Why Is It Still OK To 'Trash' Poor White People?
- 2018-08-13
- National Public Radio (NPR)
You can get away with calling something "white trash" in polite company, on cable television and in the headline of a magazine article. An article in The New Republiconce posed the question of whether President Trump might be "a white trash icon." For some reason, the term manages to come across as less offensive than most other racial slurs.
Yet "white trash" could be called the Swiss army knife of insults. It's deft in its ability to demean multiple groups at once: white people and people of color, poor people and people who "act" like poor people, rural folks and religious folks, and anyone without a college degree.
Like other slurs, there has been some reclamation of "white trash" — songs and cookbooks and T-shirts that celebrate white-trash culture. And plenty of people unabashedly refer to themselves as white trash.