Description: Poor whites are associated with kitschy chic or dangerous perversions in mainstream culture, rather than with the realities of life under conditions of economic hardship and social disempowerment. White Trash compares the stereotypes with the social reality, unmasking the racial and class assumptions behind the term. Issues range from religion to Elvis, Spam to trailer parks. 10 illustrations.
Review Quotes:
"[T]he essays in Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz's WhiteTrash: Race and Class in America forcefully peel away many common assumptions about the relations between race and privilege. The essays in White Trash interweave the personal and the "objective" to demonstrate the interdependence of experience and knowledge necessary to understand as false what has to date been assumed as normative in our cultural identity: that "white" is both classless and privileged. White Trash offers a slash-and-burn approach that others will appreciate, targeting the intersection of race and class in white culture as the invisible site of contradiction that allows whiteness to be understood as raceless and classless." -- Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety
"White Trash...contribute(s) some important new voices to the current culture wars." -- Boston Review of Books ..a new collection of stunningly didactic essays in cultural criticism...Welcome to the newest fad in academia: white studies.