White trash

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White Trash (English literally means "white trash," mutatis mutandis as "white trash ") is a pejorative term for members of the white underclass , especially in Appalachia , the South and the rural parts of the United States . This term was coined in the southern states but is now used throughout the United States.

Word origin

Even with the beginning of British settlement there was a landless lower class , often referred to as rubbish or waste people by the arrogant Puritans who brought the British class system with them . In North Carolina in 1729 there were only 3,281 landowners out of 36,000 people. The use of the term white trash can be traced back to around 1830. Originally it was used by African-American slaves in relation to whites who, like them, had to work in the fields, but were often worse off than the slaves themselves in terms of their living conditions. The use was also used in the slaves' chants, such as “Hey don't lak whiskey but he jest drinks a can. Honey! I'd ruther be a nigger dan po 'white man ”(“ ... I'd rather be a nigger than a poor white man ”). Until around 1900 the term was used exclusively in the southern states.

Wilbur Joseph Cash published his work on the class relations of the southern states in 1941: The Mind of the South . For him, the poor white man is no longer the hard-working farm worker, but the almost emasculated poor white man domesticated by the rich planter aristocracy, which is expressed in the evolutionary regression of his limp physique. He is "chinless", so his changed social position also changes his physiognomy . In his masochism he directs his hatred exclusively against the blacks instead of the plantation owners. The ambivalence of this literary fantasy, which vacillates between class analysis and eugenics, consists in the fact that it contains both the utopian dream of rebuilding the “old” agrarian south and the restoration of its masculine values, as well as a tendentially racist apology of the superiority and privileges of white resources - and see the upper classes.

Outside the southern states, too, the unskilled, non-unionized first generation of industrial workers has been referred to more often as white trash since the beginning of the 20th century . After the Great Depression of the 1930s, this was the name given to the white unemployed, seasonal and casual workers, but above all to the impoverished tenants who refused to leave their land to work as unskilled workers in the factory, as they did in Erskine Caldwell's 1932 novel Tobacco Road . People assigned to white trash were considered immobile (or at most seasonally mobile); they rejected the Fordist imperatives, and this attitude is clearly expressed in the non-degrading photographs of Walker Evans . The term white trash marked a border or decline position between the whites and the black lower classes, whose abandoned houses they often had to use. This marginalized position is z. B. in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee . During the Second World War , the number of arms workers housed in trailers increased again. After the war, these groups of poor whites became more mobile and invaded the residential areas of the white middle classes who perceived them as a threat. This crossing of boundaries was often sanctioned with violence and contempt.

Current usage

In the United States today, white trash is used to describe the white lower class and the living conditions ascribed to it, which are mainly dominated by desolate family conditions and alcohol problems. This stereotype is characterized by trailer estates consisting of mobile homes , tattoos and the main diet with unhealthy, extremely sugary or fatty foods. These people would have given up; their health is miserable, the suicide rate is increasing.

Related but not identical terms are redneck and hillbilly (for example: backwoodsmen) as well as " trailer (park) trash" or "latino trash".

The term played a major role in the 2016 presidential election campaign when the book Hillbilly Elegie: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by the then unknown author JD Vance was published in August 2016 . He describes the impoverished working class of Scottish-Irish descent in the Rust Belt , from which he himself comes, with its extremely patriotic culture, in which loyalty counts a lot and in which honor counts. Poverty is a family tradition here: the ancestors of these people were day laborers in the southern states, then tenants, miners, uneducated factory workers and machinists, and finally the unemployed. He describes that the life situation of the impoverished whites is no different from that of the poor blacks, and from that of the Latinos only because they are more optimistic: “[...] I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors and all were white. ” Donald Trump - one reviewer - seems like a messiah to these“ lost souls ”. In the 2016 election campaign, Hillary Clinton described "half" of Trump's supporters, the alleged racists, misogynists and homophobes, as deplorables , "because they think somehow he's going to restore an America that no longer exists. So just eliminate them from your thinking [...] ”(“ because they think that somehow he will fix an America that no longer exists. Just forget these people ... ”). This statement was interpreted as a provocation against the white trash , similar to a statement by Obama in 2008: "[...] they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them [...]" ("they cling to firearms or religion or antipathy towards people who are not like them ”). Clinton later regretted her testimony.

Scientific debate

Dina Smith of Drake University opposes the use of the metaphor white trash in academic and popular discourses, which showcase and distort the living life of the working white class, especially in the southern states, and which appear to be technologically-ideologically backward and superfluous let. These discourses, according to Smith, paint a nostalgic picture of southern society, in which class boundaries and the distances between them were still clearly marked in order to maintain the dominance of the educated middle classes.

The editors of the anthology White Trash: Race and Class in America , Matt Wray and Anna Lee Newitz, hope to reconcile the precarious white identity with the liberal ideas of multiculturalism and diversity through cultural studies , but according to Dina Smith they use them an ahistorical term of white trash, which is limited to its current pejorative meaning and ignores the historical, latent racist shift in meaning from the Poor White to the White Trash, the natural born losers . An aestheticization of the white trash lifestyle, which extends to the publication of extremely successful nostalgic white trash cookbooks for the middle class, is also an exploitation of the ever-newly produced poverty in the form of goods: the cookbooks would not show empty refrigerators, but those of mass consumption preferred foods containing numerous preservatives from the 1950s. The nostalgia marks a social distance from which these groups appear harmless. Since today one should not represent black poverty for reasons of political correctness, one must differentiate oneself from the white poor.

What is characteristic of the people who are now referred to as white trash, however, is not so much their immobility in the labor market, because they serve as a flexible service reserve, but their immobile, poverty-related consumption patterns. This shift in attention from the increasingly unstable class relationships to the supposedly immobile white trash, from the flexible labor market to the rigid patterns of the consumer sphere, is an expression of the increasing obsolescence of forms of life and the fear of becoming superfluous through flexible technologies, but at the same time an indication of the only one A place where the identity of the superfluous white working class can survive - just as white trash. Dian Smith warns against confusing the signified white trash with the signified ; it is a sign of something completely different.

Liberal authors usually explain the hatred of the white lower classes with the loss of their position in the social "pecking order". For example, the US-based publicist Andrea Köhler justifies the xenophobia of poor whites with the fact that their psycho - hygienic self-protection mechanism , which was still intact in the 1980s, no longer worked. This would have allowed them in President Johnson's day to look down on the even poorer African-Americans and the social programs established for them. This self-protection no longer works today against the socially rising Hispanics and other minorities.

JD Vance, on the other hand, does not explain the anger and fatalism of poor whites primarily in terms of racism: they compared their position not to that of African-Americans and Hispanics, but to that of their parents or even grandparents, who were far more comfortable, while their white compatriots looked down on them like natives.

In literature, music and film

The book The Southern Poor-White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road from Shields McIlwaine (1939) was the first comprehensive analysis of the representations of the poor whites in the literature of the South. McIlwaine tries to show that this group's poverty is a class-related phenomenon and that they do not see themselves as trash ; they are coded that way from the outside, but poverty eventually invades self-perception.

In her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison describes life in Greenville (South Carolina) under the conditions of rural poverty, clearly defined and coded southern class and power relations and in the face of the contempt of the white middle classes in her novel Bastard Out of Carolina .

In his song Copperhead Road , singer Steve Earle alludes to the fact that the “White Trash” was recruited for the army for the Vietnam War. American singer Willy DeVille used the term on the album Loup Garou in the song White Trash Girl . In it he describes the problematic living conditions of a girl who belongs to the "white trash". In 1992 the punk rock band NOFX released the album White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean . The term also occurs in the song Darkside by the nu-metal band Crazy Town from 2000. The singer Everlast , also from the United States, covers the subject in the piece White Trash Beautiful , released in 2004 . Eminem picked up the term in his single White Trash Party . A remix of Marilyn Manson's song Cake and Sodomy is titled White Trash .

Films like Daddy and Them from 2001, for example , make reference to the subject.

literature

  • Matt Wray, Annalee Newitz: White Trash: Race and Class in America , Routledge: New York 1997. ISBN 0415916925 .
  • Nell Sullivan: Academic Constructions of 'White Trash' , in: Vivyan Campbell Adair, Sandra L. Dahlberg (Eds.): Reclaiming Class. Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America , Temple University Press, 2003. ISBN 1592130216 .
  • Nancy Isenberg : White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America . New York: Penguin, 2016 ISBN 978-1-101-60848-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nancy Isenberg: White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America . New York: Penguin, 2016.
  2. ^ Button: New York 1941.
  3. ↑ Michael Uebel: Masochism in America , in: American Literary History, 14 (2002), pp. 389-411.
  4. ^ German: Die Tabakstraße , Bern 1948, filmed freely in 1941 by John Ford (German title: Tabakstraße ).
  5. ^ Dina Smith: Cultural Studies' Misfit: White Trash Studies , in: Mississippi Quarterly , University of Mississippi (n.d.), p. 369 ff.
  6. ↑ Peter Winkler: In the USA, more and more white people are dying «death through desperation» , in NZZ , March 24, 2017.
  7. ↑ Harper Collins: New York 2016.
  8. ↑ Hannes Stein: It was the “White Trash” that made Trump what he is. In: Die Welt, August 18, 2016.
  9. ^ Dan Merica, Sophie Tatum: Hillary Clinton expresses regret for comment , in: edition.cnn.com, September 12, 2016.
  10. ^ Dina Smith: Cultural Studies' Misfit: White Trash Studies , in: Mississippi Quarterly , University of Mississippi (n.d.), p. 375.
  11. ^ For example, the cover of an album by Nicole Dollanganger with the song White Trashing . [1]
  12. ^ Smith, p. 376 ff.
  13. ^ Smith, p. 387.
  14. ↑ Andrea Köhler: With the Anger of Despair , in: NZZ , 23 September 2016.
  15. ↑ JD Vance: Hillbilly Elegy: The Story of My Family and a Society in Crisis. Ullstein Verlag, 2018.
  16. ↑ Alec MacGillis: The Original Underclass. In: The Atlantic, September 2016.
  17. ↑ Dina Smith: Cultural Studies' Misfit: White Trash Studies , in: Mississippi Quarterly , University of Mississippi, (undated) p. 369 ff.
  18. ^ New York 1992. Adaptation: Defenseless - Shadows over Carolina , 1996.