[lbo-talk] trash talk (was Webb and Anti-beauty rant)

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Sat Jun 14 09:59:24 PDT 2008


ha. i can always count on your for an imaginative method of answering! more inline:

At 11:12 AM 6/14/2008, Dwayne Monroe wrote:


>I'm pretty sure she's talking about ABC's newest sitcom, "Lazy and
>Slovenly Husband Paired With Hot Overachieving Wife Mismatch Couple
>Comedy Number 25".
>
>Here's a script excerpt which might explain von RantyPants' concerns:
>
>
>SCENE: Kitchen.
>
>HOT WIFE accidentally gets whipped cream on her finger and slowly,
>suggestively licks it off. SLOVENLY HUSBAND walks in.
>
>SLOVENLY HUSBAND (after obvious pause): That reminds me, have you seen
>my new underwear?
>
>
>
>LAUGH TRACK.

excelente! is this a spoof of desperate housewives? speaking of, in that article, my hackles were raised when she wrote: "skank-wear" which, as you know, irks because it is code for gendered trash talk: any woman who is highly sexual and / or wears clothes to suggest she is is shoved down the class-ladder no matter where she supposedly resides. which reminded me of the Webb thread (and I agree with Eric about Webb).

The problem with Webb is that it's not like there aren't better analyses out there with which he might have come to understand the issues he's writing about. for someone who supposedly did a modicum of research (maybe i'm being generous here), he seems fixed on ignoring less racist and sexist explanations and sentiments.

OTOH, while I sympathize with Joseph and have personally witnessed the kind of crap he and Webb are talking about several times right on this list, I also get annoyed with the whole thing and throw up my hands. The resentment exists, but Webb is a demagogue and whips up that resentment. Which is creepy. And Webb isn't the only one. They are characters who hang out at Freepers and other forums, who seem to have made a life out of the demagoguery.

Anyway, the fellah who strikes me as having a balanced analysis here is Matt Wray. Since I was lazy, I didn't look for book, but I did find an article that is a pretty decent summary of his book, Not Quite White. (Doug -- have him on the radio show!)

That Ain't White

The long and ugly history of 'trash' talk

By Matt Wray

White Trash. For many, the name evokes images of trailer parks, homegrown meth labs, and beat up Camaros, rural poor whites with too many kids and not enough government cheese. It's a putdown for the down and out and white. White trash is the name given to those whites who don't make it, either because they're too lazy or too stupid. Or maybe because something's wrong with their inbred genes. Whatever the reason, it's their own damn fault they live like that. They've got nobody to blame but themselves.

On the other hand, white trash these days sometimes gets used as a badge of honor. Much like the way African American youth turned the despised word nigga into a word expressing pride and solidarity and the way that GLBT activists have turned queer into a source of dignity and respect, some white youth now use the term to signal rebelliousness and cultural difference­their refusal of a bland, mainstream white society that oppresses and stifles.

And there is another popular use of the term as well. It's sometimes used to name the rich and famous when they act badly or misbehave. So, despite her millions, Paris Hilton can be called white trash for her pornographic lifestyle, and George Clooney can tell us, in a self-mocking kind of way, that he's really just white trash. This trend, like so much else in the world of white trash, was probably started by Roseanne Barr, who once famously said of her marriage to Tom Arnold, "We're America's worst nightmare­white trash with money!"

All of which makes the reality that white trash names pretty complicated and confusing. Is it, as John Waters once said, "the last racist thing you can say and get away with?" Or has it transformed into a symbol of something like ethnic pride? Or is it just a comical phrase used to condemn­or sometimes excuse­bad behavior, like too much drinking, cussing, fighting, and general screwing around?

And why should we care, anyway? What makes any of this white trash talk anything more than mere pop culture trivia? To answer these questions it helps to look back to the past, to see when and how the term arose, to think about the uses to which it has been put, by whom, and why. Surprisingly, the answers have a lot to do with our changing ideas about sex, class, and gender.

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you'd probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks­both free and enslaved­to disparage local poor whites. Some of these poor whites would have been newly arrived Irish immigrants, others semiskilled workers drawn to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the postrevolutionary building boom, and others still may have been white servants, waged or indentured, working in the homes and estates of area elites. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources­the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.

While white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech.

Over the next forty years, the term began to appear more and more frequently in print. In 1854 white trash appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin­her defense of the abolitionist play that had garnered her international fame. Stowe devoted an entire chapter to "Poor White Trash," explaining that the slave system produced "not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable." The degradation was due, Stowe argued, in part because plantation slavery locked up productive soil in the hands of a few large planters, leaving ordinary whites to struggle for subsistence. But there were other factors as well: "Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of 'poor white trash,' says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said."

Southern secessionists and proslavery apologists countered that it wasn't the lack of access to good farm land, nor the lack of compulsory education, nor the lack of religious influence that made poor white trash so worthy of the contempt heaped upon them. In their view, the depravity of white trash had its source in the "tainted blood" that ran through their veins. As one educated southerner averred on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, "every where, North and South, in Maine or Texas, in Virginia or New-York, they are one and the same; and have undoubtedly had one and the same origin, namely, the poor-houses and prison-cells of Great Britain. Hence we again affirm that there is a great deal more in blood than people in the United States are generally inclined to believe." That is, the cause of poor white depravity was not attributable to any economic or social system­it was to be found in their inherited traits.

By the 1890s America's burgeoning eugenics movement got hold of this idea and never let go. Most Americans are well aware of the horrors of Nazi eugenics­the idea that through proper breeding techniques and controlling the fertility of the "unfit", one can produce a superior race. But few care to remember that Nazi eugenicists took many of their cues from their American predecessors, who, beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, successfully lobbied for laws permitting states to involuntarily sterilize those considered unsuited for sexual reproduction.

Whom did they seek to sterilize? Whom did they deem unfit for sexual reproduction? While many eugenicists railed about the threats to the white American race from hordes of dysgenic immigrants, the core of eugenical science was based on field studies of poor rural whites. These studies of poor white families and kinship networks were carried out all over the East and Midwest, from upstate New York to Virginia to Ohio. Authors gave their subjects colorful names like the Jukes, the Kallikaks, the Happy Hickories, and the Smoky Pilgrims and documented a high incidence of criminality and violence among the men and increased promiscuity and fecundity among the women.

Field researchers often produced evidence that they claimed demonstrated the deplorable effects of the "defective germ plasm" (what we would today consider genetic material) passed from one generation to the next, sometimes through the immorality of interracial sex, sometimes through the sexual predations of fathers on their own daughters, or between close cousins. The last two categories of illicit sexual behavior, grouped under the term "consanguinity", were put forth again and again, in study after study, as evidence of the need to control the fertility of poor whites, whose incestuous, cacogenic (rather than eugenic) influence, combined with their promiscuity and fecundity, threatened to overwhelm and pollute the purer white racial stock of normal Americans. In a classic example of a moral panic, eugenicists whipped up widespread anxieties about sex, class, gender, and race and mobilized politicians and civic leaders to action.

By 1921 American eugenicists had so firmly implanted fears of racial pollution through sex that fifteen states had passed laws permitting involuntary eugenic sterilization. Between 1907 and 1927, over eight thousand such operations were performed. Many of these operations were carried out on "feebleminded" men and women­those whom we would today regard as severely developmentally disabled. But an untold number were carried out on men and women whose only apparent fault lie in belonging to the class popularly termed white trash.

Such was the charge leveled in the most infamous court trial involving eugenical involuntary sterilization in the United States, the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell. In January 1924 Buck, who had recently given birth out of wedlock, was involuntarily committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. The director, judging both Buck and her newborn to be feeble minded, and believing that Buck was herself the daughter of a feeble-minded woman, wished to sterilize her immediately, fearing that her sexual promiscuity might lead to more children who would become burdens of the state. H.H. Laughlin, the nation's leading advocate for eugenical legislation, took up the case and, without ever meeting Buck, testified that in his expert opinion, she was "part of the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." In May 1927 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the eugenicists and Buck was soon sterilized against her will. The shameful decision opened the door to eugenical sterilization across the nation and since then, an estimated sixty thousand Americans, most of them poor and indigent women, have been eugenically sterilized.

We now know more of the facts in this historic case: Buck and her daughter were probably not feeble minded, even by the standard measures of her day. She had become pregnant not because of any sexual immorality, but because her adoptive father raped her. Her institutionalization was a way to hide his crime. In 2002, seventy five years after the Supreme Court's decision, the state of Virginia offered a formal apology to Buck's family and to all other families whose relatives had been forcibly sterilized. Since then, four other states have followed suit. Yet like so much bad law, Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.

* * *

The long and disturbing history behind the term white trash reverberates with meaning today. With us still are stigmatizing images of oversexed and promiscuous trailer trash women; tasteless jokes about white trash and incest; and a widely shared belief that all poor whites are dumber than the rest of us. The stigma of white trash remains an active part of our fevered cultural imagination and for too many Americans, it remains unchallenged. Those who use the term today would do well to consider its history.

Matt Wray is a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Fellow at Harvard University and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is co-editor of <http://www.amazon.com/White-Trash-Race-Class-America/sim/0415916925/2>White Trash: Race and Class in America and <http://www.amazon.com/Making-Unmaking-Whiteness-Brander-Rasmussen/dp/0822327406>The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. His most recent book is <http://www.amazon.com/Not-Quite-White-Boundaries-Whiteness/dp/0822338734>Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness from Duke University Press.


>

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