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.
I agree it’s a sad term and I don’t like it. Remember, the only people who are trash are the fash.
“White trash” has like 95% overlap with fash though.
White trash is a couple who smoke inside their trailer and beat their kids before driving to work in their $80k lifted pickup with a confederate flag decal
In fact the more I think about it, flying the confederate flag is probably the strongest “white trash” signifier there is, an explicitly fascist symbol.
It may as well just mean “Non-rich fascist”
There are people who grow up calling themselves white trash starting as babies and I just can’t accept this. It tears me up inside. It seems synonymous with a baby calling itself “the discarded.”