White trash es un insulto despectivo racial y relacionado con la clase [1] [2] que se usa en inglés estadounidense para referirse a los blancos pobres , especialmente en las zonas rurales del sur de los Estados Unidos . La etiqueta significa una clase social dentro de la población blanca y especialmente un nivel de vida degradado. [3]Se utiliza como una forma de separar a los "buenos pobres" "nobles y trabajadores" de los "pobres malos" perezosos, "indisciplinados, ingratos y repugnantes". El uso del término proporciona a los blancos de clase media y alta un medio para distanciarse de la pobreza y la impotencia de los blancos pobres, miembros de una clase privilegiada, los blancos, que no pueden disfrutar de esos privilegios. [1]
El término ha sido adoptado para personas que viven al margen del orden social, a quienes se considera peligrosas porque pueden ser criminales, impredecibles y sin respeto por la autoridad política, legal o moral. [4] Si bien el término se usa principalmente de manera peyorativa por los blancos urbanos y de clase media como un significante de clase, [5] algunos artistas blancos se identifican a sí mismos como "basura blanca", considerándolo una insignia de honor, y celebran los estereotipos y los marginación de la blancura de las clases bajas. [1] [6] [7] [8]
En el uso común, el significado de "basura blanca" se superpone con " galleta ", que se usa en las zonas rurales de los estados del sur; " hillbilly ", relativo a la gente pobre de los Apalaches ; " Okie " con respecto a aquellos con orígenes en Oklahoma; y " campesino sureño ", respecto a los orígenes rurales; especialmente en el Sur. [9] La principal diferencia es que "redneck", "cracker", "Okie" y "hillbilly" enfatizan que una persona es pobre y sin educación y proviene de los bosques con poca conciencia e interacción con el mundo moderno, mientras que " basura blanca "- y el término moderno" basura de remolque "- enfatiza las supuestas fallas morales de la persona, sin tener en cuenta el entorno de su educación. Mientras que los otros términos sugieren orígenes rurales, "basura blanca" y "basura de remolques" pueden ser urbanos o suburbanos. [10]
Los estudiosos desde finales del siglo XIX hasta principios del siglo XXI exploraron generaciones de familias consideradas "de mala reputación", como la familia Jukes y la familia Kallikak , ambos seudónimos de familias reales. [11]
Terminología
La expresión "basura blanca" probablemente se originó en la jerga utilizada por los esclavos afroamericanos, aunque su uso generalizado actual se debe a que la utilizan los blancos de clase alta y media como una forma de denigrar a los blancos pobres que son diferentes de los "normales". ropa blanca". [1] Nancy Isenberg compiló la larga lista de nombres burlones que se han utilizado para referirse a los blancos pobres:
Gente desperdiciada. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Bribones. Basura. Okupas. Galletas. Comedores de arcilla. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Tolvas de brezo. Hillbillies. De baja depresión. Negros blancos. Degenera. Basura blanca. Rednecks. Camión de basura. Gente del pantano. [12]
Descripción y causas
En la imaginación popular de mediados del siglo XIX, la "pobre basura blanca" era una raza "curiosa" de gente degenerada, demacrada y demacrada que padecía numerosos defectos físicos y sociales. Eran sucios, inexpertos, andrajosos, cadavéricos, curtidos y demacrados, y tenían niños débiles con el abdomen distendido que estaban arrugados y marchitos y parecían mayores que sus años físicos, de modo que incluso los rostros de los niños de 10 años son estúpidos y pesados. ya menudo se vuelven hidrópicos y repugnantes a la vista ", según un maestro de escuela de New Hampshire. La piel de un sureño blanco pobre tenía un tinte "espantoso blanco amarillento", como "pergamino amarillo", y tenía un aspecto ceroso, o eran tan blancos que casi parecían albinos . Eran apáticos y perezosos, no cuidaban adecuadamente a sus hijos y eran adictos al alcohol. Los sureños de clase alta los miraban con desprecio. [13]
Harriet Beecher Stowe describió a una mujer basura blanca y sus hijos en Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp , publicado en 1856:
Agachada sobre un montón de paja sucia, estaba sentada una mujer miserable y demacrada, con ojos grandes y salvajes, mejillas hundidas, cabello enmarañado y despeinado y manos largas y delgadas, como las garras de un pájaro. De su flaco pecho colgaba un infante demacrado que empujaba con sus manitas esqueléticas, como para forzar un alimento que la naturaleza ya no le daba; y dos niños de aspecto asustado, con los rasgos demacrados y teñidos de azul por el hambre, se aferraban a su vestido. Todo el grupo se apiñó, alejándose lo más posible del recién llegado [ sic ], mirando hacia arriba con ojos grandes y asustados, como animales salvajes perseguidos. [14]
La basura blanca pobre generalmente solo podía ubicarse en la peor tierra del sur, ya que la mejor tierra fue tomada por los esclavistas, grandes y pequeños. Vivieron e intentaron sobrevivir en tierras arenosas o pantanosas o cubiertas de matorrales de pino y no aptas para la agricultura; por ello, se les conoció como "sandhillers" y "pineys". [15] Se vio que estos habitantes "duros" coincidían con su entorno: eran "pedregosos, achaparrados y arbustivos, como la tierra en la que vivían". [dieciséis]
Restringidos de ocupar cargos políticos debido a las calificaciones de propiedad, su capacidad de votar a merced de los tribunales, que estaban controlados por los terratenientes esclavistas, los blancos pobres tenían pocos defensores dentro del sistema político o la jerarquía social dominante. Aunque muchos eran agricultores arrendatarios o jornaleros, otros basureros blancos se vieron obligados a vivir como carroñeros, ladrones y vagabundos, pero todos, empleados o no, fueron socialmente condenados al ostracismo por la sociedad blanca "adecuada" al verse obligados a usar la puerta trasera al entrar. hogares "adecuados". Incluso los esclavos los despreciaban: cuando los blancos pobres llegaban pidiendo comida, los esclavos los llamaban "cabras callejeras". [17]
Los norteños afirmaron que la existencia de basura blanca era el resultado del sistema de esclavitud en el sur, mientras que los sureños estaban preocupados de que estos blancos claramente inferiores alterarían el sistema de clases "natural" que sostenía que todos los blancos eran superiores a todas las demás razas, especialmente a los negros. . La gente de ambas regiones expresó su preocupación de que si el número de personas blancas basura aumentara significativamente, amenazarían el ideal jeffersoniano de una población de hombres libres blancos educados como base de una democracia estadounidense sólida. [18]
En su estudio clásico, Democracy in America (1835), el aristócrata francés Alexis de Tocqueville ve el estado de los sureños blancos pobres como uno de los efectos del sistema esclavista. Los describe como ignorantes, ociosos, orgullosos, autoindulgentes y débiles, y escribe sobre los blancos del sur en general:
Desde su nacimiento, el sudamericano está investido de una especie de dictadura doméstica ... y el primer hábito que aprende es el de dominar sin esfuerzo ... [que convierte] al sudamericano en un hombre altivo, apresurado, irascible, violento, apasionado en sus deseos e irritado por los obstáculos. Pero se desanima fácilmente si no tiene éxito en su primer intento. [19]
Otra teoría sostenía que la condición degradada de los sureños blancos pobres era el resultado de vivir tan cerca de los negros y los nativos americanos. Samuel Stanhope Smith , un ministro y educador que fue el séptimo presidente de Princeton College , escribió en 1810 que los sureños blancos pobres vivían en "un estado de absoluta savagismo", lo que les hacía parecerse a los indios en el color de su piel y su ropa. una creencia que era endémica en el siglo XVIII y principios del XIX. Smith los vio como un obstáculo en la evolución de la corriente principal de los blancos estadounidenses, [20] una opinión que previamente había sido expresada por Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur en su libro de 1782, Letters from an American Farmer . Crèvecoeur, un soldado diplomático francés que se instaló en los Estados Unidos y cambió su nombre por el de J. Hector St. John, consideraba que los sureños blancos pobres no eran "... un espectáculo muy agradable" e inferiores al prototipo estadounidense que celebraba en su libro, pero todavía espera que los efectos del progreso mejoren la condición de estos borrachos mestizos, indómitos y medio salvajes que exhiben "las partes más horribles de nuestra sociedad". [21]
Para Ralph Waldo Emerson , el trascendentalista y preeminente conferenciante, escritor y filósofo estadounidense de mediados del siglo XIX, la gente pobre de todo tipo, incluidos los sureños blancos pobres, vivía en la pobreza debido a los rasgos inherentes a su naturaleza. Los pobres fueron "transportados por el Atlántico y transportados a América para deshacerse y trabajar, para hacer la tierra fértil ... y luego se acostaron prematuramente para hacer una mancha de pasto más verde ..." Estas personas a las que Emerson se refería " guano "estaban destinados a habitar los nichos más bajos de la sociedad, y los excluyó específicamente de su definición de lo que era un estadounidense . El "americano" de Emerson era de herencia sajona , descendiente de los daneses, escandinavos, sajones y anglosajones, conocidos por su "exceso de virilidad", su "ferocidad bestial" y, al menos a los ojos de Emerson, su belleza. Estos no eran rasgos que fueran compartidos por el pobre sureño blanco. Los estadounidenses pueden haber degenerado algo en comparación con sus antepasados, uno de los efectos debilitantes de la civilización, pero aún mantenían su superioridad sobre otras "razas", y los sureños blancos de todo tipo, pero especialmente los pobres, eran ellos mismos inferiores a sus compatriotas de Nueva Inglaterra y el norte. [22]
Algunos, como Theodore Roosevelt , veían a los blancos pobres "degenerados", así como a la masa de inmigrantes del sur y este de Europa (los del norte de Europa habían sido aceptados en la raza blanca anglosajona), como una parte importante de la población. problema del " suicidio racial ", el concepto de que los blancos pobres y los inmigrantes no deseados acabarían por procrear a los de la "raza" blanca dominante y superior, provocando su extinción o suplantación, en detrimento del país. [23]
According to Allyson Drinkard, in modern American society, to be considered "white trash" is different from simply being poor and white. The term
...conjures up images of trailer parks, cars on blocks, drug and alcohol abuse, family violence, neglected children, stupid adults, fist fighting, loud and abrasive language, poor dental and physical health, garishness, promiscuous women, rebel flag regalia, incest, and inbreeding.[1]
As a racial slur
In the journal Critique of Anthropology, J. Z. Wilson argues that the term "white trash" "stands as a form of racism",[24] and Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, writing in The Minnesota Review consider it a instance of "Yoking a classist epithet to a racist one."[25] It is described as a "racial slur" by Lucas Lynch,[26] and filmmaker John Waters considered it "last racist thing you can say and get away with."[27][28] In 2020, Reader's Digest included "white trash" on its list of "12 Everyday Expressions That Are Actually Racist".[29]
Historia
Beginning in the early 17th century, the City of London shipped their unwanted excess population, including vagrant children, to the American colonies – especially the Colony of Virginia, the Province of Maryland, and the Province of Pennsylvania – where they became not apprentices, as the children had been told, but indentured servants, especially working in the fields. Even before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade brought Africans to the British colonies in 1619, this influx of "transported" English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish was a crucial part of the American workforce. The Virginia Company also imported boatloads of poor women to be sold as brides. The numbers of these all-but-slaves was significant: by the middle of the 17th century, at a time when the population of Virginia was 11,000, only 300 were Africans, who were outnumbered by English, Irish and Scots indentured servants. In New England, one-fifth of the Puritans were indentured servants. More indentured servants were sent to the colonies as a result of insurrections in Ireland. Oliver Cromwell sent hundreds of Irish Catholics to British North America during the Irish Confederate Wars (1641–1653).[30]
In 1717, the Parliament of Great Britain passed the Transportation Act 1717, which allowed for the penal transportation of tens of thousands of convicts to North America, in order to alleviate overcrowding in British prisons. By the time penal transportation ceased during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), some 50,000 people had been transported to the New World under the law. When the American market closed to them, the convicts were then sent to Australia. In total, 300,000 to 400,000 people were shipped to the North American colonies as unfree laborers, between 1/2 and 2/3 of all white immigrants.[30]
The British conceived of the American colonies as a "wasteland", and a place to dump their underclass.[31] The people they sent there were "waste people", the "scum and dregs" of society. The term "waste people" gave way to "squatters" and "crackers", used to describe the settlers who populated the Western frontier of the United States and the backcountry of some southern states, but who did not have title to the land they settled on, and had little or no access to education or religious training.[1][32] "Cracker" was especially used in the south.
The first use of "white trash" in print to describe this population occurred in 1821.[33] It came into common use in the 1830s as a pejorative used by house slaves against poor whites. In 1833, Fanny Kemble, an English actress visiting Georgia, noted in her journal: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash'".[34][35]
The term achieved widespread popularity in the 1850s,[33] and by 1855, it had passed into common usage by upper-class whites, and was common usage among all Southerners, regardless of race, throughout the rest of the 19th century.[36]
In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the chapter "Poor White Trash" in her book A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also poor whites who are even more degraded and miserable. The plantation system forced those whites to struggle for subsistence. Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their community, and says that both blacks and whites in the area look down on these "poor white trash".[37] In Stowe's second novel Dred, she describes the poor white inhabitants of that swamp, which formed much of the border between Virginia and North Carolina, as an ignorant, degenerate and immoral class of people prone to criminality.[38] Hinton Rowan Helper's extremely influential 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South – which sold 140,000 copies and was considered to be the most important book of the 19th century by many people – describes the region's poor Caucasians as a class oppressed by the effects of slavery, a people of lesser physical stature who would be driven to extinction by the South's "cesspool of degradation and ignorance."[39]
Jeffrey Glossner of the University of Mississippi writes:
Continued work is needed to understand the material reality of the lives of poor whites and how they influenced surrounding social and political structures. Finding the ways in which their influence radiated through southern society can give us an image of the poor whites that is lost in the biased accounts handed down by elite contemporaries. The social and cultural history of this period, moreover, needs to be further integrated to disentangle image-making from social reality and show the place of poor whites in the South. ... While their voices are often unheard, we can gauge the broader importance of their presence through the social, political, and cultural developments of the period.[40]
The Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer makes a case for an enduring genetic basis for a "willingness to resort to violence" (citing especially the finding of high blood levels of testosterone) in the four main chapters of his book Albion's Seed.[41] He proposes that a Mid-Atlantic state, Southern and Western propensity for violence is inheritable by genetic changes wrought over generations living in traditional herding societies in Northern England, the Scottish Borders, and Irish Border Region. He proposes that this propensity has been transferred to other ethnic groups by shared culture, whence it can be traced to different urban populations of the United States.[42]
During the Civil War
During the Civil War, the Confederacy instituted conscription to raise soldiers for its army, with all men between the ages of 18 and 35 being eligible to be drafted – later expanded to all men between 17 and 50. However, exemptions were numerous, including any slave-owner with more than 20 slaves, political officeholders, teachers, ministers and clerks, and men who worked in valuable trades. Left to be drafted, or to serve as paid substitutes, were poor white trash Southerners, who were looked down on as cannon fodder. Conscripts who failed to report for duty were hunted down by so-called "dog catchers". Poor southerners said that it was a "rich man's war", but "a poor man's fight." While upper-class Southern "cavalier" officers were granted frequent furloughs to return home, this was not the case with the ordinary private soldier, which led to an extremely high rate of desertion among this group, who put their families well-being above the cause of the Confederacy, and thought of themselves as "Conditional Confederates." Deserters harassed soldiers, raided farms and stole food, and sometimes banded together in settlements, such as the "Free State of Jones" (formerly Jones County) in Mississippi; desertion was openly joked about. When found, deserters could be executed, or humiliated by being put into chains.[43]
Despite the war being fought to protect the right of the patrician elite of the South to own slaves, the planter class was reluctant to give up their cash crop, cotton, to grow the corn and grain needed by the Confederate armies and the civilian population. As a result, food shortages, exacerbated by inflation and hoarding of foodstuffs by the rich, caused the poor of the South to suffer greatly. This led to food riots of angry mobs of poor women, who raided stores, warehouses and depots looking for sustenance for their families. Both the male deserters and the female rioters put the lie to the myth of Confederate unity, and that the war was being fought for the rights of all white Southerners.[44]
Ideologically, the Confederacy claimed that the system of slavery in the South was superior to the class divisions of the North, because while the South devolved all its degrading labor onto what it saw as an inferior race, the black slaves, the North did so to its own "brothers in blood", the white working class. This the leaders and intellectuals of the Confederacy called "mudsill" democracy, and lauded the superiority of the pure-blooded Southern slave-owning "cavaliers" – who were worth five Northerners in a fight – over the sullied Anglo-Saxon upper class of the North.[45] For its part, some of the military leaders of the North, especially Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, recognized that their fight was not only to liberate slaves, but also the poor white Southerners who were oppressed by the system of slavery. Thus they took steps to exploit the class divisions between the "white trash" population and plantation owners. An Army chaplain wrote in a letter to his wife after the Union siege of Petersburg, Virginia that winning the war would not only result in the end of American slavery, but would also increase opportunities for "poor white trash." He said that the war would "knock off the shackles of millions of poor whites, whose bondage was really worse than that African." In these respects, the Civil War was in large part a class war.[46]
During Reconstruction
After the war, President Andrew Johnson's first idea for the reconstruction of the South was not to take steps to create an egalitarian democracy. Instead, he envisioned what was essentially a "white trash republic", in which the aristocracy would maintain their property holdings and an amount of social power, but be disenfranchised until they could show their loyalty to the Union. The freed blacks would no longer be slaves, but would still be denied essential rights of citizenship and would make up the lowest rung on the social ladder. In between would be the poor white Southerner, the white trash, who while occupying a lesser social position, would essentially become the masters of the South, voting and occupying political offices, and maintaining a superior status to the free blacks and freed slaves. Emancipated from the inequities of the plantation system, poor white trash would become the bulwark of Johnson's rebuilding of the South and its restoration into the Union.[47]
Johnson's plan was never put into effect, and the Freedmen's Bureau – which was created in 1865, before President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated – was authorized to help "all refugees and all freedmen", black and white alike. The agency did this despite Johnson's basic lack of concern for the freed slaves the war had supposedly been fought over. But even though they provided relief to them, the Bureau did not accept Johnson's vision of poor whites as the loyal and honorable foundation of a reconstructed South. Northern journalists and other observers maintained that poor white trash, who were now destitute refugees, "beggars, dependents, houseless and homeless wanderers", were still victimized by poverty and vagrancy. They were "loafers" dressed in rags and covered in filth who did no work, but accepted government relief handouts. They were seen as only slightly more intelligent than blacks. One observer, James R. Gilmore, a cotton merchant and novelist who had traveled throughout the South, wrote the book Down in Tennessee, published in 1864, in which he differentiated poor whites into two groups, "mean whites" and "common whites". While the former were thieves, loafers, and brutes, the latter were law-abiding citizens who were enterprising and productive. It was the "mean" minority who gave white trash their bad name and character.[48]
A number of commentators noted that poor white Southerners did not compare favorably to freed blacks, who were described as "capable, thrifty, and loyal to the Union." Marcus Sterling, a Freedmen's Bureau agent and a former Union officer, said that the "pitiable class of poor whites" were "the only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau's] great benevolence and its bold reform", while in contrast black freedmen had become "more settled, industrious and ambitious," eager to learn how to read and improve themselves. Sidney Andrews saw in black a "shrewd instinct for preservation" which poor whites did not have, and Whitelaw Reid, a politician and newspaper editor from Ohio, thought that black children appeared eager to learn. Atlantic Monthly went so far as to suggest that government policy should switch from "disenfranchis[ing] the humble, quiet, hardworking Negro" and cease to provide help to the "worthless barbarian", the "ignorant, illiterate, and vicious" white trash population.[49]
So, during the Reconstruction Era, white trash were no longer seen simply as a freakish, degenerate breed who lived almost invisibly in the backcountry wilderness, the war had brought them out of the darkness into the mainstream of society, where they developed the reputation of being a dangerous class of criminals, vagrants and delinquents, lacking intelligence, unable to speak properly, the "Homo genus without the sapien", an evolutionary dead end in the Social Darwinist thinking of the time. Plus, they were immoral, breaking all social codes and sexual norms, engaging in incest and prostitution, pimping out family members, and producing numerous in-bred bastard children.[50]
Scalawags and rednecks
One of the responses of Southerners and Northern Democrats after the war to Reconstruction was the invention of the myth of the "carpetbaggers", those Northern Republican scoundrels and adventurers who invaded the South to take advantage of its people, but less well known is that of the "scalawags", those Southern white who betrayed their race by supporting the Republican Party and Reconstruction. The scalawag, even if they came from a higher social class, was often described as having a "white trash heart". They were accused of easily mingling with blacks, inviting them to dine in their homes, and inciting them by encouraging them to seek social equality. The Democrats retaliated with Autobiography of a Scalawag, a parody of the standard "self-made man" story, in which a white trash southerner with no innate ambition nevertheless is raised to a position of middling power just by being in the right place at the right time or by lying and cheating.[51]
Around 1890, the term "redneck" began to be widely used for poor white southerners, especially those racist followers of the Democratic demagogues of the time. Rednecks were found working in the mills, living deep in the swamps, heckling at Republican rallies, and were even occasionally elected to be a state legislator. Such was the case with Guy Rencher, who claimed that "redneck" came from his own "long red neck".[52]
Eugenics
Also around 1890, the American eugenics movement turned its attention to poor white trash. As always, they were stigmatized as being feeble-minded and promiscuous, having incestuous and inter-racial sex, and abandoning or mistreating the children of those unions. Eugenicists campaigned successfully for laws which would allow rural whites fitting these descriptions to be involuntarily sterilized by the state, in order to "cleanse" society of faulty genetic heritages.[1]
In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead.[53][54] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[55] in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions.[56]
The Depression
The beginning of the 20th century brought no change of status for poor white southerners, especially after the onset of the Great Depression. The condition of this class was presented to the public in Margaret Bourke-White's photographic series for Life magazine, and the work of other photographers made for Roy Stryker's Historical Section of the federal Resettlement Agency. Author James Agee wrote about them in his ground-breaking work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), as did Jonathan Daniels in A Southerner Discovers the South (1938).[57]
A number of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agencies tried to help the rural poor to better themselves and to break through the social barriers of Southern society which held them back, reinstating the American Dream of upward mobility. Programs such as those of the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Department of the Interior; its successor, the Resettlement Administration, whose express purpose was to help the poor in rural areas; and its replacement, the Farm Security Administration which aimed to break the cycle of tenant farming and sharecropping and help poor whites and black to own their own farms, and to initiate the creation of the communities necessary to support those farms. The agencies also provided services for migrant workers, such as the Arkies and Okies, who had been devastated by the Dust Bowl – the condition of which was well-documented by photographer Dorothea Lange in An American Exodus (1939) – and been forced to take to the road, jamming all their belongings into Ford motorcars and heading west toward California.[57]
Important in the devising and running of these programs were politicians and bureaucrats such as Henry Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture; Milburn Lincoln Wilson, the first head of the Subsistence Homesteads Division, who was a social scientist and an agricultural expert; and Rexford G. Tugwell, a Columbia University economics professor who managed to be appointed the first head of the Resettlement Agency, despite refusing to present himself with a "homely, democratic manner" in his confirmation hearings. Tugwell understood that the status of tenant farmers would not change if they could not vote, so he campaigned against poll tax, which prevented them voting, since they could not afford to pay it. His agency's goals were the four "R's": "retirement of bad land, relocation of rural poor, resettlement of the unemployed in suburban communities, and rehabilitation of farm families."[57]
Other individuals important in the fight to help the rural poor were Arthur Raper, an expert on tenancy farming, whose study Preface to Peasantry (1936) explained why the south's system held back the region's poor and caused them to migrate; and Howard Odum, a University of North Carolina sociologist and psychologist who founded the journal Social Forces, and worked closely with the Federal government. Odum wrote the 600-page masterwork Southern Regions of the United States, which became a guidebook for the New Deal. Journalist Gerald W. Johnson translated Odum's ideas in the book into a popular volume, The Wasted Land. It was Odum who, in 1938, mailed questionnaires to academics to determine their views on what "poor white" meant to them. The results were in many ways indistinguishable from the popular views of "white trash" that had been held for many decades, since the words that came back all indicated serious character flaws in poor whites: "purposeless, hand to mouth, lazy, unambitious, no account, no desire to improve themselves, inertia", but, most often, "shiftless". Despite the passage of time, poor whites were still seen as white trash, a breed apart, a class partway between blacks and whites, whose shiftless ways may have even originated from their proximity to blacks.[57]
"Trailer trash"
Trailers got their start in the 1930s, and their use proliferated during the housing shortage of World War II, when the Federal government used as many as 30,000 of them to house defense workers, soldiers and sailors throughout the country, but especially around areas with a large military or defense presence, such as Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi. In her book Journey Through Chaos, reporter Agnes Meyer of The Washington Post travelled throughout the country, reporting on the condition of the "neglected rural areas", and described the people who lived in the trailers, tents and shacks in such areas as malnourished, unable to read or write, and generally ragged. The workers who came to Mobile and Pascagoula to work in the shipyards there were from the backwoods of the South, "subnormal swamp and mountain folk" whom the locals described as "vermin"; elsewhere, they were called "squatters". They were accused of having loose morals, high illegitimacy rates, and of allowing prostitution to thrive in their "Hillbilly Havens". The trailers themselves – sometimes purchased second- or third-hand – were often unsightly, unsanitary and dilapidated, causing communities to zone them away from the more desirable areas, which meant away from schools, stores, and other necessary facilities, often literally on the other side of the railroad tracks.[58]
In the mid-20th century, poor whites who could not afford to buy suburban-style tract housing began to purchase mobile homes, which were not only cheaper, but which could be easily relocated if work in one location ran out. These – sometimes by choice and sometimes through local zoning laws – gathered in trailer camps, and the people who lived in them became known as "trailer trash". Despite many of them having jobs, albeit sometimes itinerant ones, the character flaws that had been perceived in poor white trash in the past were transferred to so-called "trailer trash", and trailer camps or parks were seen as being inhabited by retired persons, migrant workers, and, generally, the poor. By 1968, a survey found that only 13% of those who owned and lived in mobile homes had white collar jobs.[58]
Outlook
Allyson Drinkard, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice/Sociology, writes that as economic inequality continues to grow in the United States, the number of poor white people in both rural and urban areas will continue to grow. At the same time, as white privilege declines in general and minorities continue to hold a growing percentage of jobs in a declining job market, the poor white segment of the population will continue to be caught in the paradox of being a part of a privileged class, but without being able to benefit from their supposed privilege. Being white will no longer enable them to get and hold a good job, or to earn a suitable income. Poor white people, like other oppressed minorities, are born trapped in poverty, and – again, like other minorities – are blamed for their predicament, and for not being able to "raise themselves" out of their social conditions and economic status. Meanwhile, upper- and middle-class whites will continue to label them as "white trash" in order to solidify their feeling of superiority by making sure that "white trash" people are seen as outsiders.[1]
Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America, says that
White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibilty – is proof that American society obsesses mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They are not who we are." But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not.[59]
En la cultura popular
White popular culture
American pop culture connects both drinking and violence to being a white, poor, rural man.[60]
Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1854 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains a chapter entitled "Poor White Trash". Stowe wrote slavery produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe.” She further expressed that this “inconceivably brutal” group of whites resemble “some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.”[61]
White supremacist Daniel R. Hundley's 1860 book Social Relations in Our Southern States includes a chapter entitled "White Trash". He used the supposed existence of poor whites with bad blood to argue that genetics and not societal structure was the problem, and that therefore slavery was justified. He called white trash the "laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth", describing their appearance as "lank, lean, angular, and bony, with ... sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief."[61]George Bernard Shaw uses the term in his 1909 play The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, set in the wild American west. The prostitute Feemy says to Blanco "I'll hang you, you dirty horse-thief; or not a man in this camp will ever get a word or a look from me again. You're just trash: that's what you are. White trash."
Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking (1986), based on the cooking of rural white Southerners, enjoyed an unanticipated rise to popularity.[62][63][64] Sherrie A. Inness writes that authors such as Mickler use humor to convey the experience of living on the margins of white society, and to expand the definition of American culinary history beyond upper-class traditions based on European cooking.[65]
By the 1980s, fiction was being published by Southern authors who identified as having redneck or white trash origins, such as Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Tim McLaurin.[66] Autobiographies sometimes mention white trash origins. Gay rights activist Amber L. Hollibaugh wrote, "I grew up a mixed-race, white-trash girl in a country that considered me dangerous, corrupt, fascinating, exotic. I responded to the challenge by becoming that alarming, hazardous, sexually disruptive woman."[67]
In 2006, Toby Keith released a platinum album called White Trash with Money.
Dolly Parton regularly referred to herself as white trash telling Southern Living "White trash! I am. People always say, 'Aren't you insulted when people call you white trash?' I say, 'Well it depends on who's calling me white trash and how they mean it.' But we really were, to some degree. Because when you're that poor and you're not educated, you fall in those categories.".[68][69] Talking about her fame she said "There’s nothing like white trash at the White House!"[70][71] She cheerfully told Rolling Stone she will always remain "a white-trash person".[72]
President Jimmy Carter quoted a supporter who called him "white trash made good".[73] In his 2001 biography An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood, Carter wrote about poor white people in the 1920s and 1930s rural Georgia "For those who were lazy or dishonest, or had repulsive personal habits, 'white trash' was a greater insult than any epithet based on race."[74] People magazine lampooned a book on Carter as a "Southern white trash novel" [75]
- 1900 – Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland's play Po' White Trash, exposes complicated cultural tensions in the post-Reconstruction South, related to the social and racial status of poor whites.[76]
- 1907? – O Henry's short story "Shoes" refers to the male protagonist "Pink Dawson" – which the narrator consistently confuses with "Dink Pawson" – as "Poor white trash".[77]
- 1986 – Ernest Matthew Mickler's self-deprecating cookbook White Trash Cooking contains recipes from the American Southeast.[78]
- 2010 – In the "Brown History Month" episode of the animated television series The Cleveland Show (season 1, episode 19, first broadcast on May 10, 2010), the protagonist, Cleveland Brown, a black man (voiced by a white man), lives next door to Lester Krinklesac, a white man (voiced by a black man) who has a Confederate battle flag displayed on his house. When the two come into conflict during Black History Month, Lester wears a t-shirt which says "Proud White Trash".
Black popular culture
Use of "white trash" epithets has been extensively reported in African American culture.[79][80][81] Black authors have noted that blacks, when taunted by whites as "niggers", taunted back, calling them "white trash"[80] or "crackers". Some black parents taught their children that poor whites were "white trash".[82] The epithet appears in black folklore.[83] As an example, slaves would, when out of earshot of whites, refer to harsh slave owners as a "low down" man, "lower than poor white trash", or "a brute, really".[84]
- 1948 – Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee explores images of "white trash" women. In 2000, Chuck Jackson argued in the African American Review that Hurston's meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the eugenics discourses of the 1920s.[85]
Ver también
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Referencias
Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h Drinkard, Allyson (2014). "'White Trash'". In Coleman, M.J.; Ganong, L.H. (eds.). The Social History of the American Family: An Encyclopedia, Volume 3. SAGE Publications. pp. 1452–3. ISBN 978-1-4522-8615-0.
- ^ Newitz, Annalee; Wray, Matthew (1996). "What is "White Trash"?: Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the U.S.". Minnesota Review. 47 (1): 57–72. ISSN 2157-4189.
- ^ Donnella, Leah (August 1, 2018). "Why Is It Still OK To 'Trash' Poor White People?". Code Switch. Washington, D.C.: National Public Radio. Archived from the original on May 25, 2019. Retrieved August 3, 2018.
- ^ Wray (2006), p. 2.
- ^ Hartigan (2003), pp. 97, 105.
- ^ Hartigan (2003), p. 107.
- ^ Hernandez, Leandra H. (2014). "'I was born this way': The performance and production of modern masculinity in A&E's Duck Dynasty". In Slade, A.F.; Narro, A.J.; Buchanan, B.P. (eds.). Reality Television: Oddities of Culture. Lexington Books. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-73-918564-3.
- ^ Carroll, Hamilton (2011). Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Duke University Press. pp. 102–103. ISBN 978-0-82-234948-8.
- ^ Wray (2006), p. x.
- ^ Wray (2006), pp. 79, 102.
- ^ Rafter, Nicole Hahn (1988) White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919
- ^ Isenberg (2016), p. 320.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 136, 146, 151-52, 167, 170.
- ^ Stowe, Harriet Beecher (2000) [1856]. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. pp.105-06. Quoted in Isenberg (2016), pp. 148-49
- ^ Isenberg (2016), p. 146.
- ^ Burton, Warren (1839) White Slavery: A New Emancipation Cause Presented to the United States. Worcester, Massachusetts. pp.168-69; quoted in Isenberg (2016), p. 146
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 149–50.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), p. 136.
- ^ Painter (2010), pp. 126-27.
- ^ Painter (2010), pp. 117–18.
- ^ Painter (2010), pp. 107–109.
- ^ Painter (2010), pp. 167–74, 186–87.
- ^ Painter (2010), pp. 250–53.
- ^ Wilson, J. Z. (December 2002) "Invisible racism - The language and ontology of 'White Trash'" Critique of Anthropology v.22 n.4 pp.387-401
- ^ Newitz, Annalee and Wray, Matthew (Fall 1996) "What is 'White Trash'?: Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the U.S." The Minnesota Review n. 47, pp.57-72
- ^ Lynch, Lucas (September 12, 2018) "How the Term 'White Trash' Reinforces White Supremacy" The Society Pages
- ^ Lubrano, Alfred (May 22, 2017) "Is 'White Trash' finally taboo?" The Philadelphia Inquirer
- ^ Rodriguez, Gregory (June 10, 2008) "Why they bash 'white trash'" The Baltimore Sun
- ^ Helligar, Jeremy (June 17, 2020) "12 Everyday Expressions That Are Actually Racist" Reader's Digest
- ^ a b Painter (2010), pp. 41–42.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. xxvi-xxvii, 17-42.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 105–132.
- ^ a b Isenberg (2016), p. 135.
- ^ Kemble, Fannie (1835) Journal. p. 81
- ^ Wray (2006) suggests that the term may have originated in the Baltimore-Washington area during the 1840s, when Irish and blacks were competing for the same jobs. (pp. 42 Archived June 24, 2016, at the Wayback Machine,p.44 Archived June 10, 2016, at the Wayback Machine). The quote from Kemble is reprinted in page 41 Archived June 11, 2016, at the Wayback Machine of the book.
- ^ Newitz, Annalee; Wray, Matthew (July 1, 1997). "What is White Trash?" (PDF). In Hill, Mike (ed.). Whiteness: a Critical Reader. NYU Press. p. 170.
- ^ Wray (2006), pp. 57–58.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), p. 137.
- ^ Helper, Hinton Rowan (1968) [1857] The Impending Crisis of the South. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press; quoted in Isenberg (2016), p. 137
- ^ Glossner, Jeffrey (July 12, 2019) "Poor Whites in the Antebellum U.S. South (Topical Guide)" Archived 2019-07-12 at the Wayback Machine, H-Net
- ^ Particularly the chapter "Borderlands to the Backcountry: The Flight from Middle Britain and Northern Ireland, 1717-1775"
- ^ Fischer, David Hackett, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, ( ISBN 0-19-506905-6), Oxford University Press, 1989.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 159, 163–65.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 165–66.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 157–60.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 157–60, 172.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 176–78.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 177–80.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 179–80.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 180–81.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 182–86.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), pp. 187–90.
- ^ Lombardo, 2011: p. ix.
- ^ Indiana Supreme Court Legal History Lecture Series, "Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough:"Reflections on 100 Years of Eugenics in Indiana, at In.gov Archived August 13, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Williams v. Smith, 131 NE 2 (Ind.), 1921, text at Archived October 1, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Larson 2004, pp. 194–195 Citing Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200, 205 (1927)
- ^ a b c d Isenberg (2016), pp. 206–230.
- ^ a b Isenberg (2016), pp. 240–247.
- ^ Isenberg (2016), p. 321.
- ^ Jason T. Eastman and Douglas P. Schrock, "Southern Rock Musicians' Construction of White Trash" Archived December 4, 2018, at the Wayback Machine, Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (2008), pp. 205-219
- ^ a b Culture, Center for the Study of Southern. "Revisiting Deliverance". southernstudies.olemiss.edu. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ McDowell, Edwin (September 22, 1986). "Popular Cookbook Celebrates Down-Home Fare". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
- ^ Edge, John T. (2007) "White Trash Cooking, Twenty Years Later", Southern Quarterly. 44(2): pp. 88-94;
- ^ Smith, Dina (2004). "Cultural Studies' Misfit: White Trash Studies". The Mississippi Quarterly. 57 (3): 369–388. ISSN 0026-637X. JSTOR 26466979.
- ^ Inness, Sherrie A. (2005). Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 147. ISBN 978-1-34-953164-6. Archived from the original on May 4, 2019. Retrieved May 4, 2019.
- ^ Bledsoe, Erik (2000) "The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers" Archived July 14, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, Southern Cultures 6#1 pp. 68–90
- ^ Hollibaugh, Amber L. (2000). My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home. Duke University Press. pp. 12, 209. ISBN 978-0822326199.
- ^ "Dolly Parton thinks she's 'white trash'!". News24. September 12, 2014. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ https://www.timeinc.net/southernliving/culture/celebrities/dolly-parton-the-southern-living-interview
- ^ "Dolly Parton Is for Everyone - Pitchfork". pitchfork.com. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ "Icon and Identity: Dolly Parton's Hillbilly Appeal". Southern Cultures. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ "Interview: Dolly Parton". Rolling Stone. October 30, 2003. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ ""White Trash" — a cultural and political history of an American underclass". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ Stephenson, Wen (September 16, 2002). "Books in Review". Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019 – via American Prospect.
- ^ "Picks and Pans Review: Dasher: the Roots and the Rising of Jimmy Carter". PEOPLE.com. April 10, 1978. Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ Hester, Jessica (2008). "Progressivism, Suffragists and Constructions of Race: Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland's 'Po' White Trash'". Women's Writing. 15 (1): 55–68. doi:10.1080/09699080701871443. S2CID 161502612.
- ^ Henry, O (1907). "Shoes". The best short stories of O. Henry. Random House. p. 146. ISBN 978-0-679-601227.
- ^ "Oxford American.com". September 9, 2006. Archived from the original on September 9, 2006. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
- ^ Wilson, William Julius in Cashmore, Ernest and Jennings, James eds. (2001) Racism: Essential Readings p.188
- ^ a b Kolin, Philip C. (2007) Contemporary African American Women Playwrights. p.29
- ^ Roediger, David R. (1999) Take Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to be White pp.13, 123
- ^ Obiakor, Festus E. and Ford, Bridgie Alexis (2002) Creating Successful Learning Environments for African-American Learners With Exceptionalities p.198
- ^ Prahlad, Anand (2006) The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. volume 2, p.966
- ^ Nolen, Claude H. (2005) African American Southerners in Slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction. McFarland. p.81 ISBN 9780786424511
- ^ Jackson, Chuck (2000). "Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics". African American Review. 34 (4): 639–660. doi:10.2307/2901423. JSTOR 2901423.
Bibliography
- Glossner, Jeffrey. "Poor Whites in the Antebellum U.S. South (Topical Guide)". H-Slavery.
- Hartigan, John Jr. (2003). "Who are these white people?: 'Rednecks,' 'Hillbillies,' and 'White Trash' as marked racial subjects". In Doane, A.W.; Bonilla-Silva, E. (eds.). White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-41-593582-1.
- Isenberg, Nancy (2016). White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-312967-7.
- Painter, Nell Irvin (2010). The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-33974-1.
- Wray, Matt (2006). Not Quite White: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-82-233882-6.
Further reading
- Berger, Maurice (2000). White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness. ISBN 0-374-52715-6.
- Goad, Jim (1998). The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies Hicks and White Trash Became Americas Scapegoats. ISBN 0-684-83864-8.
- Hartigan, John, Jr. (2005) Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3597-2.
- Isenberg, Nancy. "Excerpt from White Trash". Penguin Random House Canada.
- Pitcher, Ben (2007). "The Problem with White Trash" (review of Not Quite White). DarkMatter. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3873-4.
- Rasmussen, Dana (2011). Things White Trash People Like: The Stereotypes of America's Poor White Trash. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 9781241610449.
- Sullivan, Nell (2003). "Academic Constructions of 'White Trash'" in Adair, Vivyan Campbell, and Sandra L. Dahlberg, eds. (2003). Reclaiming Class. Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. pp 53-66. Temple University Press. ISBN 1-59213-021-6.
- Taylor, Kirstine (March 2015). "Untimely Subjects: White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South". American Quarterly 67. pp.55–79.
- Wray, Matt and Newitz, Annalee eds. (1997). White Trash: Race and Class in America. ISBN 0-415-91692-5.
enlaces externos
- Allison, Dorothy "A Question of Class"
- Entertainers loved By trailer trash (videos)