What I'm posting here is an essay I wrote three or four few years ago about the term "white trash" and its casual use by Northern liberals.
The piece is political, but at the time I wrote it I wasn't attempting to say anything about presidential politics. Looking at it now, it seems relevant to the discussions about the blue-red divide that have taken place on dkos and elsewhere.
I'm aware that more than one theory exists about the derivation of the term "white trash." Perhaps I've put my money on the wrong theory, but even so, I don't think that would undercut my thesis too badly.
Essay after the break.
Sharecroppers, Kmart Shoppers
When I was growing up in Alabama and North Florida, I heard the words white trash much less frequently than I hear them today in Center City Philadelphia, but back home they packed a different kind of wallop. I remember sensing in white trash a peculiar nastiness that distinguished it from run-of-the-mill gutter talk, some submerged layer of derisiveness that my parsing of the words could not explain. I was an adult before I explicitly understood that white trash had originated as the Southern gentry's designation for lower-class whites, who in their poverty and supposed laziness and immorality weren't any better than blacks; that to the plantation owner, white trash and nigger amounted to two sides of one coin.
The origins of the term white trash are understood by few Northerners, but even so I find it remarkable that the term has moved into the realm of publicly acceptable speech in the North. In Philly and elsewhere you'll hear it used by many a pious liberal who wouldn't knowingly utter an ethnic slur to save his or her life. In fact, white trash has developed into a sort of hipster shorthand for ignorance, bigotry and xenophobia, and even for morally neutral things like poverty, rural living and country accents. Educated society's scruple against disparaging others on the basis of their cultural identity, which doesn't always hold for Arabs, say, or Germans, doesn't always hold for poor white Southerners either. Emphasis on poor.
The dominant strain of white trash sentiment in the North is good old-fashioned contempt for one's social inferiors. Such contempt is never a big shock in any form it takes; the only odd thing about this white trash sentiment is that it exists among educated liberals, people to whom race-contempt and gender-contempt are unquestionably taboo.
Americans on the left and right alike are bedeviled by an almost neurotic class-obliviousness. We get weepy on both sides of the divide when we ponder the idea that America is great and unique because only here can so many people start with nothing and succeed (an idea which tacitly suggests that anyone who doesn't succeed must be at grave personal fault). But the question isn't, and hasn't been for a long time, whether a talented and industrious individual can succeed here--he or she can succeed, which isn't true in every country by any means--the question is how ordinary people fare. Contemplation of ordinary people, however, leads us into rough intellectual waters which our national mythology is ill-equipped to help us navigate, and so we sometimes find it convenient to grasp at examples of exceptional people's success and pretend that these exceptions constitute rules. A curious result of all this is that many left-leaning types are just as willing as rock-ribbed conservatives to run people down for their poverty (with a standard exemption given for race). This liberal class-blindness, which allows otherwise fair-minded people to deride their economic inferiors as trash, is really not too distinct from the conservative race-blindness that allows some to suggest that everything would be fine in the ghetto if all the black people would quit drinking forties and get off their lazy asses and get a job. Liberals, of course, would rather be struck dead than make such an assertion about conditions in the ghetto. That's because liberal credentials these days are earned one hundred percent from race awareness and zero percent from class awareness.
A second major strain of white trash sentiment here in the North is an odd tendency toward frivolous white trash glorification, as exemplified by what I call the Earl Shirt. The Earl Shirt is a standard-issue work shirt that has an employee's name (e.g., Earl) stitched over the pocket. The Earl Shirt goes through the first part of its career being unhappily worn by a gas station attendant or bread truck driver, until--at such time as the Shirt gets a bad stain, or its owner gets a new job, or dies--the owner of the Shirt, or his estate, takes the curious step of donating the article of clothing to the Salvation Army.
But who would want a shirt with someone else's name on it?
Hipsters, that's who, because the Earl Shirt is eventually bought and worn by some young resident of Center City or the East Village or Berkeley or Madison, someone who, equipped with an outrageous sense of irony, infuses the Earl Shirt with multitudes of clever meanings yet misses the point that the original Earl couldn't wait to peel the damn thing off every day. Thus some of the world's most intellectually privileged young men breezily masquerade as bread-truck Earls; the real Earls, meanwhile, never try masquerading as intellectual elites, and are probably happy just to have gotten rid of the Shirt.
Maybe I take the Earl Shirt too seriously, but it's hard for me to imagine a young lefty in the pink thirties or the beatnik fifties attiring himself this way, except out of honest solidarity with the workers. Today it has somehow become appropriate to giggle about the workers. Earl! Get it? Earl? Apparently it never crosses anyone's mind that poor white people might be offended by seeing a symbol of their economic lot treated as a badge of chic.
I suppose this weird frivolity can be seen as a form of populism. Places like Center City are full of privileged young white people who, though their political sympathies run in favor of the downtrodden, have never been trod upon very much; so maybe some members of this privileged class, by pretending to ally themselves with white trash, gain a certain class-legitimacy in their own eyes. The problem is that this attempt at glorification doesn't fly. It comes across as either buffoonery or mockery, depending on whether you view it kindly or not so kindly. To complicate matters, white trash glorification sometimes conjures up what is worst about some poor Southern whites--persistent racism--without doing justice to what is sympathetic about them. And just for one more layer of paradox, the Northerners who unthinkingly evoke racism through white trash frivolity are sometimes the same ones who, mostly on account of Southern racism, feel so free and easy about laying on a bad Southern accent when they wish to denote stupidity.
For those Northerners whom I am accusing of white-trash contempt and white-trash frivolity, I think it might be an enlightening experience to visit two institutions that exist in every sizable Southern town. First on the agenda would be a trip to a Kmart or Wal*Mart, there to observe poor white shoppers rummaging through racks of eight-dollar shirts and stocking up on economy-pack diapers. Second would be a trip to any public library for a glance at Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans and James Agee's Depression-era document on sharecroppers in Alabama. The point of the exercise would be that today's Kmart shoppers and the Depression's white sharecroppers are more or less the same people--just altered a bit by history.
Once, white sharecroppers stood alongside miners and factory workers at the focus of American liberal sympathy. In later years, when civil rights issues moved into social consciousness and an increased prosperity diminished the economic hardships of many rural whites, poor whites were pretty much forgotten in the lefty imagination. This has left poor white people with a serious public image problem. In the old days, there was always the notion of simple, dignified country people--the salt of the earth--to counterbalance the opposing stereotype of ignorant, licentious, dangerous cretins. But poor whites today, who are not as poor as they used to be, and who are often as alienated from the land as middle-class suburbanites, no longer qualify as the salt of the earth in anyone's imagination, and thus are often represented as pure cretins. Yet it is a mammoth act of historical obliviousness to forget that today's Kmart shopper was yesterday's disenfranchised sharecropper. Such obliviousness puts us uncomfortably close to the old plantation owners who were the first people to utter the words poor white trash.