White trash was first used in print in 1821. It’s one of those terms that manages to insult pretty much everyone all at the same time. Obviously, it is insulting to those to whom it is aimed. It also manages to be racist in that it implies that white trashy people have to be differentiated from the regular trashy people. You know, everyone who isn’t a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. (Except here in South Louisiana where the KKK was A OK with Catholics. If you can’t beat ‘em, I guess.)
This ideology that whiteness equals economic privilege is deeply imbued in American culture to this day. Peggy McIntosh continuously conflates the two in her 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. In the film Greenbook, which I confess I have not and will not see, the white main character tells the Black main character that he, the white guy, is Blacker because of his lower class. This is something I have personally experienced. On multiple occasions. Black and other people of color even (still!) do it to each other. Call each other Oreo, coconut, or banana. Black, brown, or yellow on the outside but white on the inside for doing or liking “white people shit”. The people saying it aren’t thinking: Black people are supposed be poor, lack formal education, come from broken homes, be struggling in the ‘hood while white folks are supposed to be well off in the suburbs. For most it simply is.
Therefore, white trash, it must be understood, are not normal white people. Normal white people are middle and upper class, educated and hardworking, they are all that is good about America. Normal white people are not just normal white people, they are normal people. Everyone else is other, less than. Everyone else is defacto trash. When white people behave in ways that are not normal, when white people lack formal education, struggle with poverty, are not ‘good’ it threatens the prevailing social order of whiteness as supreme. This evokes strong, universally negative emotions from the normal people the most powerful of which is contempt.
Back in the day one of the key values that separated poor white people from normal white people was land. Having it, and having land that was of actual value. This is true to this day. Wealthy neighborhoods isolate themselves through zoning that also, mysteriously, leaves the neighborhoods strangely white. Within these affluent enclaves, residents have access to safety, better education, stronger infrastructure, and a better, healthier, and longer all-around life. Being historically barred from homeownership is a huge percentage of the wealth gap between average Black and white families.
Many poor white families, especially urban families, do not own property. If poor rural white families own property it is often worth little to barely more than nothing. For these families there is little infrastructure: whatever the racial background both poor rural and poor urban communities often live in food deserts without access to healthcare. Whole districts lack hospitals. Public schools in both are underfunded and overwhelmed. Violence is a norm.
In modern times, left or right, white poverty garners little sympathy. White poverty undermines the bootstrap mythology the right clings to, so they castigate those suffering in destitution as slothful losers drowning in self-pity. The left cast them as ignorant yokels whose racism blinds them to the fact that they are voting against their own self interests. And, like other groups in the US, poor whites are told not only is the poverty they were born into their own fault, but it is a moral failing. The implication is that not only does being poor strip us of our individuality and freedoms, by needing or accepting government help poor folks of any background actually keep others from being free.
This lie is told and upheld because a true appraisal of our history would force us to confront things we don’t want to deal with. So, we write the uncomfortable out of it. The Civil War becomes about State Rights instead of slavery. The ethnocide and genocide of the indigenous population becomes Manifest Destiny. Redlining and lynching don’t make it into our history books at all. We ignore the pervasiveness of a class hierarchy in the United States and the only poor white people we read about are the tiny minority who become rich. We prefer the myth.
In truth poor whites were seen as a threat to the elite classes, especially in the South. The “triple evils”, as Martin Luther King, Jr called the trifecta of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism existed (and exists) throughout America, but they were arguably most blatant in the antebellum South.* Black Americans were decimated by the American institution of race-based chattel slavery but poor whites were negatively affected by it in numerous ways. For this and many other reasons, from the antebellum period to today, potential unity between Black Americans and poor whites terrifies Southern white elites. Then and now they recognize that it places their power in jeopardy.
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)
This is the main reason there was no system of universal or public education in the deep South prior to the Civil War. Literate poor whites might get their hands on abolitionist or worker’s rights literature. God forbid they share that information with the enslaved. This is one motivation for why it was illegal to teach enslaved persons to write. This meant that those in the lowest classes, free and enslaved, white and Black, remained ignorant. Ignorant and distrustful of government, and politically vulnerable. Even as the elites oppressed and abused poor whites they promulgated the false idea of a “Solid South”. A South in which all whites of all classes vote the same way out of the same phony belief that all whites are elevated by anti-Black racism.
The second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century brought in science to reinforce the inequality of American class structure. This is what people reference when they talk about European immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Greece not initially being white in America. These and other immigrants as well as local lower class whites were considered a separate and inferior race. Unlike Black people, Asians, and Indigenous people these groups were never stripped of their humanity, their citizenship, or enslaved by state or federal government. But they would be oppressed, suppressed, and victim to often violent, even lethal, prejudice and bigotry. In this era class was not just hereditary, it was genetic. People of this time believed that “blood will tell” and a person’s exterior and manner were the result of “good breeding”. Class was not simply something we were born into. It was something we inherently were.
And then came eugenics.
Sources
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/us-elections-2016-who-can-vote/index.html
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/02
https://www.vpr.org/post/how-enslaved-woman-sued-her-freedom-18th-century-massachusetts#stream/0
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/02/vermont-slavery-ban/7200493/
https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/vermont-1777-early-steps-against-slavery
http://www.mrheintz.com/how-many-signers-of-the-declaration-of-independence-owned-slaves.html
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/poor-whites-have-been-written-out-of-history-for-a-very-political-reason
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/books/review/white-trash-by-nancy-isenberg.html
https://medium.com/@ebruenig/the-undeserving-poor-a-very-tiny-history-96c3b9141e13
https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/
https://www.ushistory.org/us/5b.asp
https://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/2777?lang=en
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/indentured-servitude-in-the-colonial-u-s/
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/30/633891473/why-its-time-to-retire-the-disparaging-term-white-trash
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/08/01/605084163/why-its-still-ok-to-trash-poor-white-people
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/origin-white-trash-class-still-issue-u-s
*That is not to say there were not abuses taking places all over the country and throughout our history.