Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

As Matt Wray's survey of thinking about poor whites in America makes clear, the category that will become white trash has a long and convoluted history. Lubbers, crackers, and human rubbish, pine rats, hill folk, and dirt-eaters—the terms as well as the exact nature of the characteristics that differentiate these colonists and later Americans from others vary widely. "Crackers, a name they got from being great boasters," a colonial administrator wrote in 1766, "are a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. They steal horses in the southern provinces and sell them in the northern and those from the Northern they sell in the southern" (35-36). The problem then was one of law enforcement. A Midwestern minister in 1888 saw the difference of a family of thieves, prostitutes, and nomads he described as a "pauper ganglion" dating back to 1840 in much harsher terms. "What can we do," he asked. "First, we must close up official out-door relief. Second, we must check private and indiscriminate benevolence, or charity, falsely called. Third, we must get hold of the children" (77). People this deviant cannot be helped, he argued. They must be stopped. In 1912, the journalist Walter Hines Page had a much more charitable view. "The southern white people are of almost pure English stock," he wrote in the World's Work. "It has been hard to explain their backwardness, for they are descended from capable ancestors and inhabit a rich land. Now, for the first time, the main cause of their backwardness is explained and it is a removable cause," hookworm. Poor whites could be cured. "I predict that within five years the whole face of this country will be changed and one will see here a new people and a new earth."

Wray divides his ambitious study into roughly four overlapping periods. From the 1720s through the 1830s, elites' vision of poor people descended from European immigrants changes. In the colonial era, poor whites are described as lazy because they refuse to work. They live outside society because of their immoral rejection of the work ethic. By the revolutionary era, however, elites see these poor Americans as a dangerous class of criminals, threatening the political and economic order with their thieving and squatting and general refusal to obey the law. In the antebellum period, both pro and anti-slavery supporters describe poor whites in the South as different, a group apart from other free white people. Abolitionists, however, believe the monstrous system of slavery causes their depravity. Pro-slavery Southerners believe that difference is innate, the result of biological inferiority. From Reconstruction through the 1920s, these once sectional and political ideas about the physical differences between middle-class and poor whites grew and spread with the rise of scientific thought and social Darwinism. Eugenicists, in particular, tried to make the case that poor whites were genetically and thus racially distinct. From the early 1900s through 1915, however, a group of medical reformers countered these ideas by arguing that the differences in the bodies and especially the skin of poor whites were the result of disease, especially hookworm, and not inherent biological difference.

Wray, a sociologist, provides neither the texture and detail of social history nor the close readings of texts and visual images of cultural studies scholars. Much of the historical work here, with the exception of the chapter on the hookworm crusade, is a survey of work down by previous scholars. Wray's desire instead is to make a theoretical contribution, to provide an example of the usefulness of boundary theory for whiteness studies. White, he argues, is a social, not a racial category. His study of the contradictions of the category white trash, he suggests, provide some guidelines for constructing a "unified theory of social differentiation—a way of bringing together class, race, gender, and sex analysis into a single frame" (143).