White Trash: Race and Class in America [Paperback]

Annalee Newitz (Editor), Matt Wray (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415916925 | ISBN-13: 978-0415916929 | Publication Date: December 22, 1996 | Edition: 1

This collection is devoted to exploring stereotypes about the social conditions of poor whites in the United States and comparing these stereotypes with the social reality, unmasking the racial and class assumptions behind the term 'white trash'.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This collection of essays suffers somewhat from occasional appearances in its pages of the plodding and pretentious prose of academia, but despite that fault, these essays on poor white Americans are, in general, quite interesting. To be honest, when the scholars trip over their jargon while explaining why Bubba and Jolene constitute a "debased other," it can be more fun than a free Pabst beer at the monster truck pull. Some essays stand out. Writer Michael Berube's memoir of life in a 1950s trailer park in Bayonne, New Jersey, is well-written and touching; and University of Southern California film professor Constance Penley's disquisition on white trash pornography, entitled "Crackers and Whackers" is bound to raise eyebrows. And Gael Sweeney provides the fitting finale, an essay entitled "The King of White Trash Culture: Elvis Presley and the Aesthetics of Excess."

Review

[T]he essays in Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz's White Trash: 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 and Society

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (December 22, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415916925
• ISBN-13: 978-0415916929
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Academic stuffiness (yawn), August 25, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: White Trash: Race and Class in America (Paperback)

Skip "White Trash : Race and Class in America". It's pretentious and obviously written by authors who've never done a hard day's manual labor, let alone been to a Monster Truck rally. Amazon offers Jim Goad's "Redneck Manifesto" - a much smarter and grittier look at America's white working class (written from someone who's been there).

33 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ha, ha, ha, August 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: White Trash: Race and Class in America (Paperback)

You would think that the term "White Trash" was just invented when it's been around for years and years. This book was pretty darn good! As a former southern non-belle let me say my piece. I was accused of being WT mainly because I lived at the end of a dirt road and my grandparents lived on a "hill"(billy). (We weren't rednecks though. Rednecks were the racist types, we said). We were just plain poor and lived up from a community of blacks who lived in shacks on stilts on the river. Going to high school I could see the snarl on the faces of the city kids who quickly judged you by where you lived (dirt road) and what your father did for a living (peon job at Olin). I used to think my cousins where more WT than I. Now who has the last laugh -- my kinfolk have all that land that the Martha Stewart types covet and will pay through the teeth for it, and do now that the land value there has risen by almost 90 percent. (Go away yankees). Granted, nowadays I smirk at the WT crowd on the afternoon talk shows but I could've been there. It really is a class issue and maybe they're happy eating Spam and listening to Elvis and shopping at Wal-Mart. At least they're somewhat content and not miserable like some rich Malibu people I know.