White Trash Quotes

“Despite the proliferation of personal storytelling in recent years, and the shift in social conditions that has facilitated these stories being told and heard, there are still certain stories that cannot be told—either because we have no language with which to articulate them or because there is no interpretive community to hear and understand them. These stories become, instead, secrets and lies—stories that signal social isolation and disempowerment rather than connection and strength. One such story within contemporary culture, as the epigraphs from Dorothy Allison and Victoria Brownworth suggest, is the story of class—a story that often only becomes tellable as a lie, joke, or dirty secret. This is especially the case with the category of “white trash.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“So the years 1973–78 were apocalyptic years not just for me, but for the millions upon millions of people around the world dominated by capitalism. For many Americans, especially those in the North and Northeast, the economic conditions in the early 1970s were in fact quite brutal. Between 1970 and 1977, one million jobs disappeared. The rapid and massive displacements of capital and jobs due to increasing globalization and deindustrialization caused immense human suffering for those on the lower levels of the economic ladder, compounded by chronic stagflation and deep cuts in social spending under the Nixon administration.11 Add to these economic crises the political and cultural turmoil of the early 1970s stirred by the Watergate revelations, the abandonment of the gold standard for currency, the energy crisis, the ignominious retreat from Vietnam, and Roe v. Wade.12 For many people, these economic, political, and cultural upheavals made for apocalyptic times indeed.13”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“Quintiles, since they’re based on families and households, hide what’s been happening between the genders. During the Golden Age, men of all colors did better than women of all colors; since 1973, however, the tables have turned, and men’s wages have fallen while women’s have risen—and white men, on average, have done worst of all.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“I once watched in awe as a New York City tenant lawyer exclaimed, “Good!” when she was shown statistics about declining white male incomes.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“If we take its namesake seriously, the new abolitionism suggests that white domination is something imposed from without, a social and economic system which enslaves us all, whites and non-whites alike. Thus, all that whites need to do—as Ignatiev and Garvey suggest—is “defect” and “abolish” whiteness. But whiteness, unlike slavery, is not just a social system. While whiteness is undeniably linked to a series of oppressive social practices, it is also an identity which can be negotiated on an individual level. It is a diversity of cultures, histories, and finally, an inescapable physical marker. Even if we understand whiteness to be something like “dominant culture,” what can we say about white women, white homosexuals, white Jews, white low-status men, and the white poor? These groups have certainly not unanimously experienced whiteness as a ticket into the ruling classes. What, then, are we asking a white person to do when we ask her to abolish her whiteness?”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“Like the article you are reading now, most works on whiteness are intended to explode the myth of white supremacy. While there are numerous works in this tradition, what I want to focus on here is a recent trend in white intellectual self-representation which is sometimes called the “new abolitionism.” Demonstrated most profoundly in Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey’s anti-racist journal Race Traitor, it is also adopted by David Roediger in his latest collection of essays called Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, and to a lesser extent in Fred Pfeil’s White Guys.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“When James Garner called Howard Stern “the epitome of trailer trash,” Stern responded, in his typically scatological fashion, “I can’t believe this guy wants a war with me. He should be busy worrying if he’s gonna have a solid bowel movement.” We know, of course, from Stern’s now two best-selling memoirs that neither his parents nor his own Long Island suburban family live in a trailer. His non-trash origin goes to show that you do not have to be white trash to use white trash sensibilities as a weapon of cultural war, although the fact that white trash’s rocket scientist, Roseanne, grew up so solidly trashy, reinforces the argument that early training counts.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“I vowed to remain quiet, to finish what I’d started, sending Jimmy to school. He would graduate in three months, then I would insist that we leave. I would carry out my part of the bargain and I would not lose Jimmy. And so we did move to San Francisco; my husband sent me through college, where I learned, among other things, about being a class traitor. I went my own way, away from him, and threw myself into the struggles of my generation, determined never to forsake my class again.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“There are many compelling reasons why social scientists should turn more attention to the situation of whites in the underclass. Prime among these is that researchers and politicians have constructed a grossly distorted image of poverty in this country. While whites constitute a vast majority of the poor population in the United States, blackness composes the most familiar visage in representations of poverty.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“The whole country looks more like a trailer park every day. As our lived economy gets worse, more jobs are becoming temporary, homes less permanent or more crowded, neighborhoods unstable. We’re transients just passing through this place, wherever and whatever it is, on our way somewhere else, mostly down. “I get really scared sometimes,” my mom tells me, “that the old days are coming back.” She means the Great Depression days she knew in her childhood, and the trailer park days I knew in mine.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“The eugenic family studies had a very pronounced influence on social policy and medical practice in the early twentieth century. Conservative politicians used them effectively as propaganda in their call to end all forms of welfare and private giving to the poor. The burgeoning medical and psychiatric establishments used them to enlarge their fields, resulting in the involuntary sterilization and forced institutionalization of large numbers of rural poor whites.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“Many of these accounts became popular with the American public, and family clans like “The Jukes” and “The Kallikaks” became widely known, entering the public imagination as poor, dirty, drunken, criminally minded, and sexually perverse people.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America

“In a country so steeped in the myth of classlessness, in a culture where we are often at a loss to explain or understand poverty, the white trash stereotype serves as a useful way of blaming the poor for being poor.”
― Annalee Newitz, White Trash: Race and Class in America