Not Quite White
Subtitle: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: November 2006
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 213
ISBN-13: 9780822338734
Subjects: Ethnography; Social Science; Public opinion; Sociology; Whites; United States; Poverty; American Studies; Race and Ethnicity; Discrimination & Racism; Ethnic Studies - General; Sociology - General; Race identity; Rural poor
Description: White trash. The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources--literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses--to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites. -- From publisher description.