Why is it okay and not considered racist to call someone "white trash"?
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Anonymous
Same here, I'm the PP you quoted above. I grew up in West Virginia. Just saying that gives some people that exact image in their mind. Never mind my father was a teacher, all my siblings graduated from college, I have a Ph.D. and I'm a C-level executive. I'm still a "hillbilly" to many based simply on being from Appalachia. I am a white as the driven snow, but really, the WV jokes about incest, bare feet, moonshine, tooth to tattoo ratios and such are very offensive and not the least bit funny. I've heard hillbilly jokes from PC people who would never dream of telling a joke that slammed a person of color. |
takoma
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| Lynching is racist, and a lot of people call dialect jokes racist. These are so vastly different that using the same term for both makes the word almost meaningless. |
Anonymous
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I'm guilty of using it. Why? I grew up with the term. When someone says trash, trailer trash, white trash... The picture in my mind is always the same - poor white people. Honestly because growing up in a mostly white mid west, the poor people I knew where white. It wasn't until later that I realized what "white trash" inferred. So many people that use the term don't understand the undertones. I certainly didn't until much later.
My parents weren't racist at all, but they had a lot of sayings that were certainly not PC. I never took the sayings as racist because they were never said with a tie to racism. Another example - someone trying to 'jip' you means to rip off. I didn't realize that it really is gyp, as in gypsies. Jip in my mind was some sort of slang word for ripping off. |
Anonymous
One point: unless the implication is that all white people are "trash" then "PWT" is not racist. If anything, calling someone from WV PWT or a "hillbilly" is the opposite of racist, as it acknowledges diversity within white culture. You might just as well argue that the depiction of Toofer Spurlock on 30 Rock is racist, because it makes fun of black Harvard graduates. "White trash" may be a lot of things: mean, insensitive, outdated. But it's not "racist" in any meaningful sense of the world. |
Anonymous
Incorrect. "Hillbilly" is insensitive. "White trash" is racist. |
Anonymous
Incorrect. White trash is not racist. Not if racism means anything at all. "Racism" is defined as: the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. Please explain to me how, exactly, calling a tiny subset of white people in rural areas "white trash" reveals a "belief that all members of [the white] race possess characteristics or abiliities specific to that race" etc... Look, I get that for whatever P.C. reason people really, really want to see "white trash" as racist, but you've got no case. Try classism. You might get somewhere with that. |
Anonymous
| No. It is racist toward BLACK people. Explained up thread. |
Anonymous
The reason it is racist against black people is that the "regular" trash are assumed to be non-white, or you wouldn't need to add the "white." It is also classist to call poor people of any race "trash." |
Anonymous
Are you high? |
Anonymous
No that's stereotyping and prejudice. Racism is the systematic oppression of members of a group of people based upon their racial classification. It is manifested through accepted practices and beliefs (institutionalized racism), and actions by individuals toward other individuals that are either out in the open (overt) or hidden in coded language or practices (covert). The use of "white trash" is an example of the latter. |
Anonymous
Also, the fact that trash is the modifier for "white" makes this pretty clearly *not* a case of racism. Racism (of the institutional variety) would be where all whites are denied the right to buy housing in particular neighborhoods because "white people are trash". Informally you could make the case that someone who thinks that white people should not be permitted to buy houses in DC because "white people ruin everything and drive out decent folk" is a racist. But, no, a phrase like "white trash" which had its origins in middle-class white society cannot conceivably be argued to be "racist." |
Anonymous
Let's assume for the sake of argument that your definition is the correct one. In what way does referring to poor rural white sub-population show "the belief that every person of a race shares some characteristic other than their mutual race". This is obviously not the case, as explained up-thread. It's the reason the n-word is not "racist" when used by black folk, even when used in a derogatory manner. Because it's used to assert differences within the race (e.g. Chris Rock's iconic "n****rs versus black people" riff), *not* to assert that the race has some universal (negative) characteristic. |
Anonymous
No. You are still not getting it. The fact that "white" is the modifier for "trash" is what makes it racist. It makes perfect sense that it has its origins in white society. Think. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
<waves> Kentucky side of Appalachia here. We have much in common. |