Talking White Trash

Mediated Representations and Lived Experiences of White Working-Class People

Tasha R. Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138486355
• eBook ISBN: 9781351045735
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Talking White Trash documents the complex and interwoven relationship between mediated representations and lived experiences of white working-class people—a task inspired by the author's experiences growing up in a white working-class family and neighborhood and how she came to understand herself through watching films and television shows.

The increasing presence of white working-class people in media, particularly within the genre of reality television, and their role in fueling the unprecedented rise of Donald Trump, has made this population a central subject of U.S. cultural discourse. Rather than relying solely on analyses of mediated portrayals, Dunn makes use of personal narratives, interviews, focus groups, textual analysis, and critical autoethnography to specifically analyze how popular media articulates certain ideas about white working-class people, and how those who identify as members of this population, including herself, negotiate such articulations.

Dunn's work provides alternative stories that are rarely, if ever, found in popular media—stories that feature the varied reactions and lived experiences of white working-class people; stories that talk to, talk with, and talk back to mediated representations and dominant cultural ideas; stories that illuminate the multidimensionality of a population that is often portrayed in one-dimensional ways; stories that move inside and outside the white working-class to better understand their role within, and influence upon, U.S. culture.

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING “WHITE TRASH”

The Formation and Historical Mediated Representations of the White Working Class

From the beginning, they have existed in the minds of rural urban elites and the middle class as extrusions of the weedy, unproductive soil. They are depicted as slothful, rootless vagrants, physically scarred by their poverty. The worst ate clay and turned yellow, wallowed in mud and muck, and their necks became burned by the hot sun. Their poorly clothed, poorly fed children generated what others believed to be a permanent and defective breed.

(Isenberg, 2016, p. 320)

The opening quote by Isenberg eloquently summarizes what a chronological analysis of white working-class people in media reveals: not much has changed. The class-oriented tropes and voyeuristic shock attributed to mediated representations of this and other populations who struggle to make ends meet have remained intact. Despite the abundance of stereotypes and negative characteristics associated with those positioned on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, class—until now—has not gotten much attention in the academy or U.S. culture at large. While many scholars have examined media content in relation to race and/or gender, class is often overlooked. This oversight can be attributed to both the complex and multifaceted nature of class, as well as the fact that class is not as visible as gender or race (Grindstaff, 2017).

The general consensus among media scholarship centered on class is that mediated representations often frame the lifestyles of the middle and upper classes as ideal, while negatively portraying the poor and working classes by associating them with character deficiencies and moral failings, such as crimes, substance abuse, violence, sexual perversion, and more. The overriding message of this framework is that poor and working-class people deserve their lot in life because they possess undesirable qualities and “willingly” engage in behavior that lacks good taste, defies socially acceptable manners, and violates mainstream U.S. as well as middle- and upper-class values. A message such as this contributes to the steadily increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots in the United States (Bullock, Wyche, & Williams, 2001; Clawson & Trice, 2000; Kendall, 2005).

Among the lower classes, white working-class people are the most vulnerable to being misrepresented and consequently rendered objects of ridicule in media. One primary reason for this phenomenon is that the class status of these folks challenges the often assumed homogenous and privileged terrain of whiteness, the marker of racial normativity in U.S. culture (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Wray, 2006). To be “just white” is to possess no racial identity (Heavner, 2007; Nakayama & Martin, 1999). Whiteness, in other words, is invisible (McIntosh, 1988), refers to a set of largely undefined characteristics, and is considered the “unraced center of a racialized world” (Wray & Newitz, 1997, p. 3), meaning it exists as a standard against which all other racializations are considered deviant.

Whiteness maintains such privilege through the marginalization of those who are not white and/or who do not possess standards associated with whiteness, such as wealth. For example, when white was conceived as a racial category in the seventeenth century, non-white people in the West were considered by white European settlers to be savage, uncivilized, and deviant—a social construction used to justify various forms of exploitation, such as slavery, and consequently elevate the status of those identified as white (Yancy, 2012). Skin color, however, was and still is not the only qualifier for those who are situated within the borders of whiteness. There are a multitude of people with white skin who are marginalized because of additional variables of identity, such as class, region, sexuality, ability, and gender (Hartigan, 2013). As Frankenberg (2001) indicates, “whiteness as a site of privilege is not absolute but rather crosscut by a range of other axes of relative advantage and subordination; these do not erase or render irrelevant race privilege, but rather inflect or modify it” (p. 76). For example, white people who are working class are not inherently privileged; instead, they are considered “white Others” for their inability to abide by the middle- to upper-class standards associated with their race (Newitz & Wray, 1997).

Such marginalization helps explain why white working-class people are ridiculed in media. Additionally, as previously mentioned, they are among the few minority groups it is socially acceptable to mock. As Goad (1997) states:

Day after cotton-pickin’ day, we are invited to hate white trash. Our media machines and their huzzled suckling masses show scant pity for the redneck. Our magazines and sitcoms and blockbuster films are crammed with slams of hicks and hayseeds and hillbillies and crackers and trailer scum.

(p. 15)

In short, among those with limited power and resources in U.S. culture, few are disparaged as openly as white working-class folks (Grindstaff, 2002). For example, the inherently racist phrase “white trash” is often unconsciously used to describe this marginal population—an irony when considering the current U.S. cultural climate wherein derogatory labels for a vast majority of minority groups are rigorously policed. While it may be politically incorrect to demonize minorities, everyone is allowed to hate the white working class (Hartigan, 1997; Sweeney, 2001).

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WHITE WORKING CLASS

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the open ridicule and marginalization of U.S. white working-class citizens would have been unthinkable because of the population’s privileged roots. According to Roediger (2007), the formation of the working class developed alongside a sense of whiteness, eventually leading to the creation of the white working class. “White” was never considered a racial category until 1680 when it was used to distinguish white European settlers from Native Americans. Contributing to this distinction were negative images of Native Americans developed by the European settlers to justify the dispossession of Native Americans from the land. Many of the images had a strong connection to work and discipline, implying that Native Americans were lazy and unable to properly care for the natural resources God had provided, which is why they should give them up. Settlers, by contrast, came to consider themselves “hard-working whites,” illustrating how the working-class consciousness was developed on a foundation of race, of whiteness, that ultimately led to the displacement and segregation of the Native American population (Roediger, 2007).

A similar act of racial privilege occurred during the late eighteenth century, after the American Revolution, when independence was considered a powerful masculine ideal. The United States was still a slaveholding republic, so slave labor was common. Alongside such labor emerged “hireling” wage labor, which steadily increased in popularity as the dominant mode of production changed from agrarian to industrial. White European settlers who had migrated to the United States as skilled craftsmen were frustrated with the newfound emphasis on industrialization because instead of maintaining a work-based independence, they were forced to engage in standardized wage labor that required strict discipline, as evidenced by timetables, in order to survive. Frustrated with their newfound lot in life, white settlers began to search for a way to justify their existence as more than merely workers. They found their answer in racism, by drawing distinctions between bondage and wage labor through constructing an image of those in bondage—the black population—as “other,” as lazy, primitive, and promiscuous (Leyda, 2016; Roediger, 2007).

This racist ideology continued to blossom both during and after the U.S. Civil War when white workers sought to further ensure their difference from and power over enslaved and newly emancipated black people. Fearing they would be considered equal to newly emancipated slaves, white workers began referring to themselves as “freemen”—the opposite of slaves—a label that merged white supremacy, an exclusive occupational trade, and civil rights. By associating with this new label, white working-class people could bolster themselves while marginalizing the black population (Roediger, 2007). Even though white working-class folks still earned low wages, their compensation was subsidized by a “public and psychological wage,” which emerged discursively through defining themselves as “not slaves” and “not black.” In other words, though exploited by capitalism, their social status and overall value emerged from and depended on the devaluation of black existence (DuBois, 1935).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the privilege attributed to whiteness began to publicly fracture as many poor and working-class whites, especially those in the rural South, were not as upwardly mobile as their racial superiority and the American work ethic claimed—a phenomenon further fueled by the Great Depression. The science of eugenics, which refers to the study of good genes, emerged to justify why these poor whites, and people of color, were unfit for social mobility, thus concentrating and consolidating power and privilege in the hands of middle- and upper-class white folks. Researchers during the early years of the eugenics movement sought to scientifically prove that rural poor whites were genetically defective (Schinko, 2010). Consequently, inferior heredity was accepted as a common explanation for socially undesirable characteristics, such as poverty, crime, sexual perversion, and alcoholism, commonly attributed to rural poor and working-class whites. These people were rendered a separate breed, unable to fit within “normal” society, which ultimately functioned to naturalize their marginal position. The major attraction of providing biological explanations for undesirable traits is that those who were not implicated, such as middle- and upper-class whites, were reassured they were not susceptible to the same fate; their economic, social, and political superiority remained intact (Portwood-Stacer, 2007). In other words, the supposed biological inferiority of impoverished whites genetically locked them into a legacy of social and economic exclusion, which continues today—hence the fall of the white working class to which I alluded earlier (Isenberg, 2016; Leyda, 2016).

Adding to this fall are the complications that poor and working-class white folks encountered when migrating en masse to northern cities in the mid-twentieth century to look for work after the industrialization of agriculture in the South. This migration overlapped with general population growth and led to crowding in the cities. Their unfamiliarity with and inability to adjust to urban social customs reinforced a predominant cultural notion that migrant whites were backward and uncultured, which challenged traditional racist beliefs in the North and contributed to a new kind of discrimination based on class, which lingers today (Portwood-Stacer, 2007). While the white working class may have been conceived of and into privilege, it has since been relegated to the margins—a phenomenon clearly articulated in the labels ascribed to this population.

NAMING THE WHITE WORKING CLASS

Several terms have been used to label working-class white people, including “white trash,” “trailer trash,” “hillbilly,” “redneck,” “cracker,” and “Okie.” While each of these labels have different connotations, they have, since the late 1980s, become virtually interchangeable (Hartigan, 1997), commonly signifying a set of moral failings, such as poverty, criminality, and poor hygiene, which function to separate the “lesser” group of whites from middle- and upper-class white society (Young, 2017). Among these terms, the most central and widely disseminated in contemporary U.S. culture is “white trash” because it is shed of geographical ties, contains an excess of meaning, and most clearly demarcates boundaries between poor and privileged whites (Grindstaff, 2011; Schinko, 2010; Sweeney, 2001). The term first appeared in the eighteenth century, when rich white settlers used it as a racial slur to distinguish themselves from the lower-class white folks, obscure their shared European history, and consequently guarantee themselves power and access to social resources (Wray, 2006).

“White trash” is most common, but the slew of other terms associated with this population highlight a spectrum of differences, which are important to acknowledge to better understand the complexity of the social position(s) white working-class people inhabit. For example, while “white trash” is often the catch-all label that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Mediated Buffoons as Political Stakeholders: Welcome to the White Working Class
• 1 Becoming “White Trash”: The Formation and Historical Mediated Representations of the White Working Class
• 2 Digging in the “Trash”: Contemporary Mediated Representations of White Working-Class People
• 3 From Insider to Insider/Outsider: An Autoethnographic Account of Returning to My Working-Class Roots
• 4 “It’s Like Watching a Car Accident”: When the Lived and Mediated Experiences of White Working-Class People Intersect
• Conclusion—Taking out the “Trash”: A New Beginning for the White Working Class
• Index