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 is just classism and the timeless urban against rural conflict. A person who becomes one or the other gets the convert’s zeal. There will be people justifying this saying they have problematic attitudes and behaviors but I don’t put much faith in this because often the person doing the criticism have all sorts of unexamined beliefs themselves.
If someone is born into better circumstances and never question their own attitudes and behaviors they can’t be expected to have necessary perspective to evaluate the beliefs of others in more unfortunate circumstances in good faith. This of course doesn’t mean social circumstances and people in that situation cannot be examined or criticized rather it has to come with self-awareness.
I was born on the rural side of this conflict but defected to the enemy