“Why do you call yourself specifically *white* trash? It can sound weird and off-putting to people of color to hear that, because it carries the implication that just plain trash would of course refer to someone non-white. Obviously a life of rape and welfare fraud and Nice People not looking you in the eye isn’t something that happens solely to white people. Is the part of your identity that includes your family’s antagonism toward black people and a black girl’s antagonism toward you sufficiently important that “white trash” is the right label?

I don’t normally comment anonymously but from everything you’ve said about your rage, I think that might be the way to go. What you’re saying is interesting and that’s why I’ve commented, but after having someone tell me on Facebook that my opinion on something didn’t count because I can’t trace my family back to the Mayflower like she can, I’m a little wary of setting off white girls who know my name. “

I think that is a fucking awesome comment and I thank you for leaving it.  🙂

I don’t know how to answer that.  I want to.  There is an answer in there.  I’ve been trying to find it for a while.  There is something there for me in the intersection of how my privilege and my lack of privilege has existed that has specifically felt different from the people I have known who were not-white but also poor.  (That’s been a lot of people.)  There is something about the hick, cracker, redneck, weird mountain people…

I’m not sure what it is.  I want to be able to explain it right.

I know it sounds off putting on a racial front.  I know it offends the shit out of my friends for me to say it.  That’s part of why it feels right.  Because I feel like I am that kind of offensive.  It’s like “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist Sometimes”.

Of course I’m not special.  I don’t think that anything that has happened to me has been unique to me.  However the combination seems to be unusual.  It’s something in the combination that becomes a specific category.

Ok, here is an example: the word ghetto.

A part of a city, esp. a slum area, occupied by a minority group or groups.
The Jewish quarter in a city: “the Warsaw Ghetto”.

Uhh.  Is that how people in the US use it?  No.  They mean poor and usually black, but possibly hispanic.  It’s a denotation connotation difference.

For me there is a difference in some part of the connotation.  So there is this song by Confederate Railroad (country music–see, hick shit) called I Like My Women A Little On The Trashy Side.  It epitomizes, for me, a lot of how I feel about the idea of being trashy.  I like the song because it is upbeat and enthusiastic.  People like what they like in an unabashed heartfelt way that appeals to me.  They are raw.  They have no class.  And they like being that way, thankyouverymuch.

The movie Hounddog.  There is a specific culture and mystic to white trash.  It doesn’t look the same when other races enact the same patterns.  There is a flavor difference.  It’s not better.  It’s not worse.  I spend a lot of time looking for movies and books and stories and songs that embody this for me.  I can’t find any parallel that feels right anywhere else.

I don’t know why the violence and the country music and the racist rednecks and their constant belittling of how the women don’t do enough fucking work.  It all ties together for me.  It is all part and parcel of the same willingness to fight.  Fight because you were born feeling less than.  You were born with a fucking chip on your shoulder because the whole god damn world acts like they are fucking better than you and that’s not god damn right.  Because I fucking deserve better.

But I don’t.  No one does.  I don’t see the same hubris in other races.  That sounds… trite?  Stupid?  Like I’m sucking up?  I don’t find examples in poor white culture that I want to emulate properly.  Roseanne was the strongest rolemodel and look what happened to her.

There is some part of being willing to say that I’m not special because I’m white.  I’m white but I’m still trash.  Just because I can wear the right clothes and style my hair the same way and “pass”…there is still this part of me that can’t get over everything that was poured into my head.  All this hate and anger and rage and feeling of injustice.

I don’t think I am special because I am white trash.  I think that actively reminding myself that I have a long way to go before I have the ability to act like a fucking human being around all people in all circumstances without regard to provocation is something that I have to do to me.  I have to deal with the fact that I don’t know how to be appropriate.  It is a problem for me.  It is a problem in my life.

I am white trash because I only find echoes of me in poor white girls in Southern movies despite the fact that I was raised primarily in the bay area in yuppie central.

I don’t know how to speak about my experience without acknowledging that I’m white.  I am.  And I don’t feel like I can speak to the universal poor experience.  Or the universal trash experience.  I can only speak to mine.

And I’m white trash.  It’s a circular logic.