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.
It’s probably better to hear from more than one viewpoint, but this was a major culture shock so to speak about me moving from lib-to-lefty.
What I can offer is the fact I am ‘white trash’ and have used the term a lot when call out nazis. Nazis know they’re cruel, callous people, and they fucking love it. Reminding them they are in the wrong will have those pigs laugh at how cruel they’re being. Any criticism that just boils down to “that’s not nice” is useless because they know they’re assholes and love it.
‘White trash’ is like the nazi equivalent of “bluehair”. They might not care they’re mean, but calling them inbred or slobs, or that they’re not as great as they think they are. Well, most of the time they’ll still laugh it off (we’re dealing with the most confident people on earth even if they don’t deserve an ounce of it). But you signaled that you find traits commonly seen as desirable to be undesirable, and sometimes this gets on their nerves, someone they view as inferior claiming they’re not just not superior, but the true inferiors. I just so happen to be stuck living with these types because I had the misfortune of being born and raised somewhere that isn’t a major city in a blue state.