White Trash, Class Analysis, and Appalachia

1. White Trash, Class Analysis, and Appalachia

2. [C]lass in the U.S. has always been a tricky category, often used metaphorically to designate forms of pathology and taste rather than literally to designate economic position. In the popular imaginary, there is often a confluence between white poverty and white criminality, deviance, or kitsch. (63) Pink Flamingos (John Waters film, 1972)

3. “discourses of class and racial difference tend to bleed into one another” The term "white trash" points up the hatred and fear which undergird the American myth of classlessness. Yoking a classist epithet to a racist one, as "white trash" does, reminds us how often racism is in fact directly related to economic differences. As a stereotype, "white trash" calls our attention to the way discourses of class and racial difference tend to bleed into one another, especially in the way they pathologize and lay waste to their "others.” (Newitz and Wray, 57) Broadway Press, 2006

4. Class and race categories [T]he term "white trash" reminds us that one of the worst crimes of which one can accuse a person is poverty. If you are white, calling someone "white" is hardly an insult. But calling someone "white trash" is both a racist and classist insult. It's worth asking why this is so. Perhaps the scar of race is cut by the knife of class. This is not to say that race is in any way reducible to class. Clearly, the knife cuts both ways. Yet all too often in discussions of racial identity class is ignored, dismissed, and left untheorized. We argue that leaving class out of anti-racist criticism not only creates a theoretical blindspot, but can also play into class prejudice. We cannot understand many types of social injustice without deploying theories which wed anti-racist agendas to anti-capitalist ones. (Newitz and Wray, 58) Bruce Gilden, “Two Days in Appalachia,” Vice News, July 8, 2015. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdxvx8/two-days-in-appalachia-0000687-v22n7. See also Scott Finn, “Two Days in Appalachia: Photography or Poverty Porn?” West Virginia Public Radio, July 29, 2015. http://www.wvpublic.org/post/two-days-appalachia-photography-or-poverty-porn#stream/0

5. When we talk about white trash, we're discussing a discourse which often confuses cultural icons and material realities, and in effect helps to establish and maintain a complex set of moral, cultural, social, economic, and political boundaries. To interrogate this discourse, we need to ask where its representations and stereotypes come from, what motivates them, how they are produced and taken up, and by whom. (Newitz and Wray, 59) Appalachian Emergency Room skit, SNL, Season 31, 2005

6. Newitz and Wray reference Charles Murray: People like Charles Murray and other proponents of the "bell curve" theory of intelligence would argue that poor whites are poor simply because they aren't as smart nor as educable as their genetically well endowed fellow whites. Murray and his ilk are reviving an old strain of thought about race which goes back to the early twentieth century eugenics theory…. (59) 1994 2012

7. [O]therconservative cultural critics…have argued that impoverished whites are in large part the product of misguided social policies. According to this view, the government programs associated with The War on Poverty have failed the poor, breeding generations of welfare dependent whites…The end result of these programs and policies, they argue, is a growing class of poor, disenfranchised whites who share a culture of poverty that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to enter mainstream American life. (59-60) Is this an apt characterization of J.D. Vance’s position? Vance: “[O]urgovernment encouraged social decay through the welfare state.” (Hillbilly Elegy, 144)

8. Excerpted from https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-war-poverty-50-years-failure, accessed 3/1/2019.

9. [B]othof these explanatory models [eugenics and culture of poverty] demonstrate the tendency of the social sciences and policy studies to pathologize certain behaviors or groups, thereby completely misdiagnosing the problem… [P]overtyis not understood to be endemic to capitalist social relations…. (60)

10. A critique of capitalist social relations enables us to understand "white trash" in a twofold fashion. It is a way of naming actually existing white people who occupy the economic and social margins of American life, and it is a set of myths and stereotypes which justify their continued marginalization. (60) Linocut by Giacomo G. Patri

11. Mapping White Trash America: Class Matters Understanding the social structures and the processes of representation which produce any group of people is a difficult task. As cultural materialists, we hold that economic structures and conditions are crucial forces in shaping and forming identities of individuals and groups. Certainly, racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences are all deeply involved with class formation. But these notions of difference, so often foregrounded by postmodern social theorists, often serve as a means for talking about class difference without actually using a language of class analysis. (67)

12. “class…is all too often neglected and ignored…” This is not to say that class is in any way the determining structure of domination in American life. But it is all too often neglected and ignored by some academics, activists, and public intellectuals in favor of discussions and movement building around other forms of difference. The result of this neglect of class has been to overlook the workings of capitalism as a system of domination and oppression. And to the extent that identity-based political movements and social theory have not been consciously critical of capitalism, they have served to reproduce and perpetuate capitalist structures of domination. (67-68)

13. “this inconstant geography of capitalism” In the current U.S. scene, this inconstant geography of capitalism we have been describing has been a matter of tremendous human pain and suffering for those left behind in the wake of the juggernaut of capitalist growth. The Rust Belt cities of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Gary, and, above all Detroit, are tragic examples of the immiserating effects of deindustrialization processes which began in the early 1970s. (70) Youngstown, Ohio in the wake of deindustrialization.

14. “[P]oorwhite trash is the ghastly specter which haunts the white middle class.” Images of the poor are used in mainstream culture as repositories for displaced middle-class rage, excess, and fear. These images and representations are then sold to the public as the real poor whites, thus effectively hiding who actually existing poor people are and what their struggles might be. Because images of the poor in the media seem so rich and fascinating, the social causes of poverty and economic neglect are easily overlooked. We are left with provocative stereotypes, stripped of historical and social context. (70) Mama June on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, season 1

15. “We know Appalachia exists because we need it to define what we are not. It is the ‘other America’ because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives.” -Ronald Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (2013)

16. Crossing Kentucky's Cumberland Gap, pioneers made their way west. “NATIVE AMERICANS OF APPALACHIAN KENTUCKY” https://sites.google.com/site/appalachiachronicle/native-americans

17. Berea College students (https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/berea-college/) 1900 advertisement for Berea College, placed in a black newspaper in Minnesota

18. Early 20th century brought more diversity

19. African-American contributions to Appalachian culture An elderly African American man playing a banjo, c. 1902; Library of Congress

20. From “Mountain whites” to “Appalachians (People)” Appalachia, 1950--waiting at the bookmobile stop.

21. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 2.

22. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 6.

23. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 7.

24. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 19.

25. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 21.

26. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 23.

27. Pollard, Kelvin, and Population Reference Bureau. “A ‘New Diversity’: Race and Ethnicity in the Appalachian Region,” 2004, 25.

28. In order to fix the issues of the region, we first have to recognize we have a diverse bunch of people living there.”Aaron Thompson

29. “Digging in the Trash” The thing about it is, I’m not talking about men being like cats, having nine lives. The way my grandfather did it wasn’t like that at all. What I’m talking about are people being too mad at this world to lie down and die. That was him in a nutshell. His survival was a matter of stubbornness and anger. His survival was a matter of looking bitterly at the hand he’d been dealt and saying, “Sorry, boys, but I ain’t done playing.” David Joy, author of “Digging in the Trash”

30. Nowadays, I make my living as a full-time novelist. I write about fathers and sons. I write about friendship. I write about poverty and hopelessness, addiction and violence. I had a novel come out a few weeks back, “The Weight Of This World,” a book The New York Times called “bleakly beautiful” and “[a] pitiless novel about a region blessed by nature but reduced to desolation and despair.” The Associated Press praised the pacing and prose, and noted how trailers and churches dot my landscape. A part of me couldn’t understand why that was noteworthy, but I guess it seems strange to people on the outside. What I hope they see too, though, is that this is a place sopping wet with raw emotion, a landscape drenched with humanity. It is all I know and it is beautiful.

31. “Desperation is a way of living.” The other day I was watching a BBC interview about poverty in Baltimore. One of the people being interviewed said something that really struck me. He looked into the camera deadpan and beaten and he said, “Desperation is a way of living.” When he said that, I couldn’t help but think, maybe it’s not just gentleness that’s a resource of the privileged. Maybe hope is a resource of the privileged, and maybe that’s what people don’t get about the kids I grew up with, about the characters I write about in my novels. I get asked all the time why my characters aren’t hopeful. What I say again and again is this: It’s hard to be hopeful when you’re worried about your next meal, when the only thought to ever cross your mind is how you’re going to make it through the day. 

32. David Joy on addiction I get the same kind of questions about addiction. People don’t understand what would push someone to drugs like methamphetamine or heroin. They don’t understand what would make a man drink like my grandfather. The reason they can’t understand it is because they’ve never been that low. When all you’ve got is a twenty-dollar bill, twenty dollars doesn’t ward off eviction notices. Twenty dollars doesn’t get you health insurance. Twenty dollars doesn’t make a car payment. Twenty dollars doesn’t even keep the lights on. But twenty dollars can take you right out of this world for just a little while. Just a minute. Just long enough to breathe. That’s what every single addict I’ve ever known really wanted: just a second to breathe.

33. This reviewer didn’t like what he called my “Southern Poverty Law Center photorealism.” This is what got me, though. He wrote that I should “leave the peeling trailers, come down out of the hollers, and try writing about people for a change.” He actually italicized that word, people, to be sure and say that what lives in those trailers, what finds itself in a world consumed by hopelessness, addiction, and violence, those aren’t people at all. . . But what he misses is this. These are people who just like everyone else experience happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. These are people who love and hate, people who cry their eyes out when they lose someone close . . . people who’d sell the last thing they had to put food on the table, people who work eighty hours a week to break even. . .

34. As I write this essay, I find that I’m tired. I’m tired of standing by silently while privileged people in privileged places strip those less fortunate of their humanity. I’m tired of living in a place where men like my grandfather and Paco are shipped off to front lines to die for profit margins. I’m tired of an America where all the folks I’ve ever loved are dismissed as trash, where people are reduced to something subhuman simply because of where they live. I’m tired of having to explain it. I’m just goddamn tired.

35. A friend of mine sent me an article recently from The New Yorker titled, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” It was basically an essay about how some of the richest people in America have been preparing for some sort of societal breakdown. I guffawed at the thought when I read it, not at the idea of America collapsing, but at the idea they think they’ll be the ones to survive. I laughed at the boldness, at the arrogance. I’ve never been a betting man and the truth is I don’t have much money to lay down, but what I’ll leave you with is this. While all the privileged have been coasting through life so often on the backs of my people, we’ve been surviving. Survival is not new to us. As the man from Baltimore said, Desperation is a way of life. So if the time comes and there are bets to be made, I’d think long and hard about where you slide your chips. If I were you, I’d try to imagine my grandfather waking up off that bed, staring God right dead in His eyes as he’d done a dozen times before, and saying with a sly grin spread across his lonely face, “Sorry, boys, but I ain’t done playing.” I’d think about all of us in trailers, the lot of us, the trash, and if all I had were a dollar to my name, that’s the bet I’d make.