OK, it is Flannery O’Connor and the story is called Revelation. Here’s the excerpt I’m thinking of:
This is the era the term “white trash” references. You can claim it’s removed from it’s roots and you’re using it as a tongue-in-cheek reference but it’s roots have to do with deeply institutional racism.
Huh? Whitetrash supposedly has everything to do with were you grew up and whether you had money or not.
One of us is not from around here.
That is what you are not getting. It is about conduct and not about circimstances. Plenty of poor white people even in the South are not labeled as white trash by anyone because they don’t behave that way. I grew up in a very poor part of rural Lousiana and I know this to be a fact from experience. White trash is a behavior pattern and a style of living.
I’m annoyed that it’s such a precise term that I can’t always use it when I want to. For example, there are some folks on my street that meet all the stereotypes of white trash (car parts on lawn, tendency to sit on the front porch drinking beer all weekend while their dog assaults passing pedestrians, etc.) except that they’re not white.
Well, but the meaning of terms, like words, changes. The term is not offensive because of how it was used/what it meant over 100 years ago. What it meant back then is irrelevent to how it is used today.
I also dont see the term white trash as being cultural or ethnic, unless of course someone wants to claim ‘white’ as an ethnicity or culture. White Trash (and White Trash Done Good) is used, much like Redneck, Hick, Bumpkin, and here in Cal the older Okie and newer Valley Trash, as an insult towards the choices people have made/are making in life, not towards anything that is beyond their control. That is the way in which these terms are mostly used nowadays, and so that is the way in which they are defined. How they were used, and thus defined, at some point in the distant past is interesting, but irrelevent to their current meaning.
Well, the term “white trash” has always struck me as much more deeply rooted in class prejudice than in race prejudice. The reaon for specifically using the adjective “white” has generally been because there has always been, unfortunately, such a wide range of alternatives used to apply to blacks in America.
Exactly.
Want an example of rich white trash? Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears. Skanks, I don’t care how much money they have. It’s not about where they’re from, it’s about what they do.
Over a hundred years ago? We’re talking 40 years ago. Not ancient history.
The term “trash” is class related. Adding “white” to it makes it race-related.
It’s like JerH says:
Yeah, all you have to say is one of the many multi-purpose slurs for ethnic minorites and you’ve made your point. No need to add “trash”. But, “those dang white folks down the street” doesn’t carry any baggage or sting. You have to add “trash” to get your point across.
I think the term “Ghetto” is a very analogous term to “White trash”. Black people use it. White people use it. It doesn’t apply to most black person that are poor or even all black person that live in an actual ghetto (e.g. a 70 year-old grandmother that knits sweaters in her ghetto apartment is not called “ghetto”). Likewise, rich celebrities like rappers can easily become or maintain their ghettoness. It is a lifestyle, an image, and a way of conducting yourself.
Precisely, Shagnasty.
I pretty much agree, except a white person can be white trash andi ghetto, but all the other colors of the rainbow are limited to just ghetto.
Yes, its class related, in the american sense of the term ‘class’, not the old european sense of the term. We choose our classes here, we arent born into them. Which ‘class’ you belong to in the US is a result of the choices you make, just as I said; White Trash is a label applied to people based on the choices they make or have made, just as ones ‘class’ is.
And yes, adding white to it makes it apply to only people of one skin color, but again that has nothing to do with culture or ethnicity any more than the term Blonde Bimbo has anything to do with culture or ethnicity.
I’m sure that very satisfying for someone born to poor parents. All they have to do is say “I’m upper class,” and POW!, they will be magically transformed.
Seriously, i’m no economic reductionist, but your “analysis” of what constitutes class in America is so naive and simplistic as to be laughable.
Hey Paul, don’t bust on West Virginia, your home state! I lived there for a while when I was in college (WVU) and we explored the whole state… West Virginians are some of the nicest people I have ever met. Yeah, WV ranks pretty low on the wealth scale, and yeah many of them are rednecks (I do not use “redneck” in an offensive way!), but I have seen much more white trash up here in Northern Virginia that I ever saw in WV…
Look, for what it’s worth, I agree with you about the class thing somewhat (we’re talking behavior, not socio-economic class and, BTW, I’m pretty dang American) and I have no problem saying someone is trash. (Britney got married and the groomsmen wore track suits with “pimp” written across the back? That’s trash.)
What I have the problem with is adding “white” to it. For the reasons stated above, it’s offensive. Why is it even neccessary to state the color of the person you’re disparaginging? I know white boys who act “ghetto” (which I think of a little differently from “trash”; it involves conspicuous overconsumption and flashy gold jewelry rather than just general slovenliness) and minorities who act “trashy”.
I seriously doubt I’ll disuade anyone from using the term; it’s trendy and I’ve have used it in the past. But, I’m just telling you why using it will offend certain people, particularly some older minorities.
In Gone With the Wind (ca 1937) the “house negroes” of the rich white folk were definitely a class above “poor white trash” such as the Slattery family, it’s delineated quite clearly.
I’ve often wondered about voodoochile’s point about white being a culture. To me it clearly is, but we don’t usually see it as such because it’s considered “normal” (with regional variations). Really, isn’t that what racists have a problem with, cultures other than their own - surely it isn’t really skin color?
BTW, my Granny, she had a mobile home, but my Auntie, she had a double-wide. 
Two women I admire and cherish.
“White trash” and “poor white trash” are epithets that were first used in the 1830’s by African American slaves in talking about white servants and whites from the lowest economic strata in the South.
That, of course has little bearing on how the term is perceived in the last 20-50 years.
Just though I’d let you know the origins.
I’d venture that the term is used mostly by whites about whites in that recent time period. Just my guess.
My Dad was a poor kid in depression era South Carolina. Years later, when I was old enough to understand, I’d hear him and my Uncle chatting about how such-an-such just never made good. Their outlook was that it didn’t matter what you had, it’s how you managed it.
Doing absentee landlord property management, I’m sometimes amazed at what I see in Section 8 (subsidised rent) properties. Some folk will keep a place as neat as a pin, with pleasant well-behaved children who do well in school. Others make me want to scrub myself with bleach when I leave-and sadly the kids are like windblown leaves. Poor doesn’t equal stupid, lazy or dirty, but some folks seem to think it’s an excuse to be all three.
Some choose to be trash. Others believe in recycling. 
It helps the flow. Two syllables, going up on the first and crashing with decisive finality on the second, works better in an insult. It also works with “nigger” vs “coon.” The latter may mean the same thing and be used the same way but it just lacks the bite of two syllables. And three syllables is too long and loses its spark; “poor white trash” is almost sympathetic and “jigaboo” is comical.
But Britney Spears’ groomsmen really dressed like that? Man, that’s trashy!
In Virginia we had “hillfolk,” who were respectable, and “hillbillies,” who weren’t and both could come from the same family. Then I moved back north and we had the Cleveland and Chicago equivalents to white trash, Polacks. You could be a perfectly respectable Polish person or you could be a Polack; it was a choice you made; it wasn’t made for you.
I want to also tell Paul in Saudi that it doesn’t sound like his mother was white trash. A coal-miner’s daughter? Just means her daddy had a job, at least when the mines were open. Perfectly respectable.
Y’know, where I went to school (small lib. arts college in rural New England), lots of kids I knew had folks with summer homes on the Maine coast (where I grew up), but all of them thought Mainers typically married their siblings and perhaps aspired to increasing their inventory of lobstah traps as a way of moving up in the world. “Maynards” was the term they used. Boy, if they thought my type were backward, they should have seen my kinfolk, the majority of whom still live in the hills of Oxford County where my parents grew up. Oh, yeah, I forgot: My college friends went skiing up there, so the locals probably sold them booze. I didn’t go up there often to ski, because it was too expensive.
I was always simultaneously amused and annoyed whenever someone who first met me at school would say “Wait, you’re from Maine? Seriously?” Like somebody from Cos Cob, CT, has any business being amazed that we’re not all beer-drinking shit-kickers. What was even more irritating was having our obligatory discussions on race relations in whatever seminars we had to attend to extoll the virtues of diversity, and all I could see were a bunch of rich white kids from private prep. schools discussing things they knew absolutely nothing about. At least I didn’t pretend to know what black kids in New York City felt like just because I lived in Westchester County. I couldn’t help wondering, though, if growing up in a poor state, in a family of relatively modest means (e.g., we couldn’t afford a summer home in Boothbay Harbor, though I’d never say were were poor ourselves) gave me more insight into the outsider in this environment than my pallor would suggest.
Needless to say, I had a jaundiced view of political correctness from an early age. I hated it before hating it was hip, because I was a Maynard, and that was never un-PC to the rich white kids I called my friends.