Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (review)

The emergence during the past twenty years of historical and sociological studies of ideas about whiteness and the operations of white privilege has evoked mixed emotions. In the United States, labor historians initially dominated the investigation of whiteness, identifying the new category of historical analysis and showing how it served psychologically to compensate one group of workers for poor wages and conditions, thus separating them from "colored" comrades. Whiteness soon attracted the attention of social scientists, literary critics, historians of empire, and scholars from cultural, ethnic, and women's studies. For many of these enthusiasts, the category offered a means to write about race without necessarily writing about minorities. It allowed them to render visible, and perhaps strange, those bodies, minds, and behaviors that previously had seemed, if not invisible, then at least "normal" or unmarked. It suggested all sorts of exciting possibilities and fresh narratives. But then some historians and social critics kicked back, arguing that "whiteness" was lacking in historical sensitivity and sociological nuance. Whiteness cropped up everywhere and it always looked the same, and made the same things happen, so how could it be considered a useful category of analysis? Why did much of its critical potential dwindle so often into narcissistic fascination with the author's own people? Would it prove to be anything more than another fad, a historiographic dead end, or a lost cause for aging radicals?

Trained in sociology, Matt Wray represents the second generation of scholars of whiteness. He is less interested in unmasking hidden or normative whiteness than in tracing and situating efforts to frame and stabilize white identities over time. That is, he seeks to establish how some people came to imagine themselves as white and to work out why this particular self-identification mattered. "We should reconceptualize whiteness," he writes, "as a flexible set of social and symbolic boundaries that gave shape, meaning, and power to the social category white" (p. 6, original emphasis). In Not Quite White, Wray treats marginal and degraded whites—or "white trash"—in the United States as boundary markers, revealing the scope and limits of white identity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the margins, "white" became a means of negotiating affinities and differences in diverse communities, making available a convenient mechanism for determining "thresholds of inclusion and respectability" (p. 134). Wray engagingly shows us the multiple personae and cultures articulated through the boundary category of "white trash" since its emergence in the southern United States in the 1830s.

Historians of science and medicine will find the second half of Not Quite White—the chapters on eugenics and hookworm prevention—especially rewarding. Wray adroitly describes how eugenicists targeted poor and degraded whites in the early twentieth century and attempted to manage their reproduction in order to defend and secure the status of whiteness. Hookworm crusaders, in contrast, tried to mobilize—not sterilize—poor whites in the southern states, hoping to improve their environment and conduct, thus making them into productive and respectable citizens. Wray argues that hookworm prevention efforts "profoundly influenced national perspectives on southern poor whites, effectively opening the door for this group to lay claim to their 'groupness,' to insist on their identities as fully white Americans, to shed the taint and stigma of moral, racial, and sexual degeneracy, and to further distance themselves from black Americans and immigrants" (p. 20). When we realize the target of so much twentieth-century public health was the status of whiteness, its operations can look quite different.

Some years ago after I talked in the Berkeley hills about how clearly marked white bodies became in Australian medical research, a distinguished cultural historian from a nearby institution observed that scientists and physicians had never focused on whiteness in the United States. Certainly American...