“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.

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.

Et Tu, Atticus!: The Hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Cold War

Against the background of the Cold War, this article rethinks the novel (1960) and film (1962) To Kill a Mockingbird, more specifically Atticus Finch’s characterization as the courageous, unblemished defender of an unjustly accused black man in the American South. Because of Atticus’s unrelenting efforts to exonerate Tom Robinson, he has been proclaimed the 20th century’s greatest American movie hero. At a closer look, however, it turns out that, while Atticus fights hard for Tom, he nevertheless, and as a matter of course, abandons the investigation into the stabbing death of Bob Ewell, a poor white man and Tom’s accuser. The New Yorker magazine noted this conflict in the movie. So, it begs the question: from what social attitudes does this broad-spectrum admiration for Atticus emerge? This article proposes an answer: it originates in identity-centrism, an attitude that underlies United States ideology during the Cold War era and results, specifically, in a total disregard for the poor. In other words, To Kill a Mockingbird is not a closed-ended novel of good versus evil, but an open-ended work that raises a troubling question about diversity.

Building Longitudinal Datasets From Diverse Historical Data in Australia

Australia is rich in population datasets generated to manage convicts, civilians, stock, land and the colonised and displaced First Nations people. It has also preserved all service and pension data from both world wars. Through nominal linkage using volunteers and paid research staff, it has been possible over the past twenty years to build four cradle-to-grave datasets derived from administrative cohorts: poor white babies born in a charity hospital 1858–1900; Aboriginal Victorians from 1855 to 1988; convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land 1818-1853 and servicemen who embarked for World War I from the State of Victoria. The abundance of digitised historical sources from government archives to historical newspapers enables the practice of demographic prosopography, with a wide range of variables that have yielded new insights into Australia’s population and social history.

Conclusion

The conclusion presents the consequences of entitlement for individuals, the planet, and democracy. Entitlement makes people cognitively inflexible but also behaviorally, professionally, and politically unable to adapt to change. Dominant group members do not believe they should have to change and adapt, and they react emotionally when they are asked to do so. Economically struggling White people support policies that are self-destructive to themselves and their communities. Many White people vote according to their racial status against their economic needs. They support politicians who offer policies that objectively advantage the wealthy and harm working-class and poor White people. Entitlement can help us understand climate change denial if we consider it in the context of anti-intellectualism, individualism, and fragile masculinity—topics covered in previous chapters. Finally, entitlement could end democracy. The grievance politics of the entitled has knocked down some crucial pillars that historically have upheld democracy in the United States. In order to stay in power, Republican politicians must cheat because their initiatives are so unpopular, they would not win elections if everyone voted. Therefore, they gerrymander districts to absurdity, they remove voters of color from voter lists, they close voting locations in ethnic minority communities, and they limit early voting, weekend voting, and even voting by mail during a global pandemic.

Rethinking Moral Crisis

This chapter addresses the moral crisis. One of the oldest tropes in the “end of the world” genre is “We are going to die because of a moral crisis.” The ancestor of this argument is Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Moral arguments can be made by anyone in any part of the political spectrum; they are the most common, however, among the religious right. The chapter then considers Jim Nelson Black's book When Nations Die: Ten Warning Signs of a Culture in Crisis. Black's treatment is unusually complete and covers nearly every argument made by moral crisis authors. Ultimately, societal survival is based on large groups of people working together to solve common problems. Identifying one group as having superior values and another group as being barbarian reduces the size of the potential web of cooperation. Indeed, it is not helpful to set rich people against the “idle” poor, white people against “criminal” blacks, or Christians against “culture-destroying” vulgarians.

Peculiar Whiteness

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.’

Managing Difference: White Parenting Practices in Socioeconomically Diverse Neighborhoods

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.

The Social Question in Pre-apartheid South Africa: Race, Religion and the State

In the first half of the twentieth century, “social” issues in South Africa were framed by both rapid social and economic change (especially industrialisation and urbanisation) and racial division. The social question in South Africa was as much a racialised version of a “national question” as a social one, revolving around the social and economic inclusion (through state intervention) of “poor white” people and white workers and the reinforcement of a clear racial hierarchy. From the 1930s, political elites slowly moved towards the very partial inclusion of the African majority. Political and religious ideas, primarily from Europe, informed understandings of the social question among both supporters and opponents of public provision.

A Simple Justice

When the Declaration of Independence was signed by a group of wealthy white men in 1776, poor white men, African Americans, and women quickly discovered that the unalienable rights it promised were not truly for all. The Nineteenth Amendment eventually gave women the right to vote in 1920, but the change was not welcomed by people of all genders in politically and religiously conservative Kentucky. As a result, the suffrage movement in the Commonwealth involved a tangled web of stakeholders, entrenched interest groups, unyielding constitutional barriers, and activists with competing strategies. In A Simple Justice, Melanie Beals Goan offers a new and deeper understanding of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky by following the people who labored long and hard to see the battle won. Women's suffrage was not simply a question of whether women could and should vote; it carried more serious implications for white supremacy and for the balance of federal and state powers -- especially in a border state. Shocking racial hostility surfaced even as activists attempted to make America more equitable. Goan looks beyond iconic women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to reveal figures whose names have been lost to history. Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge led the Kentucky movement, but they did not do it alone. This timely study introduces readers to individuals across the Bluegrass State who did their part to move the nation closer to achieving its founding ideals.