>--- shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> I live in Webb's state
> > and the people who
> > live here mock rednecks, white trash, etc -- and I
> > don't live in Northern
> > VA, either!
>
>As they did where I grew up in West Virginia.
>However, white trash was not applied broadly to
>everybody who was white,poor and lived in a trailer
>home (or worse). It was a term reserved more for what
>most LBOers might call the white "lumpen proleteriat"
>:) That's the difference...at least, where I grew up.
>
>BTW, where in Virginia do you live?
Actually, what they tend to get called these days is ghetto. :) It doesn't matter where they live or what ethnicity or race, from what I can tell. It's behavior. Britney Spears is ghetto. Kfed = ghetto. etc.
I haven't discerned fine distinctions here, because I've only been here just over a year, but I know what you mean from my home town region where wealthy students and professors at a liberal arts colleges would call them white trash (bad poor people) and hicks (good poor people -- they didn't really know they were poor; they just assumed). Among those so-labeled, the words were hillbilly and hick, though I don't recall any special distinctions as to good v. poor. Good= people who tried hard, followed the rules, and if they didn't it was just poor education/lack of knowledge about the right way to behave. Bad == people who deliberately violated middle class norms in terms of comportment, clothing, hair styles, cars, food, sexual habits.
The same dynamic held in Limpdick, only there is was:
as a nation, lots of people think that southern states are filled with rednecks, hicks, hillbillies, etc.
the actual inhabitants of such states, though, are annoyed by this stereotype -- not because they don't think such people exist, just that they don't like being called them. Rather, they would point fingers at some group within state more properly labeled hick, redneck, white trash, etc. (Never mind that someone from NY would think they ALL were...)
So, coastal Limpdickians believed tnat the rednecks lived in C. Florida.
But in C. Florida, they would be annoyed to learn they were all called rednecks... etc. etc.
I read Matt Wray's Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness earlier this year. Not bad, some interesting points to add to discussion but I'm too lazy to dig the book out and refresh memory. (Matt Wray was an editor of the Bad Subjects' volume, White Trash, to which Doug contributed years ago.)
shag
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)