Poor Whites/White Trash: una ricognizione

The 400-hundred-year history of poor whites in the U.S. South has been marked by systemic poverty fueled by structural economic dynamics. Intrinsic to the class discourse is a history of cultural and political stigmatization of white poor by “progressive” white elites, reformists, and liberals. Derided as rednecks and hillbillies and lumped into the derogatory category of white trash, poor white Southerners have been subjected to classist and eugenic discrimination. Constructed as “dysgenic,” incapable of social betterment, anti-modern, and uneducable by other whites, the identity of poor whites is associated with the idea of poverty as an irremediable dysfunction – no small curse in a country founded on the myth of the classless society and infinite social mobility. This introduction touches upon Dolly Parton, Li’l Abner, Gone with the Wind, Dorothy Allison, Erskine Caldwell, the photo-essay book, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land.