“We Ain’t Nothing but White Trash”. The Ethnography of Poor Whites and the Politics of Stigma in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee.

2021 ◽  
pp. 092137402110533
Author(s):  
Djemila Zeneidi
Keyword(s):  
Objective Analysis ◽  
White Population ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Group ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Seraph On The Suwanee ◽  
Subjective Side

This article aims to demonstrate the documentary value of Zora Neale, Hurston’s descriptions, in her novel Seraph on the Suwanee, of the condition of the poor white US Southerners known as “crackers.” By, depicting a “cracker” woman’s upward social trajectory through, marriage, Hurston reveals the social and existential reality of this, segment of the white population. Her novel presents an objective, analysis of the crackers as a socio-historical group distinct from other, whites. However, Hurston also explores the subjective side of belonging to this discredited group by offering an account of her heroine’s experience of stigmatization.

Elevated above the Real: The Poor White Southerner in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Child Of God ◽  
White Southerner

This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).

Peculiar Whiteness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Mellette
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Thomas Dixon ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Disparate Treatment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Fear And Anxiety

Peculiar Whiteness argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ‘white trash’ have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety-inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or with other troubling conditions such as physical difference. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ‘white trash,’ tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, the book analyzes how we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to re-categorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ‘white trash.’

scholarly journals Levinas, Social Vulnerability, and the Logic of South African Racism

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-101
Author(s):  
Robert Bernasconi
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Vulnerability ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The Way

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was at the forefront of the promotion of the idea of vulnerability in philosophy. For Levinas, my primary vulnerability concerns not my pain, but my pain at the other’s pain. Vulnerablity also has an ambiguous character in so far as it is not easily separated from my self-absorption in enjoyment. In this paper I show how Levinas’s account can illuminate the way that the idea of vulnerability sometimes operates within racist societies to maintain existing divisions. In particular I focus on the Carnegie Commission’s 1932 study The Poor White Problem in South Africa where concern for the vulnerability of poor whites concealed a tendency to naturalize the vulnerability of South African Blacks. Keywords: Carnegie commission, poor whites, racism, vulnerability, Emmanuel Levinas,South Africa

From “The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers”1

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Bledsoe
Keyword(s):  
Southern Literature ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Men ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Almost All ◽  
New Generation

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.

Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN A. KEELY
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Family Study ◽  
Rural Poverty ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
White Family ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Erskine Caldwell ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Family ◽  
Poor White

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chary Feinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Aging Process ◽  
White Men ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Female Slaves

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who were treated with a contempt which deepened all the more by their womanhood. Some were actually driven away by their neighbors, who feared an increase in the poor rates. The legal records of the colonies contain many instances of poor widows who were … forced to wander from one town to another (Fischer, 1978: 63).

Jill McCorkle: The Rough South from One Remove

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bennett
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Elementary School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Old South ◽  
White Trash ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White

This chapter discusses Jill McCorkle's fiction, which reflects the whole South, rather than just its middle class. McCorkle did not grow up amid poverty, and in fact calls her upbringing in 1960s Lumberton, North Carolina, “very much middle-class”—even upper class by the standards of her elementary school classmates. Her 1990 novel, Ferris Beach, features a character named Kitty Burns, a transition figure between the old South, with its clear divisions of class, and the new, where what a person does is more important than where that person came from. Another character, Merle Hucks, at first seems to fit the “poor white trash” stereotype, and whose family encompasses all the Rough South stereotypes. Merle, however, transcends the Rough South stereotype and distinguishes himself from his family and friends. McCorkle also published a novel called Life After Life in 2013.

Managing Difference: White Parenting Practices in Socioeconomically Diverse Neighborhoods

2021 ◽  
pp. 153568412098101
Author(s):  
Megan R. Underhill
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Parenting Practices ◽  
The Other ◽  
Spatial Distance ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
The Poor ◽  
White Parents ◽  
Black Residents ◽  
Block Level ◽  
Poor White

Drawing on 40 interviews with white parents in two mixed-income neighborhoods—one that is majority-white and the other that is multiracial—this article examines how residence in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods conditions the parenting practices of middle-class whites, specifically concerning parents’ management of their children’s contact with the poor. The data reveal that white parents in both neighborhoods work to ensure symbolic and spatial distance between their children and their poor neighbors resulting in distinctive patterns of micro-segregation in each neighborhood. However, how parents engage in this work depends on the race of their neighbors and the block-level geography of their community. I find that parents deploy more contact-avoidant practices toward their poor white rather than their poor black neighbors. Among participants, poor whites conjure feelings of disgust and are actively avoided, whereas poor black residents provoke feelings of ambivalence, as contact with them is judged to be both valuable and threatening.

“Work in the Factory Itself ”

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-182
Author(s):  
Elizabeth D. Esch
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Carnegie Corporation ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Social Scientific

This chapter examines how the Poor White Investigation of the Carnegie Corporation provided a social-scientific rationale for the racial segregation of industrial work with which Ford, who would become one of the most powerful multinational employers in South Africa, complied. Targeted during the antiapartheid movement to divest, the roots of Ford’s relationship with this racist state are in the 1920s and 1930s, built on Ford’s reputation for racial paternalism and so-called progressivism in the United States. In South Africa, an interest in Ford’s processes of mass production and mass consumption were both mobilized in projects of racial improvement, though the Carnegie report specifically endorsed the idea of work in the factory as the most effective route to the racial improvement and discipline of so-called poor whites, recommending “white managerialist” efforts to address the “problem of poor whites.”

Voluntary Associations and the Social Integration of the Poor

1971 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-357
Author(s):  
Russell L. Curtis, Jr. ◽  
Louis A. Zurcher, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Social Integration ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social
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