For me, it’s occasionally coming up when I listen to comedians. A year back I also heard a story about a white person who grew up poor, became financially stable with a good job, and then punched down and started calling other white people “white trash.”
To me it’s obvious this is poor-shaming. But I have a feeling it’s far more complex than that. I’m not even white and I feel degraded whenever I come across those words. I barely know what it means, but it breaks my heart anyways to hear.
White trash is more than that, it’s typically referring to really crude, crass people that have a lack of common decency and have entitlement issues. Source: lived at many trailer parks and this kind of person is prevailent. There are many good people at trailer parks but there’s a certain type that are really some of the most revolting people you can meet.
this really just is a case of there are shitty people exactly like you described of every class. i really wouldn’t say at all there are more shitty poor people than shitty rich people. rich people being rich alone makes them fucking shitty. lots of the shitty things poor people do, rich people also do but they don’t get called on it, don’t get caught doing it, have a way of framing it as something classy. go drive through any rich neighborhood and you’re gonna find a bunch of people pilled out of their minds, drunk during the day, drugged out on any number of things. the difference is, in the trailer park, people tend to be outside their houses in these conditions where as in the rich part if they’re outside it’s in their fenced in back yard or in their massive plot of lands where you just wont see them or hear them
look no further than any starbucks drivethru if you wanna see rich people acting worse than however you’d think someone from the trailer park acts
All of this. Not many people would even think to call a shitty rich person white trash, it’s a term saved specifically for poor whites. And I feel like I only really hear other white people use it so that they can distance themselves from poverty because poverty is something to abhor
So much this; when the rich do it, it’s laughed off or excused.
There was a major member of the British royal family who was revealed to be racist, and the guy who revealed it got death threats
Tbf, I do have different reactions to rich and poor people being super racist.
Rich people? Yeah no shit, that’s how you got here. It’s not acceptable but it’s understandable. My enemies ontologically evil.
Poor people? You’re a class traitor. You should know better. You’re not even benefiting from this arrangement but you hate minorities so much you’re willing to do volunteer work about it.
That is, in fact, very true. My fiance worked at Starbucks and the horror stories she’d tell were pretty close to the ‘shitty white trash asshole’. It’s completely true that no matter what class we talk about there are shitty people of course. Although I still maintain that there is a certain swath of people that exhibit the tendencies of white trash and just run with it. There’s shitty rmiddle class/rich white people and then there’s Pam that lives in a trailer, drinks malt liquor and demonizes blacks as ‘ruthless animals’ while she smokes meth in her living room. That’s the true ‘white trash’ for you.
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Eh, not completley true. My extremely abusive ex used to call me and my family white trash specifically to cause me harm
Oh it is definitely used as a slur against people who are just poor and struggling, but there are also the types I talked about that give poor people a bad name and are just unsavory people that are disgusting individuals and don’t care that they’re disrepectful and gross, in fact they revel in it.
Also lived in many trailer parks and I agree with you. Poor shaming is definitely a (large) part of the term white trash but it’s not the only factor.
There are “cultural” factors as well, things like smoking cigarettes indoors, beating your kids, not getting your dogs neutered, hoarding, and willingness to call people the N word
It’s not purely a class distinction and I know that because 90% of the time I’ve heard that term used it’s an intra-class conflict, this is the person with the trailer they keep nice and clean with a lovely garden out front calling their neighbor white trash for letting their (unneutered) dog trample their flowers. Thats a real world example.
It’s not just living in a trailer, plenty of nice normal poor people live in trailers. It’s smoking cigarettes (or meth) inside that trailer and flying a confederate flag out front. And likely having a giant pickup truck that costs more than the trailer.
Yeah it’s kind of like the Chris Rock bit. There’s white people and then there’s white trash.
It’s racist because of the implication that the standard state for white people is “not trash” but pretty much everything is racist so idk how much grief it’s worth investing with.
As opposed to nonwhites? Someone told me it’s implying that it’s expected that people are poor, except for when they’re white. It implies it’s weird to be poor if you’re white, but it’s at least somewhat expected when you’re a minority. So the term “white trash” is racist towards minority races… Must be why it hurts me deeply.