating from among the people mocked. (Similar to Chris Rock in that context.) Brett Butler (Grace Under Fire)? Same deal. Roseanne? Ditto.
This past year, TV’s It’s All Relative mocked both working class whites and effete Harvard (gay) intellectuals, hardly limiting its humor to poor whites.
On the other hand, there have been several threads on this board censuring or condemning the use of “redneck,” “white trash,” and similar epithets.
I suspect that you can find places (whether it be neighborhoods, work places, or on-line communities) where just about any group can be mocked. I don’t see any great pressure to single out poor whites for abuse.
Let’s keep our terms straight. The epithets “white trash” and “rednecks” and “hillbillies” do not refer to poor white Americans in general. They refer to a particular ethnic subculture: Poor Southerners (and particularly Highland Southerners, as opposed to Tidewater Southerners – think West Virginia vs. Virginia), of pre-Revolutionary Anglo-Celtic (particularly Scotch-Irish and Border Scots) descent; or persons living in other parts of the country who are descended from such Southerners. Those are the people Jeff Foxworthy is talking about in all his redneck jokes – his own people, with certain definite cultural characteristics, including a traditional predilection for violence, armed and unarmed, Protestant religiosity, love of hunting and fishing, etc. (“If you have ever been too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck!”) Impoverished Polish-Americans in Detroit or Chicago, or poor Irish-Americans in Boston or Brooklyn, would not be referred to as “white trash” or “rednecks” – even if they are just as white and just as poor and just as crude as any of the rednecks in Foxworthy’s jokes. Rednecks are also distinguishable from WASPs – who are also descended from pre-Revolutionary Anglo-Saxons and Celts, but whose ancestors came from different parts of the British Isles, and from a slightly higher social stratum, which on this side of the Atlantic became a much higher social stratum. As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “George Wallace might have been a white Protestant of Anglo-Saxon descent, and rather vocal on all three points, but a WASP he was not.”
And that might be why it’s “okay” to make fun of rednecks – because most Americans, even poor white Americans, are not rednecks themselves.
So are you saying that in order to be classified as ‘white trash’ or ‘redneck’ you have to be American?
Yes. I don’t think the terms are used in any other country. Have you ever heard of a Canadian redneck?
Actually, they are used quite freely in other countries I have lived namely Australia and NZ, I’m not sure about Canada.
However, I’m sure the original terminology came from the US.
Maybe so – but I doubt any of Foxworthy’s jokes would resonate with an Australian audience; just a guess, I’ve never been there.
I doubt if any of Jeff Foxworthy’s “jokes” resonate with an American audience either. Just another one note hack.
Two thoughts:
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“White trash” is not an ethnic group like white, black, latino, etc. It’s a description of people in the white group who make very poor life choices.
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The term “white trash” itself is a little offensive to me. By saying “white trash,” you’re implying that the normal kind of trash is non-white. Sort of like saying “day baseball game.”
No, CurtC, it is an ethnic group. See my explanation above. Have you ever heard the term applied to a poor rural person in New England?
Jim Goad wrote a book called The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash became America’s Scapegoat. Admittedly, I only got half-way through the book before I gave up. He has one point that’s drilled in most paragraphs in the book, that it’s wrong to treat the “White Trash” with the racist vitriol that seems so acceptible in modern America. On the link above, Amazon provides the first couple pages of text in the book where the author “shows” the difference in acceptibility between the terms of “white trash/redneck/et al” and “nigger”. Later on in the book he compares indentured servitude to slavery (and his points tend to get even weaker throughout the book…well… to the midway point I got to and his points become pedantic excuses and bad rationales).
A simpler point would be not judge groups of people but to just hate a person on an individual basis (to paraphrase a wiser comedian).
Very true . . . but the question in this thread is not whether it’s OK to hate rednecks, but whether it’s OK to mock them – an issue closely related, but still distinct. I would hate to live in a culture with no ethnic humor. As we say in the Church of the SubGenius, “Fuck 'em if they can’t take a joke!”
I don’t really see the argument… white trash or ghetto trash, it’s generally the same sort maladaptivity (ignorance, welfare, irrational fertility, speech impediments, etc.) with variable specifics in comportment, aspect, etc. Both are routinely made fun of. Assuming that both types of trash are preventable drags on society, why shouldn’t they be mocked? Anything to discourage such behaviour would seem advantageous.
I say the above particularly after thinking about the highly questionable taste of things like “hood” hip-hop/rap culture (unfortunately stronger than ever) or idiocies such as “trucker chic” (which thankfully seems to have subsided this year, but no doubt there will be plenty more reincarnations).
For that matter we also make fun of yuppies (and derivatives, I have lost track of them), lawyers (but not judges), loose women (but not men), the whole “bling” nonsense (does anyone engaging in bling actually take it seriously???), and countless others.
If humour were perfectly ordered and PC, and not transgressive or otherwise naughty, it wouldn’t be humour.
Oh, we exist in abundance! The word is used quite freely here in Canada, typically used by those outside of Saskatchewan and Alberta, to refer to Saskatchewanonians and Albertans. I, as an Albertan, prefer to refer to Saskaskatchewanonians as Prairie Newfies, though that’s really neither here nor there.
I’ve lived in the South for over 60 years and would never have considered using the terms hillbilly, redneck and white trash interchangeably.
Generally, I choose not to use them at all. But they do have differing connotations.
Further, WASPs rednecks and hillbillies can exist within the same family. That is one of the things that makes Southern family reunions so bizarre.
On this note: Have you ever noticed how everyone of Scottish ancestry gets sheep-fucking jokes? Not just the Scots themselves, but New Zealanders (many of whom are of Scottish ancestry,) and American southerners (many of whom are also of Scottish origins.) It seems like the sheep-fucking thing will never go away.
Has anyone here ever heard a Welsh joke?
I’ve never been to New England, but I wasn’t aware that the term white trash wouldn’t be used there. But I would think that this would tell you more about the people using the term than about who it applies to - since the term “white trash” is itself racist in that it assumes that “regular trash” is non-white, and racism is more prevalent in the South, the people who use the term happen to be in the South. I’d say that people who use the term would also use it to describe a New Englander who lives in a trailer park and gets drunk every night.
About the terms white trash, hillbilly, and redneck being interchangeable, that’s just wrong. A hillbilly is a poor person from the Appalachians. White trash is someone who lives in a trailer park and gets drunk every night. And I consider myself to be somewhat of a redneck, since I am from West Texas and identify with certain traditional values. The term redneck usually doesn’t have a negative connotation, unlike the other two.
Yes. I don’t think that the term is as exclusive in all areas as you’re making it out to be. I don’t have much to add to the OP except that I agree with monstro. For some reason, almost every group likes to pretend that they’re the last ones that can be safely picked on.
I’m from Appalachia and I can say with some authority that all hillbillies aren’t white trash, all white trash aren’t hillbillies, and “redneck” can be offensive or merely descriptive, depending on context.
Most of the people around here are of German descent. We’ve got hillbillies, white trash, and rednecks; sometimes the same person is all three!