White Trash: The Construction of an American Scapegoat

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA97/price/open.htm

Equality is simultaneously the greatest accomplishment and worst failure of America. It is the place where idealism and reality come to blows in American culture. Despite the glossy veneer of "political correctness" which has been painted over the rust and corrosion of centuries of racism and classism, the enduring American necessity for a social "other" has chosen working class whites as the focal scapegoat of our time.

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Representations of working class whites in the popular media are responsible for the dissemination of "white trash" as well as "good country folk" stereotypes in society. The working class white, placed in these two distinct roles, serves as a personified id and superego for the collective psyche of America, particularly of middle and upper class whites.

The "white trash" portrayal represents the little devil on one shoulder -- embodying racism, ignorance, violence, filth, and base desires. He operates outside of societal boundaries with an emphasis on the "id's" instinct and primalism. The "good country folk" portrayal represents the little angel on the other side -- embodying simplicity, loyalty, faith in religion and humanity, and a connection to family and community. This "superego" maintains moral absolutes in a world where such ideals no longer belong.

Society has not chosen one to be the representative model, but instead uses (and I mean that in the harshest sense) this dichotomy to fulfill its own desires on either end of the spectrum. As "id", the working class white is burdened with all the crimes and guilt of the white race over time. This allows the audience to feel justifiable hatred toward a group which they can demonize and thereby release guilt and aggression unto -- while hating what is worst within themselves. As "superego", the working class white is used to nostalgize and idealize the desire for a simpler life. Thus enabling the audience to reassure itself of qualities they hope are best within themselves in a kind, moral world. These images reappear over time and in many forms of media. They are considered for their impact on public perception and treatment of working class whites.

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The derisive treatment of working class whites by middle and upper class whites stems from two emotions within themselves: fear and guilt. Working class whites are the embodiment of uppers worst fears..fear of slipping in the class system, fear of social isolation and fear of this socially unstable class that retains an emphasis on physicality rather than intellect and moral judgements rather than ambiguous relativity.

One option is to take the worst historical attributes of whites and placing them on those whites who are most powerless and isolated in society. Then you can blame and hate them for their crimes against humanity and your own. Upper class whites can join with blacks and other minorities, thereby alleviating their guilt, taking attention off themselves and bonding with minorities against poor whites. Uppers are still pitting the two groups against each other; they have merely switched sides. For proof, just take a look at recent voting patterns. The liberal, well educated white votes alongside minorities against politically conservative working class whites.

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Labeling someone as a "poor white" is a paradox -- juxtaposing connotations that are at polar extremes in American rhetoric and thought. It is a label that is uncomfortable for those using it as well as those identified by it. The original derisive term was "poor white trash." Rather than abbreviating itself to "poor white" however, it has become "white trash." This takes the emphasis off of the economic difficulties of the class, and places the importance on the moral qualities of the people that make up this social group.

But the truth is, working class whites have no choice but to work, and to work in thankless, physically demanding jobs which society's habits necessitate, but no one wants to perform. These jobs are looked down upon because they require little education and they place one in the lower level of social hierarchy. The job complaints of these men do not center around board meetings, not making junior partner, who got the nicest company car, or even paying off college loans. Their problems are on the job injuries and deaths, explosions, shift work year after year, no opportunity to ever receive a promotion, protecting their seniority, and providing health care for their families....not to mention paying the bills.

This class should theoretically be distinguishable for economic reasons. But our capitalist society teaches that we all get what we deserve -- the rich and the poor. This is further complicated if one is white. The cultural baggage of white skin includes the myths of power, education, wealth and opportunity.

If one is white and does not succeed there are no social excuses, though they exist for all other marginalized groups. The implied problem must therefore be laziness or stupidity. Yet the marginalization of this group is not so different. The folks also live within a social construct that teaches different values and offers no visible option for a path different from that of their family and social structure. And there are no social organizations offering "poor white" scholarships, or "poor white" loan programs, nor are wealthy whites willing to mentor the working class white's children by helping with college or job training. Being white, in some sense, actually harms their chance of receiving aid or encouragement if they chose to pursue education or a different lifestyle from that of their families.

Thanks for posting this. A lot to digest right now.

However, it's late and I only have one thing to say. We all know there is a white underclass in America. You don't have to call them trash, rednecks or otherwise. That underclass will increase as the middle-class slowly disappears unless we throw out those white people at the top of the heap who really are the trash.

for the day crowd

"victims" too. Give white people victim status and then, watch out!
911 did that for white americans and we're still not finished killing people.

I for one have no problem with having financial aid for poor people, no matter what their color. I have a hard time giving too much sympathy to the white underclass, since they stupidly vote with the white assholes who are hurting them.

I take exception with your statement that "the cultural baggage of white skin includes the myth of power, education, wealth and opportunity." Sorry to disagree, but in our system, it's not a myth. When the "white underclass" reaches the level of the "black underclass" then I will agree with you.

It's a good post. Very thought provoking. Kind of a sadness about rich white folks using poor white folks. The real sadness to me is that poor white people continue to support the rich white people who are using them. Now that's a phenomenon that needs some talking about.

A losing game for oppressed people is playing "who's oppressed more" in my opinion. No one is happy at being the most oppressed group in society, or at least shouldn't be. I don't think the article is pushing a "white victim" angle, I think it's the age old story of rich people pitting whites against blacks - which started with the first racist laws in North America.

"the cultural baggage of white skin includes the myth of power, education, wealth and opportunity."

I think his point was the "no excuse for not being rich" for poor whites is a myth. The essay was directed towards liberals I believe, not outright bigots or racists.

"I have a hard time giving too much sympathy to the white underclass, since they stupidly vote with the white assholes who are hurting them."

That's too bad I think. Sharpton has pointed out that while black people vote for Democrats almost all the time, the Dems won't "take them home" - so is Sharpton saying that blacks are stupid for voting with the assholes who are hurting them? Unfortunately, the Republicans *do not* have a monopoly on classism in politics today.

a personal friend and all around good soul Stanley...this is a good read

Stanley ran for NY Gov on the Green Party ticket in 2002

Americans like to believe that they live in a classless society. Most
Americans defiantly identify themselves as middle class, although economic inequality is greater in the United States than in most advanced Western nations.

Offering an important revision of conventional wisdom, Stanley Aronowitz demonstrates that class remains a potent force in the United States. Aronowitz shows that class need not be understood simply in terms of socioeconomic stratification, but rather as the power of social groups to make a difference. Aronowitz explains that social groups from different economic and political positions become ruling classes when they make demands that change the course of history. For instance, labor movements, environmental activists, and feminists have engaged in class struggles as their demands for power reconfigured the social order. The emerging global justice movements—comprised of activists from heterogeneous social and political backgrounds—also show potential for class formation. Written by a prominent scholar and social activist, this book offers a stunning reconceptualization of the meaning and significance of class in modern America.

is because he acts proud of his ignorance. I grew up lower middle class in a working class rural white area and had that overbearing attitude pushed on me the whole time. Reading books was considered a complete loser activity and football and hunting were considered everything.

Can't even go into the racism I observed. And another thing I observed is how many working class white guys felt so entitled to their union mining and steelworker jobs, but when those jobs went overseas, very few of them would even dream of taking the sort of pink collar jobs I worked at or going to community college. Even though I managed to put myself through college with the incredibly low-cost loans of the eighties.

I agree with Solomon, the victim thing, especially since 9-11, has been ridiculous. I cannot muster up much sympathy for working class whites until I see less racism, abuse of women, and more respect for education and work.

Not to stereotype, because I do see hard-working people all the time, but even then I will get disappointed when that hard working person says something like "Nuke the Arabs" and so on.

Add in Fox News and Rush and O'Reilly, also being listened to by a lot of middle class people, and it's depressing to see.

Looks like that's exactly what you did.

"I cannot muster up much sympathy for working class whites until I see less racism, abuse of women, and more respect for education and work."

Your attitude is exactly what the article talks about. You'll find those same racist and sexist attitudes among working class blacks - are you going to tell me you'll have no sympathy until they straighten up and renounce bigotry and abuse of women and respect for education and work?

Self-hating worker?

I heard part of Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" on audiotape - the part where he goes over his own personal experiences with white people and black people and says black people have given him far less grief. I would have to agree with him based on my own experiences.

After growing up, I moved to the city and have lived in four states in three large cities, one small town and one medium city. Overall, minority people have been nice to me and middle class whites have been nice to me. Most working class people have been nice too, but that is also the place I have encountered negative attutudes and people with big chips on their shoulders.

I take people as they are and there are good and bad people in every group, but this is just what I have experienced.

The Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction era was at first organized and headed by upper-class whites, and studied terror and violence were its chosen instruments.... When the physical subjection of the black man was achieved...the necessity for violence decreased, and upper-class Southerners could very well afford to see themselves as the even-minded children of light and peace. The whole idea of a specially vicious attitude towards blacks prevalent among lower-class whites is an upper-class myth. It was primarily a technique that the elite used to divorce itself from unflattering deeds no longer productive

This is from The Crucible of Race.

The notion that poor whites are singlehandedly responsible for American institutional racism doesn't stand up to even a casual look. I mean, think about it. Are the bankers who deny loans to minority businesspeople and would-be homeowners poor white trash? What about the Supreme Court that upheld segregation in the Plessy case? The legislatures that created Jim Crow? (At that time, remember, poor whites generally could not vote either, thanks to property and poll tax requirements.) The guys who cooked up this unjustified war that is killing lots of poor people of many colors?

But there's a common tendency to pretend that things are so. I'll never forget a post at DU last spring when the war began that read "Well I hope the rednecks are happy now, they got what they wanted!"

Are Bush, Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz rural poor whites? Last I checked, they were at the very center of the nation's power structure, and they're the ones who are ultimately responsible for this war.

Take a look at this entry from popular, Manhattan/Williamsburg-centric, hipper than thou Blog, "Low Culture." The writer doesn't call the people he disdains "white trash," however; This guy is a budding writer, so he's more specific. They are: "white ethnic proles."

Who are the white ethinic proles, you may ask? According to the Low Culture bloger, they are the people who were riding the Staten Island Ferry when it crashed. You know, the dead, the maimed, the traumatized.

I kid you not.

A friend--whose white-ethnic prole father was returning home on the Ferry when it crashed--e-mailed teh link. He's okay, BTW. But what I read kinda stunned me.

--
Tragedy
When letters containing anthrax began arriving at certain offices with the depressing regularity of the J. Crew catalog or solicitations for low interest credit cards, there was much talk of whether or not the spores had been "weaponized" or not.
Weaponized. It was a neat neologism that hinted at both intent and maddening randomness: something banal had been made into a weapon, and like a handgun or a hunting knife, it could accidentally kill you. But the term was also falsely ameliorative: it suggested that anthrax (or planes and buildings three months before) don't kill people, weaponized anthrax kills people.

With yesterday's awful Staten Island Ferry crash, we're on the verge of a new term as we see everything that was once banal turned implacably, irrevocably tragic. The Staten Island Ferry is something a joke to New York snobs, a means of transporting the type of stereotypical "white ethnic" proles mocked in Working Girl each morning and discreetly returning them to "wherever they're from" each night. Now, like so many things before, it has been tragedized.

http://www.lowculture.com/archives/000157.html
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Grrr...

Thank you for posting the excerpt, WCTV. It helped me to understand what I was reading--and feel something more than disgust.

I was born poor white trash - "trailer trash" as the other kids in school so charmingly referred to us. I'm the youngest of 13, and was raised by a mother who was working to keep six kids fed without a penny from our father, who was off screwing anything in skirts and drinking. She never took a penny in charity from anyone. We didn't have most of the "stuff" that most American kids take for granted - even in those days, kids expected certain things as entitlements. We didn't have them. But we had books, thanks to public libraries, we had a roof over our head most of the time, even if it was abysmally sordid living quarters at time. We were clothed, even if the clothes were handmade, hand-me-downs, or bought from thrift stores. We were fed, even if buying a lunch at school or even having a cookie in our lunch sacks was out of the question.

And all but two of us worked our way up and out of that extreme poverty, by our own hard work to get an education, to acquire marketable skills, and to move ourselves out of the rundown travel trailers and cheap tarpaper shacks we grew up in. Our parents were ill-educated and ignorant - my father didn't finish 8th grade, and my mother only finished 10th. College was out of the question for any of us (no one ever explained scholarships and grants to me, so I screwed off too much in school to qualify). All but one of us rejected the racism and ignorance we were brought up with.

My point is that you cannot make assumptions about what someone will become based on the circumstances under which they were born. Not all poor white trash grows up racist, ignorant, and conservative. Not even most. One of the biggest mistakes the Democrats have ever made was to allow the right wing to co-opt the working class of this country. Based on fiscal policies, those are the folks who should be most solidly with us, as they were in earlier decades - the blue-collar workers, the laborers, the folks without economic advantages. But we've allowed ourselves to be painted as elitists, opposed to the things Joe Sixpack enjoys, and have been abandoned by them. It's possible to be progressive and still appeal to the working folk of this country (Wellstone was good at that - he never forgot the small farmers and blue-collar workers were the backbone of his party), and until we relearn that lesson, we will continue to come in second.

I had similar experiences, but my immediate family was never poor, my dad had a steady job with the Navy. I never forgot my roots, since my extended family still lived in the trailer parks (some still do). When I was a kid, I thought we were quite rich since we lived in a house instead of a trailer :) My cousins had been called "trailer trash" at school since before they could remember. Frankly, I'm sick of the stereotypes on DU that all the poor whites living in trailers are redneck fundie bigots who beat their wives, or even worse, poor misguided souls that need an enlightened rich leader to teach us the right way to think.

"One of the biggest mistakes the Democrats have ever made was to allow the right wing to co-opt the working class of this country. Based on fiscal policies, those are the folks who should be most solidly with us, as they were in earlier decades - the blue-collar workers, the laborers, the folks without economic advantages. But we've allowed ourselves to be painted as elitists, opposed to the things Joe Sixpack enjoys, and have been abandoned by them. It's possible to be progressive and still appeal to the working folk of this country (Wellstone was good at that - he never forgot the small farmers and blue-collar workers were the backbone of his party), and until we relearn that lesson, we will continue to come in second."

You certainly got that 100% right, in my opinion.

I grew up 'welfare poor' and lived among my brothers and sisters of color in various low income housing developments.

I won't go into the rest of my sob story, but suffice it to say, classism is a serious issue along with racism.

Interesting article.

I'm "native american" and growing up, I had a lot of animosity to those that are labelled "white trash." It seemed as if all of them hated us and I had no sympathy for their poverty and an almost hatred for their political leanings. That's changed as I've gotten older and become more familar with the role economics and exploitation play in U.S politics.

It's interesting that this should be posted today because I ride a light rail to work. Today, a mother in her early 20's got on with her daughter who looked to be between 2 and 3 years of age. They were white and they appeared to be very poor. The little girl wore a long purple velvet dress and brown boots. She sat their smiling and cluthing a plastic doll that had no clothes and appeared to be very battered. She smiled at me and I smiled back at her and waved to which she waved back.

I don't know how or why this mother or daughter ended up as impoverished as they appeared to be. I don't know what the mother's politics are or if she's a racist. But I felt sorry for her and her daughter.

Tim Wise follows a lot of the points made in his article Collateral Damage: Poor Whites and the Unintended Consequences of Racial Privilege.

The article does agree with the class isolation of poor whites, but differs in that poor whites still have a higher social status than the poor of color.

www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-09/30wise.cfm

(no social principle is true 100% of the time). I grew up part of the time in government housing projects side-by-side with poor families of color as well as poor white families. Bad as we white kids had it, the kids of color had it even worse - there's societal prejudice against all poor folks, but I never had anyone get off an elevator because I got on one, or had a store security guard follow me around, or got stopped driving because I had a higher percentage of melanin in my epidermis. They did.

I don't think the article said poor whites have the same social status as blacks. I certainly believe that poor whites have more interests in common with poor blacks, and generally speaking these two groups should be on the same side of most economic and political issues. The fact that they aren't is the legacy of racism - which was started in the Americas to do just that - make sure that white indentured servants, black slaves, and natives wouldn't join up to drive out the bosses, masters, and invaders.

though I wish the author would learn that paragraphs are a good thing ;-)

The point about the racializing of poverty is an excellent one, and I would tend to see it as a way to avoid the issue of class. Even as squeamish as America is about discussing race, class seems to be an even bigger taboo sometimes. It's certainly more a threat to the establishment.

After all, if white America can no longer assume that poverty is a "black thing," and they are constantly reminded that tens of millions of people every bit as white as they have not been able to escape from poverty, they might start questioning the system, and we can't have that.

A while back, i noticed the deteriorated condition of an outbuilding attached to my house. The wood rot was sooo bad, i had stapled old linoleum flooring over the holes to keep the wind out a few years ago... and have not touched it since.

Well, it struck me in a lucid moment, that the outbuilding looked like whomever lived there was "white trash". I don't know why i felt that, but somehow flooring and junky glue exteriors on houses indicates poverty and poor taste... and that was MY HOUSE... and deep hidden away in my american raised heart, was a fear of ever being labelled white trash... it somehow stands for everything i pretend i am not... and even in my "enlightened" ;-) ha ha... old age... it was a strong enough motivator to get me to spend 1000's of dollars and weeks of time changing the building that nobody could call me white trash by looking at my house.

Your post hits on that deep, almost subconscious subterfuge that white trash has come to reflect as a stereotype in my life, though in fact it has no tangible meaning really. No person is trash... i know that in my heart... yet people make many judgements, and of all the more demeaning ones, to be labelled amongst the neocon lowlife is a strong motivator.