Just Po’ White Trash: The Dirty History of White Trash

When you hear the phrase “trailer park,” what comes to mind?

Does it conjure up images of worn trailers, rusty trucks on cinder blocks, and horribly tacky lawn ornaments?  Perhaps a confederate flag?  Ignorant poor white trash making meth and growing weed?

It’s common to hear jokes about white trash and the associated stereotypes.  The very idea of this marginalized low-class segment of American society remains prominent in popular culture—celebrated or denigrated for their lack of refinement.  Since white trash is so often associated with southerners, you might naturally assume that the term came from the Deep South.

Poor white of the South

Actually, the term “white trash” can be traced to Baltimore, Maryland.  During the 1820s, African Americans (both free and enslaved) used it as a derogatory term to refer to local, poor whites.  These poor whites—newly arrived Irish immigrants, paid or indentured servants, and other semi-skilled workers—were competing for the same resources, such as jobs and other opportunities.  This led to increased social hostilities, and hence, the insult took hold as a means to designate the inferior class.

However, while it might have originated as African American slang, the term was then picked up by middle-class and elite whites and quickly became part of American speech.  Over the next several decades, white trash became synonymous with the degraded poor and was claimed to be the result of “bad blood” inherited from ancestors who were social miscreants and lowlifes.

The term took on an even darker, ugly meaning in the 1890s, when the emerging American eugenics movement applied it to individuals that were deemed unfit to breed. “White trash” was seen as a threat to society and laws permitting the involuntary sterilization to prevent the sexual reproduction of these unsuitable people were passed throughout the early 20^th century.

The terms meaning and usage gradually changed, and during the 1960s and 1970s, being labeled “white trash” had less to do with falling below economic standards than not meeting society’s standards of decorum and taste.

The girls: trashy and workin' on their tans

Nowadays, white trash can still be used as slur for a perceived cultural inferiority, but has also been claimed by those who have risen from low origins to express pride and community identification.  Similar to how “queer” has been reclaimed by the LGBT community, some people willingly identify themselves as white trash, seeing it more as a symbol of rebelliousness against conformist society.

As the Trailer Park girls tell us, they’re “what society let slip through the cracks.”  The residents of Armadillo Acres are proudly trashy and shamelessly human.

Sources:

“White Trash: The Social Origins of a Stigmatype”

http://thesocietypages.org/specials/white-trash/

“White Trash in the Twentieth Century”

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/trash/trash3.html