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Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur
- Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
- University of Arizona
- Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2000
- pp. 37-64
- 10.1353/arq.2000.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
JULIA LEYDA Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word "trash" as "a worthless or disreputable person; now, usually, such persons collectively . . . white trash, the poor white population in the Southern States of America," including British usages of "trash" that denote poverty and worthlessness. The American examples, however, include the addition of "white," creating the racialized term "white trash," as in an 183 1 usage : '"You be right dere,' observed Sambo, 'else what fur he go more 'mong niggers den de white trash?'" Another usage appears in a white man's 1833 journal entry: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash.'" Although this example attempts to trace the term "white trash" to slaves, I suggest that whatever the origin of the expression, it was most likely the invention of middle-class whites, who attributed it to slaves and encouraged animosity among slaves and poor whites in order to prevent cross-racial alliances that would challenge white hegemony . Indeed, the OED etymology cites a white man's journal entry, in which the term is ascribed to African Americans by whites, who most benefit from it. According to Eugene Genovese's history ofslavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll, middle-class whites "explained away the existence of such racial contacts and avoided reflecting on the possibility that genuine sympathy might exist across racial lines" (23). Fear of slave rebellion with the aid of poor whites who resented the planter class fostered the hostile attiArizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 38Juiia Leyda tudes toward white trash: for example, many Southern states instituted "stem police measures against whites who illicitly fraternized with blacks" and attempted to keep white and black laborers separate (23). Although poor whites and blacks sometimes helped one another, more often animosity prevailed, bolstering the power of the upper- and middle -class whites. Despite a few examples of cross-racial sympathy in Genovese's oral histories, on the whole "interracial solidarity could not develop into a serious threat to the regime" because of the dominance of racist discourse over class consciousness and the strength of poor whites' desire for upward class mobility (24). Since the nineteenth century, the racial and classed term white trash has peppered American oral and written culture, yet few scholars have seriously questioned how this term functions in American language and literature.1 The paucity of research on the term is in itself telling: white trash is an epithet whose history is still largely unexamined . In 1990s everyday usage, the term white trash caricatures a group of people—poor whites—implicitly justifying through ridicule their disenfranchisement and alienation from society. A historically informed , critical examination of how the term white trash functions in the 1930s demonstrates how middle-class whites constructed white trash identity to explain the socio-economic immobility of other, less prosperous whites. The discourse of "trash" circulated in conjunction with claims about genetics and eugenics, adaptability to changing capitalist markets, and gender identity. The term signifies specific racialized class identities contingent on time and place, but always serving ro distinguish the trash from upwardly mobile whites, who, no matter how poor, still have the potential for upward mobility that the trash lack. Emphasizing individual biological traits—concerns proper to the private sphere—middle-class whites could evade the fact that poor whites' poverty results from structural problems in the economy—the public sphere of capital and labor, production and consumption. By examining the way the term works in the 1930s, a time of economic crisis when the issue of class took center stage in public discourse and when urbanization and consumer capitalism reached into the private homes of even the poorest states in the South, we can better comprehend how the term operates in contemporary texts and contexts. Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl (1939) and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) suggest the historically specific ways in which poor whites Reading White Trash39 are read as white trash in 1930s American texts.2 Reading these two novels together is...