I wish I could live a couple hundred years so I could see how history and perspective view January 7, 2020. My bet: neither will be kind to Donald Trump or the Republican Party. Another bet: January 7 will be understood as the high water mark of America’s White Trash Revolution. Time will make clear how perilously close Trump’s mob came to altering our political destiny. The insurrectionists physically assaulting the Capitol were just the tip of the spear. Plenty of other insurrectionists organized and funded not just that event, but the whole idea behind the event: the end of American democracy.
These “other insurrectionists” – the as yet unpunished legislators and elitist Trumpanistas (like Roger Stone and everyone else at the Clifford War Room) and even the money behind them all see Trump’s mob in a very particular – and historical – way: as white trash.
Is “White Trash” A Racist Term?
Sorry, but “white trash” is not a racist term. A tribe as racist as white people are and have been historically do not get to call anyone else “racist”. It’s absurd and an insult to everyone to whom they’ve subjected their racism.
Projecting your awfulness onto everyone else? It’s Schoolyard Bully 101.
The term “white trash” likely originated among slaves. For reference: in 1833 English actress Fanny Kemble, visited Georgia. A diarist, she noted: “The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash’”. Slaves (with no hope of being anything other than slaves) saw white servants as being lower on the pecking order than they were.
Slaves didn’t popularize it! Had white people not taken it up – having recognized its direct truthfulness – the term would never have gained traction. But, it did gain traction. White people had found a word that described Life as they saw it.
The term would have gone nowhere had white people not taken it to their hearts and used it so frequently and fervently to describe other white people!
In a soccer/football sense That puts us back on side.
“Is ‘white trash’ a racist term?” No, no, no, no, no. That is the pot calling the kettle “racist”.
Anyone who’s actually experienced racism or bigotry can tell you all about it. For one thing, it’s terrifying! The larger group has singled you out because you weren’t born white.
Look, whatever hard luck and struggle white trash have endured? Their race had nothing to do with it. The irony is, they struggled despite the enormous advantages granted them because they were white.
Sorry, white people, but the “is ‘white trash’ racist?” debate is much ado about less than nothing. Whatever slave first put those two words together – “white” and “trash” – had simply observed and articulated a stone cold fact. White people in America – all of them Europeans – had brought their European class system with them; it did not spring up here. Some white people saw other people as inferior. Those inferior white people didn’t become inferior when they got here. From a white, European perspective, they had always been thus going back hundreds and hundreds of years.
The European Class System
In England, by the mid-18th century, that class system had already marginalized about 40% of the population. They were poor and going to stay poor. When the New World opened to the Old World, the Old World – oh, the irony, – did not send it’s best. It did send a ton of rapists and other criminals! The Transportation Act Of 1717 sent as many as 50,000 indentured servants to the Colonies.
When the American market closed to them, the convicts were then sent to Australia. Historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote in A History Of White People (in 2010) that, in total, 300,000 to 400,000 people were shipped to the North American colonies as unfree laborers, between 1/2 and 2/3 of all white immigrants. While wealthy Europeans saw the Americas as an investment – long term and short – those actually on the ground here saw America less optimistically.
European pathogens having wiped out the overwhelming majority of indigenous peoples, the next waves of Europeans really did step into a kind of nothingness. Sometime between 1587 and 1590, everyone in the Roanoke Colony completely and mysteriously vanished. Our view that America was a “land of opportunity” has a lot of hindsight on its side. Until the Colonies became a viable concern, those arriving in America anticipated and endured considerable hardship.
Or sent people to America to endure considerable hardship.
The Slave Trade
The Atlantic slave trade began in 1619. But, even before that, England was transporting underclass English, Welsh, Scots and Irish people to America. Per Painter in A History Of White People, this crucial part of the small, but growing American workforce were all-but slaves. By the middle of the 17th century – when the population of Virginia was 11,000 – only 300 were Africans. Whenever there was unrest or insurrection back home, those guilty were sent to the colonies.
The New World was empty but fertile. It would require lots and lots of cheap (or free) to turn it into something. To that end, the Mother Country – England – sent its most expendable people to do all that heavy lifting.
In The Mind Of The South, journalist J. W. Cash wrote “These people belong in the main to a physically inferior type, having sprung for the most part from the convict servants, redemptioners, and debtors of old Virginia and Georgia, with a sprinkling of the most unsuccessful sort of European peasants and farm laborers and the dregs of the European town slums. And so, of course, the gulf between them and the master class was impassable, and their ideas and feeling did not enter into the make-up of the prevailing Southern civilization.”
Opportunity For Some, Not All
No one had a history of reinventing themselves. Nobody had such a history back then (with rare exception). Yes, Opportunity shone from the American Colonies. But, that opportunity was meant to extend Europe into America – warts and all. The rich were going to get richer. The poor? they were going to help it happen.
So – for that group of people – going to America wasn’t meant to change them. French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw poor white southerners as one of the effects of the slave system. In Democracy In America, he described them as ignorant, idle, prideful, self-indulgent, and weak. To whit –
From birth, the southern American is invested with a kind of domestic dictatorship … and the first habit he learns is that of effortless domination … [which turns] the southern American into a haughty, hasty, irascible, violent man, passionate in his desires and irritated by obstacles. But he is easily discouraged if he fails to succeed at his first attempt.
An earlier European observer – soldier/diplomat Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur (he resettled in the US and changed his name to J. Hector St. John) wrote hopefully that “the effects of progress would improve the condition of these mongrelized, untamed, half-savage drunken people who exhibit “the most hideous parts of our society.”
So much for hope.
Wanna know what the slums of London looked like circa 1750 – I mean the people and their environment? Take a tour of the deep south or white supremacist parts of the West. That is centuries of disempowered humanity unable to see opportunity where everyone else sees it.
Every group who arrived in America after the big white inflow? They adapted. Changed as the had to – while holding onto their culture. Necessity – and intense, sometimes violent resistance from white people – forced them to work far harder to achieve the same success as white people.
Yet, this group of white people – to judge from what other white people say about them – didn’t change.
Or can’t. And, so, they’re stuck. And being stuck makes them angry.
Donald Trump Is White Trash
Yes, the term “white trash” came from outside the white world. But, the people using “white trash” to describe some white people? They’re mostly white – and they’ve been using that descriptor for a very, very long time. To describe other white people.
So, is the term “racist”? No, it’s not. It’s how white people describe other white people who don’t measure up to their white standards. It’s really more about class than race. And, as I said, whatever class system there was in Colonial America came from the Mother Ship.
Nothing’s changed.
Just like it was back then when rich white people would send “white trash” to hunker down into and disappear from The Roanoke Colony. It’s still the case.
Donald Trump is just one more rich white guy taking advantage of the very group of whites from which he came! Trump didn’t come from any sort of “aristocracy” (a bullshit club made up of bullshit people), his great grandfather ran from Germany to avoid the draft.
His mom comes from Scottish stock, but, I defy you to find anything like a William Wallace in Donald Trump’s DNA.
Long before Trump took over the Republican Party, the Republican Party had made that wide beam of angry, dispossessed, forever-underclass-and-poor white people its bitch. But, theirs was a symbiotic relationship. The rich white people could use the poor white people to defend them from all the non-white people.
They could even use poor white people to help enslave non-white people. Enslaved Black people saw that dynamic and named it. Rich white people used it both to describe and disempower poor white people.
And, at moments like these? Rich white people are using poor white people just as they always have: like cannon fodder.
The Republican Party bet the ranch on a White Trash Revolution. They came shockingly close to pulling it off.
Until we prosecute every last vestige of it?
It won’t completely go away. That means it will fester and metastasize. And, in time, it will produce still another White Trash Revolution.