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originally posted by: ~Lucidity
Is this really racist? Or is it an adjective being used to describe (in an albeit stereotypical way) the kind of trash Trump attracts?
In any event, someone seems to be having a bit of an issue with that political incorrectness that's supposed to be all the rage, no?
originally posted by: Stormdancer777
a reply to: andy06shake
people have no idea how the term redneck originated.
originally posted by: Stormdancer777
I live in a diverse neighborhood, we are all probably below poverty level, why are poor whites only called trash?
Taking Out the Trash By the 1890s, America’s burgeoning eugenics movement got hold of this idea and never let go. Most Americans are well aware of the horrors of Nazi eugenics—the early- and mid-nineteenth century idea that through proper breeding techniques and controlling the fertility of the “unfit,” one could produce a superior race. But few care to remember that Nazi eugenicists were taking their cues from American predecessors, who, beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, had successfully lobbied for laws permitting states to involuntarily sterilize people considered unsuited for sexual reproduction.
.While many American eugenicists railed about the threats posed by hordes of “dysgenic” immigrants (non-white, often, but also people from “undesirable” countries and bloodlines of all sorts), the core of eugenical science was based in field studies of poor rural whites. These studies of poor white families and kinship networks were carried out all over the East and Midwest, from upstate New York to Virginia to Ohio.
Authors gave their subjects colorful names like the Jukes, the Kallikaks, the Happy Hickories, and the Smoky Pilgrims. They documented a high incidence of criminality and violence among the men and increased promiscuity and fecundity among the women. White trash was a threat, in other words, because these people were both unfit for reproduction and spectacular at it.
Field researchers often produced evidence they claimed demonstrated the deplorable effects of “defective germ plasm” (what we would today consider genetic material) passed from one generation to the next, sometimes through the immorality of interracial sex, the sexual predations of fathers on their own daughters, or reproduction between close cousins. The last two categories of illicit sexual behavior, grouped under the term consanguinity, were put forth again and again, in study after study, as evidence of the need to control the fertility of poor whites, whose incestuous, cacogenic (rather than eugenic) influence, combined with their promiscuity and fecundity, threatened to overwhelm and pollute the purer white racial stock.
It was a classic example of moral panic: Eugenicists whipped up widespread anxieties about sex, class, gender, and race to mobilize politicians and civic leaders. By 1921, American eugenicists had so firmly implanted fears of racial pollution that 15 states had passed laws permitting involuntary sterilization. Between 1907 and 1927, over 8,000 such operations were performed. Many were carried out on “feebleminded” men and women—those we would today regard as severely developmentally disabled.
But an untold number were carried out on men and women whose only apparent fault was belonging to the class popularly labeled
white trash.
few who use the term today—either proudly or as a shaming slur—seem to know about its deep historical entanglements with the politics of sex, race, and class.