Red, White, and Poor
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The vast majority of farmers, black and white, were tenants or sharecroppers, and repressive poll taxes disenfranchised not just black men and women, but also poor white people. It was more ingenious and insidious than many people today realize. In Texas, the tax was due on February 1, in the winter off-season, when farmers were habitually strapped for cash. Little wonder that in , three of four voting-age adults outside the South participated in the presidential election, but in the South, just one in four cast ballots.
The system kept men like Eugene Cox, a conservative Democrat who held the powerful post of House Rules Committee chairman, in power.
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In , Cox won reelection with 5, votes, though his district in southwest Georgia had a total population of , residents. Yet when working-class Southern whites could participate in the political process, they often jettisoned their natural class interests in favor of racial solidarity. For a time, it held. But in , Democrats campaigned with intense focus on the issue of inter-marriage and miscegenation—a rare phenomenon that nevertheless struck a raw nerve with white workers and farmers.
To reduce Jim Crow politics to a single trajectory is to oversimplify a complicated story. But the problem of white working-class Southerners bedeviled generations of liberal activists and historians. When the labor federation Congress of Industrial Organizations launched Operation Dixie, a massive effort to unionize Southern workers in the mids, organizers ran into the same wall: Conservative politicians and their wealthy patrons successfully used race as a cudgel to turn white workers away from collective bargaining agreements that would have raised their wages.
Critically, Du Bois never insisted that the psychological wages of whiteness were wholly devoid of tangible value. What they forfeited in material benefits, working-class whites also recouped in limited power and privilege.
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On the other hand, the Negro was subject to insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. David Roediger, a historian of class and race who writes with a Marxian lens, emphasized exactly this point in his classic volume, The Wages of Whiteness , published in the title was a direct tribute to Du Bois.
He encouraged a generation of scholars to consider that working-class whites may not have been unwitting dupes in their own economic subjugation; instead, they knowingly harvested certain real advantages of whiteness. While this pattern was most visible in the South, it also deeply influenced political culture in the North and West, where whiteness was no less central to popular conceptions of American citizenship. That law remained on the books into the 20th century. Indeed, there was no immediate consensus that certain new immigrants met the qualification.
Many non-black workers keenly understood that they might be left outside the boundaries of citizenship. They also resented new forms of industrial discipline that their employers foisted onto them. Many addressed these anxieties by drawing a sharp dichotomy between white and black—citizen and slave—and placing themselves on one side of that divide.
In short, they deflected on black people, both slave and free, the very same social demerits that wealthier whites—who were trying to impose new discipline on the urban working class—ascribed to them. One group that did sometimes compete for unskilled jobs with African-Americans were Irish immigrants. Regarded as racially suspect— depicted in political cartoons as dark and ape-like, and patently unqualified for citizenship—Irish immigrants became some of the most avid and violent practitioners of white identity politics.
Indeed, more was at stake than cash wages. To achieve standing as free white persons—and to enjoy the many benefits of citizenship that accrued from that definition—working-class men in the antebellum era consciously asserted their white identity and set it apart from blackness through language, performance, politics and violence. If working-class whites historically derived both psychological and citizenship wages by privileging race over class, is it possible that they sometimes enjoyed real wages as well? Giving special focus to labor and housing markets, they found that many working-class white families benefited directly from government policies that placed African-Americans at a disadvantage.
Beginning in the s, most mortgages were underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration, a federal agency that insured banks against losses from homeowners who defaulted on their loans. At minimal expense to the federal government and with only the pledge of default insurance, the FHA freed up unprecedented levels of capital and helped create a postwar social order in which 60 percent of American households owned and accumulated wealth in their own homes.
In deciding whether or not to insure mortgages, the FHA rated every census tract in the country. This meant that most black Americans could not secure mortgages, as their mere presence in a neighborhood would choke off affordable credit.
It was not just a matter of housing. A powerful combination of private-sector discrimination and nepotism within trade unions had long excluded black workers from well-paid, blue-collar industries. And New York was better than most places. In Chicago, 17 percent of black adults in the early s were unemployed. In Cleveland, 20 percent.
It was the "mean" minority who gave white trash their bad name and character. At her skinny breast an emaciated infant was hanging, pushing, with its little skeleton hands, as if to force nourishment which nature no longer gave; and two scared-looking children, with features wasted and pinched blue with famine, were clinging to her gown. After all, "white" is the only racial group that needs a modifier for it to become a slur. The beginning of the 20th century brought no change of status for poor white southerners, especially after the onset of the Great Depression. Views Read Edit View history. When Donald Trump was criticized for making racist and sexist comments , Isenberg says the media tried to portray his supporters as "white trash," as opposed to ordinary, upstanding white people.
In Detroit, 39 percent. In effect, two postwar forces most responsible for lifting millions of working-class families into middle-class comfort and privilege—the suburban housing boom and unionized blue-collar jobs—became available en masse to black Americans only as the post-war boom drew to a close. They accumulated equity in their suburban homes and used it to send their children to college or to save for their retirement.
They enjoyed access to public services—from public schools and public trash collection, to clean water and sewage—that were deficient in majority-minority neighborhoods. These advantages conferred second-order benefits, including better health and a higher average life expectancy. In other words, whiteness did pay real wages. It delivered an intergenerational advantage to those who were in a position to claim it.
And white working-class Americans seemed on some level to understand it. When, in , Lyndon Johnson attempted to ram through Congress a law banning racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing, white working-class voters revolted both in the streets and at the polls.
That summer, when Martin Luther King Jr.
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Even though exit polls have shown that white people of all class and education backgrounds voted for Trump in the general election, Isenberg says it's the people pegged as poor and working-class whites — wearing red Bubba hats and cheering at rallies — who get burdened with negative associations. She says we talk about those white folks as "a group that doesn't deserve to be heard from, either because we don't like them because they're poor and they're violent, or we want to claim that they're the most racist group in society.
That last idea — that poor white people are more racist than wealthy or middle-class white people — is an enduring one. Matt Wray says that one of the earliest recorded usages of the phrase "white trash" was in , when the daughter of one of the largest slave owners in Maryland said that there were no tensions between black slaves and white slave owners, only between black slaves and "white trash.
The person down the road is racist.
The one who drops the N-word, or has the Confederate flag flapping off the back of their truck. Poor white people aren't the only ones who bear the brunt of the term. Of course, the phrase is also a backhanded way of demeaning people of color. After all, "white" is the only racial group that needs a modifier for it to become a slur. There's no "black trash" or "Hispanic trash" or "Native American trash," presumably, because for most of American history, those people were assumed by those in power to be poor, uneducated and criminal.
White trash, as described by Wray, is an oxymoron. Black trash, by that thinking, is almost redundant. He says that white trash "is a term that really has white supremacy baked into it, because it's kind of like it's understood that if you're not white, you're trash. During the slave era, "white trash people" were sometimes talked about as the white equivalent to black slaves. In , in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about "white trash people," whom she described as "a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable" than slaves; "a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe.
For black people at that time, a life of misery and degradation was considered unremarkable.
In most Southern states, poor whites and wealthy whites forged a .. “Roses are red, violets are black, King would look good with a knife in his. White trash is a derogatory American English predominantly class slur referring to poor white .. elected to be a state legislator. Such was the case with Guy Rencher, who claimed that "redneck" came from his own "long red neck".
For white people, it was an abomination. Nancy Isenberg says that connection between black enslaved populations and poor white people was more than just coincidence. She says that when England first started to colonize the Americas, they needed a large labor force to get things going. That workforce came in the form of indentured servitude — thousands of poor British children — a process that Isenberg says laid the foundation for slavery. They literally felt that they were dumping what they called the 'waste people' in the New World.
These were people who were seen as unproductive and idle, wandering vagrants back in the Old World. They were going to unload them on the New World. So much has changed since the first European indentured servants were sent to the United States. But from the sounds of it, the way we talk about poor white people hasn't changed much at all. For more in the Code Switch Word Watch series, listen to the latest episode of the podcast or check out our blog.
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