COLUMN: The '90 version of war on the poor

From Tony Smith's, "Doric, Ironic and Corinthian," Fall '98 From Tony Smith's, "Doric, Ironic and Corinthian," Fall '98Tony Smith says the term 'white trash' is a manifestation of broad societal decay. From Tony Smith's, "Doric, Ironic and Corinthian," Fall '98Tony Smith says the term 'white trash' is a manifestation of broad societal decay.White Trash. We all know the term. We've seen these people in rural hovels, inner suburbs and trailer parks from Florida to California. We've seen on daytime talk shows. We've turned white trash into a theme for a frat party. But why are they called "white" trash? Apparently, we wish to make it explicitly clear that we are not referring to black, yellow, red or brown trash. The term "white trash" is widely accepted in mainstream culture, yet these others are seldom used. A 1996 article in San Diego State University's Daily Aztec about an upcoming football game against the University of Wyoming referred to Wyoming residents as "white trash." A quick web search for "white trash" reveals thousands of sites, including the "White Trash Cookbook," and "White Trash Gardening." A similar search for "black trash" revealed mostly newsgroup posts about "killing all the black trash," and a few Aryan Nation websites. This disparity corresponds with daily life: Only racist extremists would ever refer to someone as "black trash," while "white trash" rolls off our tongues with ease. Referring to anyone as "trash" is powerfully insulting and dismissive. So why is "white trash" such a widely accepted expression? When you get down to it, it's because white trash are poor. The American Heritage Dictionary contains only one definition for white trash: "A poor white or poor whites in general." So, if we translate, "white" means "white" and "trash" means "poor." The fact that we continue to call these people "white trash" instead of simply "trash" implies that those other colors of trash exist, but we are not referring to them. There are certainly poor blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans out there as well as whites. The so-called "PC Revolution" was the most recent evolutionary step in mainstream American society's feelings about blatant, public, verbal displays of racism, which subsequently became more or less taboo. Bashing the poor, however, has always been acceptable, even fashionable. It seems to me that slamming "white trash" became much more common in the early 1990s, when the PC craze was at its height. You could almost hear the subconscious reasoning going on in everyone's head: "telling jokes about blacks and Puerto Ricans isn't acceptable any more, so I need to find some other disadvantaged group to criticize." White trash fit the bill perfectly. They were uncool for so many reasons: They were poor, uneducated, white, violent and stereotyped as being racist. You could see the thrill on people's faces when they realized that they had finally found a group of people that they could hate without feeling guilty. Of course, other groups were being deamonized at the time, too. Politicians railed against "welfare queens" (shorthand for urban black single mothers) and "job-stealing Mexican immigrants" in the late 1980s and early '90s. Many people saw through this rhetoric, correctly identifying it as racist. But more to the point, terms like "welfare queen" were just other ways to express disgust for the poor. Back in the 1960's President Lyndon Johnson instituted a group of social programs collectively titled "The War on Poverty." Here, on the eve of the 21st century, we have discovered that a War on the Poor is much cheaper, simpler and more fun. As a society, we seem to have become jaded about poverty. We've practically given up on welfare, which was the only major social program we had which exclusively benefited the impoverished. We now prefer to lock up the poor when they commit their crimes of desperation, and to burn them alive in their compounds when they rebel against our laws. Daily, hours of TV programming are devoted to showing them physically attacking each other (Jerry Springer) and getting beaten up by the police (COPS.) But why do these people fascinate us so much? Because they are the clearest manifestations of our diseased culture. We stare and pick at these people like open sores on our feet, hoping that the rest of our body is not also infected. We blame them for society's problems in an effort to escape the bigotry, hatred and violence within our minds. But the very fact that we love to attack these people so much is the clearest indication that we are deceiving ourselves.