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.
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.