One of my fellow dopers on another thread used the term ‘White Trash.’ I am sure that, like most people, he did not mean much by it. I am sure I am being overly sensitive.
Still, I was born as ‘White Trash,’ and I sort of resent the fact that this racial term can be used against me and my family and if I complain, it is somehow my fault. I make an effort not to abuse you because of your race, religion or hat size, could you please do the same for me?
But ‘Paul,’ you say, ‘you are not WT. You are a smart, witty urbane man-about-town.’
‘True’ I reply, ‘why is it remarkable that someone born in West Virginia, the son of a real-live coal miner’s daughter can string two sentences together?’
Remarkably not all of us are stupid knuckle-draggers. Would you please stop lumping all of us together in the Lumpenproleariat.
Anyway, it is bedtime here, if I do not reply to your posts, please do not think I am ignoring you.
How can this term be described as a racial term? Just because it’s got white in it doesn’t make it so. Surely it’s a provincial term/insult rather than a racial one.
I always thought about it as more of a way of mind than anything else but I’m not from the US so probably have it wrong.
I use it but only for the people that live up to the stereotype. There really are some out there. I think it is a good descriptive tool for a subculture.
I always thought it was a bit dopey. The white doesn’t bother me as much as the trash. Of course “bother” is relative, I probably think about it for a nanosecond.
I don’t know, that’s just the thing. If you act like white trash, I’m gonna call you white trash. If you don’t act like it, I don’t care where you’re from, I won’t call you that. For example, 99% of the people that go to the Christmas Tree Shop exhibit all the normal behaviors of white trash. I am not going to list them here as it will no doubt lead to me getting shot down so quickly I won’t know what hit me. But I could call them rude, insensitive, backwards jerks who think that snatching something out of a kids’ hand and making a beeline to the register to buy it for their own kid is OK, or I could call them white trash.
But a spade is still …(can’t say that anymore, can we?)
Labeling people “trash” (i.e. worthless) based on their cultural/ethnic background is the essence of prejudice, is it not? The only thing interesting about these threads is the rhetorical calisthenics people will go through to argue otherwise.
Ah, but they’re not being labeled worthless based on their cultural/ethnic background. When the label is applied correctly, assuming it can be, it is applied to those who wallow in their slovenly surrounding. These are people who sit around and watch Springer all day, beat their kids and spouses on a regular basis, procreate like it’s going out of style, hurl racial epithets with abandon, bathe once a week and don’t got no time for no fancy book learnin’. I’ve taken to calling such people trash no matter what the color of their skin.
Paul, I know that you tool around Saudi in your Camero with the naked chick mudflaps on the back wheels, listening to ( Insert irritating music here) at full volume. Your mullet blowing in the hot desert air.
Yeah, that is so you.
Please note that sarcasm was used in the above post.
Paul, while you know more about your childhood than I do, the term “white trash” couldn’t possibly apply to you.
Being/becoming white trash has nothing to do with where you grew up, what you lived in, how much money you had or what your family name is. It’s about how you conduct yourself. Yes, WV has some white trash, unfortunately. Hollywood, however, is full of it.
You’re a prince, and I know I’m not the only one on these boards who thinks so.
White trash is offensive because as it was orignally used in the South, the scale of respectability ran: black folk, white trash, white folk. You were designating them as “trash” because they acted like it was assumed those black folk did. Which is why you didn’t need a term like “black trash”. It was given. The point was satirized in a famous short story by I think maybe Flannery O’Connor that has the thoughts of an obviously bigoted middle-class white woman thinking about class while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. (I wish I could remember the name of the story; it’s in a lot of literary anthologies) She’s ruminating on how some of the “colored folk” are so well-behaved, they’re almost as “good” as the worst of the white folk. That was a common old-school Southern viewpoint.
