You can get away with calling something "white trash" in polite company, on cable television and in the headline of a magazine article. An article in The New Republic once posed the question of whether President Trump might be "a white trash icon." For some reason, the term manages to come across as less offensive than most other racial slurs.
Yet "white trash" could be called the Swiss army ***** of insults. It's deft in its ability to demean multiple groups at once: white people and people of color; poor people and people who "act" like poor people; rural folks and religious folks and anyone without a college degree.
So why does "white trash" still get thrown around without much pushback?
Typically, the term is directed at low-income, rural white people. And while there were more than 17 million white people living in poverty as of 2016, it's still rare that you see poor white people represented in government or media. (In 2014, more than half of all members of Congress were millionaires.)
When poor (or formerly poor) white folks do get portrayed in the media and pop culture, they're often reduced to a series of offensive stereotypes: that they're angry, lazy, dirty, overweight, sunburned, stupid, racist, alcoholic, abusive, jobless, tacky, diseased, violent, backwards, Bible-thumping and uneducated. Those stereotypes get reinforced over and over again on TV and in movies, as anyone who watches Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty will tell you.
Like other slurs, there's been some reclamation of "white trash" — songs and cookbooks and T-shirts that celebrate white-trash culture. And plenty of people unabashedly refer to themselves as white trash.
But no matter who uses it, the phrase itself reinforces some pretty insidious ideas about the meaning of whiteness (and, by reflection, blackness — we'll get to that in a minute). By accepting the idea that white trash exists, people are tacitly accepting that there's another, different kind of whiteness. Normal white people — the ones who aren't white trash — embody all the things white trash can't: They're hard-working, educated, classy, kind and good.
