How a Legacy of Poverty and Systematic Exclusion Created “White Trash” in America

The truth in any tense is often hurtful, and so is the truth about the origins of our language. Both the noun and the verb “trash” are recorded to have “obscure” beginnings in the Oxford English Dictionary, perhaps because nobody bothered to write down—or rather publish—this particular history. Trash is a noun, but it is also a verb whose origins are obliterative. Along with the Swedish trasa, another probable ancestor of trash is the French verb trasier meaning “to draw a line through, strike out, efface.” I imagine all the lives that had already been effaced before trash entered the English lexicon in 1604—forever crowning and denigrating Bianca, the slut, the accused criminal, the patron saint of a certain class of erotic love.

The OED’s entry also mentions “field trash,” the dried leaves that remain around the base of sugarcanes after harvest. This kind of trash is also brutal: it has bloodied the hands of last century’s enslaved Africans and this century’s exploited farmworkers. In the dictionary’s discussion, the word trash can refer to worn-out shoes donned by tramps and vagrants. Elsewhere in the word’s origin, chips fly from axes wielded in the rough hands of backwoods loggers, since trash also means that which is cast off from tree-felling. As one works through the etymology, one encounters all sorts of laborers trashed by exhausting work, filthy and ragged, thrashing through mire and dirt.

I learned these definitions in books and in dictionaries, like the one in which I found that one obsolete usage of the verb to trash means to hold back, restrain, or hinder. Everything that has trashed me over the years—not just my years, but the years that led up to me—the demeaning work, the name-calling, the looming threats of hunger and incarceration—held me back from something I can’t yet name, but that I am inching toward, slowly, the more I learn.

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The more I learn, the freer I become, but I also get angrier, uglier, and more critical. While completing my third college degree, fifteen years after my sophomore year of high school, I took a class from the great-grand-something of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famed abolitionist. My teacher, a carefully dressed, classically professorial sort of woman, took great pride in her literary lineage. She told us about her family’s legacy in the arts when she introduced herself on the first day.

Beecher Stowe, like my teacher, wrote many acclaimed books and essays in her lifetime. In them, she made impassioned arguments against slavery using vivid narrative techniques and thorough research. She also did it by railing against white trash people—scourge of the American South.

Beecher Stowe dedicated an entire chapter to my people, the garbage gang, when she wrote her second book, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1854. The chapter is entitled, simply, “Poor White Trash.” She writes, “These miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves.” This describes my ancestors, and, frankly, me and my contemporaries, we a whole trashy kingdom of despicable peasants.

Harriet Beecher Stowe blamed slavery for the creation of our mongrel class because of the way it concentrated wealth with plantation-owning elites, leaving poorer whites to languish on infertile, backwoods plots with no way to earn a proper living or get an education. Other intellectuals in her time believed that poor white trash were their own race entirely, the result of bad blood poisoned by generations of immorality, inbreeding, or interracial relationships. Similarly, she described white trash as more “degraded and miserable” than even the enslaved people with whom they were ridiculed for associating.

My college teacher was deeply intelligent, quite accomplished, and mostly very kind.  She taught her favorite works from the Western canon in an organized, passionate way. Her course was framed as one in which we students could read and discuss the greatest writers who ever lived. We were to read with an eye toward craft so that we might attempt to replicate some of what these great masters of the written word composed.

Like most works in the canon, all the books she chose for us were by or about wealthy people or those aspiring to be so. Their content was generally dismissive or abusive regarding women, the poor, and people of color. While reading Madame Bovary, I planted a yellow flag on each page that made direct reference to these groups in unflattering ways. In the end, my copy of the book was radiant with yellow strips, each one a warning against too much self-identification.

Another of the books we read was House of Mirth, which was about a woman who would rather die than be poor, who in fact did die because of it. Lily Bart was obsessed with dinginess, with avoiding the horrible, gray life of working-class girls. Like many of her modern-day counterparts, working a thankless job and living in a boarding house turned Lily Bart into a drug addict, then into a drug casualty. Emma Bovary also died from the fear of being poor; the possibility scared her to death.

I do not begrudge my teacher for choosing these texts, nor for having us read them in such an apolitical, white way. I believe she intended to help us be better artists. I am only saying that I was bored and a little hurt by yet another repetition of these same tired tropes.

White, good.

Money, good.

Servants and sluts, bad.

The repetition of these cultural truths even felt oddly affirming. Although they had a cruel way of showing it, the authors of these books knew how hard it was to be poor, especially poor and woman, and they put that truth in black ink on white paper. They saw me, and they described a near-version of my reality. Like Mirth’s Bart, I had worked menial jobs, lived in crowded, dark rooms, and spent money I didn’t have at fancy restaurants. I had taken too much alcohol and other analgesics to dull the soreness of my existence. I had dulled myself nearly to death. These authors knew that poor and dead have a close kinship.

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Poor and dead had also been kin in AP US History, where I finished reading a section about the Haymarket Massacre and the struggle for the eight-hour workday, then paused to stare at my reflection in the trash can of water next to my desk. I was careful not to get any of the liquid on my arms or head—Mr. Smith had warned us about the possibility of asbestos. As I stared at a slice of my face in the rippling water, I considered that many of our parents could not find jobs that offered full-time hours or paid a living wage. What use is an eight-hour workday when there is no workday to work, or when the wage on offer is a violation of one’s humanity? Living in a trash town, the prevailing feeling is nihilism.

In my headphones between classes, the Sex Pistols screamed, “When there’s no future,  how can there be sin? We’re the flowers in the dustbin.” On the school bus home while meth labs and vacant lots slid in and out of view, Crass made a ruckus like banging hard and fast on trash can lids, singing “Do they owe us a living? ‘Course they fucking do!” On weekends, I went to punk shows and jumped into the mosh pit. All my losses, failures, and fears dissolved when I took the first elbow to the face. What went on outside the show ceased to matter, and I fell out of reality, into what the more monied parents might have called the wrong crowd.

We chugged wine from bags and Mad Dog 20/20 bottles. We smoked all kinds of stuff. We sucked dicks in the back seats of cars. We refused to bathe. We worked the jobs that would have us: fast food, mostly. Ugly, stinky jobs for ugly, stinky people who just wanted to earn enough to be able to buy gas, go to shows, and black out.

That same year, the school, in a budget crisis, asked us to bring in toilet and printer paper. We had run out. Piece of trash school, I thought, as I stuffed a couple of bargain toilet tissue rolls into my backpack to drop off at the front office. The bathroom stalls mostly had toilet paper that year, and we made do when the copies dried up. The roof never fell in, and I wasn’t fatally poisoned by asbestos. I moved away, and I went to college, but I could not shake the image of the trash can and me in my classroom.

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Later, I learned I could draw a line from my trash can and me in my classroom all the way back to 14th-century England. White trash was not a new idea when Beecher Stowe popularized it. Poor and trash, like poor and dead, had been related for centuries, in Shakespeare’s time and before, ever since colonial England needed exploitable labor to power its empire, and a linguistic ideology to buttress its mission. British colonizers filled ships with thousands of the kingdom’s poor people—mostly Scots, Irish, and Welsh—to work as indentured servants in the so-called New World. These “waste people” were seen as unproductive vagrants, perfect for dumping into a short, brutal life of hard labor developing the land as it was cleared, by genocide, of indigenous Americans. For a long time after, there were at least as many white trash as enslaved Africans in what is now the United States. The landed class used trash to divide the working class, and to create a separate, dingier world for whites who did not meet their standards of racial supremacy. The term made dehumanization easy and was, ultimately, effective.

The opposite of trash in Shakespeare’s 1604 was the nobility. The king and queen and the rest of the small class of royals held the money, waged the wars, and generally ran the show. The waste people at the bottom were the worst of the worst of the poor, who found themselves without food and shelter. Because their numbers had increased in the century prior, due in part to all the wealth the nobility hoarded, the royal family passed new Poor Laws to “assist” them, updating statues first codified in 1349. Workhouses and other institutions sprang up to corral, control, and extract labor from these “vagrants” and “helpless cases.” These laws included provisions such that any poor person found guilty of being able to do an honest day’s work but who chose not to, could be sentenced to death. Or, I suppose, they were indentured in the colonies.

My father’s elders were Okies on one side and Blacksmiths from Norway on the other. My mother’s lineage is more mongrel and mysterious—her origin story includes infidelity, adoptions, and run-aways—but my maternal great-grandma, who was Scots-Irish and Welsh, lived until I was in my twenties, and I suspect she hailed from England’s trash can classes.

Beecher Stowe would’ve called Granny white trash. Her kith and kin were musicians, drunks, and petty criminals. Not book-crackers, skull-crackers. Progeny of waste people, ignobles. She had babies with four different men, survived domestic violence, drank, smoked, and yelled. She hated anyone acting too big for their britches. She cooked with Crisco and shopped for clothes at St. Vincent de Paul. But she was also a white trash class traitor, according to Stowe’s definition, in that she refused to condemn other poor people, including Black people and migrant farm workers. Granny regularly cussed at the TV over anti-welfare rhetoric, slights against unions, or racist dog whistles—probably a rare quality in a white woman born in the 1920s. I believe that Granny believed that the working class were the true nobility. I believe she had confidence, that she was a glitch in the system, a queer element.

Granny’s real name was Hester Ann, but early in her life, she changed it to Anna Mae, for reasons I am unable to discover. My mom guesses Granny found the name Hester unattractive. I tell her that Hester Prynne was the chick from Scarlet Letter—a slut in the woods who was forced to wear the big fat A that marked her a dirty woman. Granny had only an eighth-grade education, so it is unlikely that she ever read Hawthorne. It still pleases me to think of her as part of a legacy of women who disturbed the order, who dragged the good name of women in the muck of sensuality, who trashed the rules, however imperfectly.

Today, when people say white trash, they are talking about white people who shop at Walmart, fix their own cars, and frequent drive-thru’s. They mean whites who live next door to Black and brown people, who work with them as security guards, janitors, clerks, and prep cooks. They mean jailhouse whites. They mean whites who do not speak the Queen’s English or Shakespeare’s English or anything close to it. They mean white people who are bad at being white. White trash people are still generally understood to be lazy, fat, racist, abusive, alcoholic, dull, tacky, violent, backward, loud, Bible-thumping, and uneducated. Such stereotypes are kept alive by television, political policy, miseducation, and art.

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From Low: Notes on Art & Trash by Jaydra Johnson. Copyright © 2024. Available from Fonograf Editions. Featured image: David Antis, used under CC BY 2.0.