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

Matt Wray, in Not Quite White, manages to achieve an evasive goal in higher education – he has written a book that is both fun to read and highly informative. Because this is a scholarly review of his work, I’ll concentrate more on what Wray taught me in Not Quite White, but I should reiterate that reading this book was an enjoyable experience in and of itself. Wray should be commended almost as much for his engaging writing style as for his impressive research skills.

That said, this book is more meticulously researched than almost any I’ve read in this area of study. Wray, a sociologist by trade, paints a colorful socio-historical picture of the creation and recreation of categories of whiteness that asks the relevant questions and answers them thoroughly. Wray’s dogged pursuit and explication of the social history of “white trash” is further demonstrated in his footnotes, which are almost as informative the main text. Each answered any incidental questions that came to mind from a reading of the main text. Yet Wray’s footnotes go beyond parenthetical explanations, becoming mini-essays on a myriad of topics, and I looked forward to reading each one. Certainly an expanded version of several of the footnotes could produce other interesting manuscripts. Moreover, the footnotes alone easily validate the author’s substantive expertise and superb research skills.

The most obvious contribution of Not Quite White is manifested in the wealth of information it offers about “white trash.” Wray shows how the group commonly known as “white trash” came to be defined as such, after first being referred to as “lubbers” and then as “crackers.” Particularly fascinating is his analysis of the role of the eugenics movement and the “hookworm crusade” in both delineating this group and suggesting competing explanations of the cause of the group’s supposed degeneracy. In this regard, Wray shows how structural explanations of poverty (which debunk victim-blaming by showing how poverty is a cause and not a result of other ills) could account for the early history of poor whites. Wray demonstrates that essentialist, individualist explanations became taken-for-granted paradigms in the history of the “white trash” and thus excluded alternative environmental, constuctionist explanations.

Another fascinating process that Wray reveals is that much of the stigma of white trash came from these whites’ transgressive behaviors. For example, poor whites at various points in their history violated traditional gender roles – white trash women worked, seemingly out of the “control” of their husbands; white trash women engaged in “unladylike” sexual practices, and, therefore, were the targets of “moral panics” and “symbolic crusades.”(101) Similarly, poor whites often transgressed racial boundaries either as allies of or companions to people of color. In fact, some in both the eugenics and hookworm movements suggested that white trash was a “polluted” racial form that resulted from contact with people of color. Incidentally, although the author makes this point clearly throughout the book, I believe it should have come up in his otherwise excellent summary in the last chapter.

Finally, poor whites existed in a dubious economic position. Particularly in the South after the Civil War, they often refused to fall in line as whites when this meant more exploitation. White trash were so labeled, in large part, because they engaged in cultural resistance (117) that put their very identity as whites in question (120). In effect, white trash were fallen “pure Anglo Saxons.” This historical account makes it clearer why, today, the term “white trash” is beginning to convey a transgressive whiteness.

Aside from the specific information Wray offers regarding the history of the white trash label and people, Not Quite White makes larger theoretical and methodological contributions. In both the study of whiteness and in race and ethnicity research in general, there is often the implied or explicit assertion that race, as a category of group identification and a method of exclusion, is more important...