United States | News & Politics

I don't know where you're from, but I have only ever heard somebody use the phrase "white trash" to refer to lower income white people, usually who behave in a trashy manner but not always (wherein a trashy manner means things like wearing wife beaters or raggy clothing, men walking around without shirts on, living in a trailer park--though that alone doesn't necessarily make you white trash, being undereducated and poorly spoken, being bigoted and outspoken, likely being on drugs or drinking too much, or living on disability payments while not being disabled and still hating "welfare" for others, having a criminal record--penchant for fighting, drunk driving, theft, drug dealing, etc, etc).

And it's very much a racist term because it's implying that regular "trash" is not white.

Just out of curiosity, what region are you from?

Because where I'm from -- which is only a few dozen miles from Winder, by the way -- calling somebody "white trash" very definitely can have an extra layer of connotation that merely calling them a "trashy person" does not.

Specifically, because of how closely correlated race and class are around here due to all the institutional racism (both historical and ongoing), calling somebody "white trash" doesn't necessarily just mean "trashy," it means --
and please forgive for risking coming across as racist in my attempt to describe other people's racism -- "living like a black person." The idea is that black people, as an underclass, are trashy by nature, so by invoking a racial comparison the person using the phrase isn't just saying the object of their insult is trashy, but is also "othering" them and contemptuously scolding them for failing to uphold the class standard racists expect of them as a white person.

And yes, that applies to "rich white trash," too: when a racist's worldview is that even the richest black person is inherently inferior to even the poorest white person, to call a person "white trash" is to consign them to the lowest class of society no matter how rich they are.

Also, please note that I'm not saying that everybody who uses the phrase "which trash" is a racist! The connotation I'm describing is highly context-dependent. In other words, just because some shitty kinfolk of a murderer in Georgia are highly offended at being accused of being associated with blackness because they were called "white trash" by randos from elsewhere in the country, doesn't mean said randos actually meant it that way.

Nevertheless, regardless of what some people mean and how other people interpret them, the bottom line is that using that phrase in this context injects race and class issues into the matter that don't deserve to be there and do nothing but distract from any legitimate goal anyone here might have, whether that be throwing the book at murderous fuckwits, reforming gun laws, trying to fix the root causes of domestic abuse and school bullying, or otherwise.