As the gap between rich and poor grew wider after 2000, conservatives took the lead in white trash bashing. In Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), the economist and Hoover Institute fellow Thomas Sowell connected the delinquency of urban black culture to redneck culture. The book begins with a quote dating to 1956: “These people are creating terrible problems in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat.” His assumption was that readers would associate the quote with a conventional racist attack. But it was aimed at poor whites living in Indianapolis, and reflected “undesirable” southern whites who lived in northern cities.
Sowell contended that there has been an unchanging subculture going back centuries. Relying on Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture (1988), a flawed historical study that turned poor whites into Celtic ethnics (Scots-Irish), Sowell claimed that the bad traits of blacks (laziness, promiscuity, violence, bad English) were passed on from their backcountry white neighbors. In Sowell’s odd recasting of the hinterlands, a good old eye-gouging fight was the seed of black machismo. Reviving the squatter motif, he downplayed the influence of slavery, and substituted for it a eugenic-like cultural contagion that spread from poor whites to blacks. He further argued that white liberals of the present day are equally to blame for social conditions, having abetted the destructive lifestyle of “black rednecks” through perpetuation of the welfare state.44
Another conservative blaming the poor for their problems is Charlotte Hays, whose 2013 book When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? was a “Southern Lady’s” gossipy screed against obesity, bad manners, and the danger of national decline when society takes its “cues” from the underclass. Hays expressed her horror that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo attracted more viewers than the 2012 Republican National Convention. In her best imitation of a snooty matron complaining, “You can’t get good help anymore,” the author/blogger’s senses were affronted whenever and wherever she saw the disappearance of the rules of politeness. That a depressed minimum wage keeps millions in poverty is of no concern: she writes that the colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth understood that hard work might still require “a little starving.” If she was talking about the actual Jamestown, she should have said “a lot of starving” and a little cannibalism. Hays represents a good many people who persist in believing that class is irrelevant to the American system. It is, she insists, manners (alas, no longer practiced by one’s social inferiors) that determine the health of a civilization. “A gentleman is defined,” Hays writes, “in a way that a janitor could be considered one if he strove to do the right thing.”45
Sowell and Hays were responding to the cultural shift that began in the 1970s. Hays wished to banish identity politics entirely, which is why she mocked all kinds of white trash slumming. In its place, she imagined reviving old-fashioned manners—as if it were possible for class identity to be hidden under a veneer of false gentility. She wanted the pretense of equality, but offered nothing for closing the wealth gap. Sowell reimagined what Alex Haley started, in attempting to rewrite race as an ethnic identity and heritage—that is, something transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. With his revisionist pen, he cut the tie to Africa, the roots forged by Haley, and replaced the noble African American progenitor with a debased cross-pollinating power: degenerate crackers of white America.
A corps of pundits exist whose fear of the lower classes has led them to assert that the unbred perverse—white as well as black—are crippling and corrupting American society. They deny that the nation’s economic structure has a causal relationship with the social phenomena they highlight. They deny history. If they did not, they would recognize that the most powerful engines of the U.S. economy—slaveowning planters and land speculators in the past, banks, tax policy, corporate giants, and compassionless politicians and angry voters today—bear considerable responsibility for the lasting effects on white trash, or on falsely labeled “black rednecks,” and on the working poor generally. The sad fact is, if we have no class analysis, then we will continue to be shocked at the numbers of waste people who inhabit what self-anointed patriots have styled the “greatest civilization in the history of the world.”
EPILOGUE
America’s Strange Breed
The Long Legacy of White Trash
Two persistent problems have rumbled through our “democratic” past. One we can trace back to Franklin and Jefferson and their longing to dismiss class by touting “exceptional” features of the American landscape, which are deemed productive of an exceptional society. The founders insisted that the majestic continent would magically solve the demographic dilemma by reducing overpopulation and flattening out the class structure. In addition to this environmental solution, a larger, extremely useful myth arose: that America gave a voice to all of its people, that every citizen could exercise genuine influence over the government. (We should note that this myth was always qualified, because it was accepted that some citizens were more worthy than others—especially those whose stake in society came from property ownership.)
The British colonial imprint was never really erased either. The “yeoman” was a British class, reflecting the well-established English practice of equating moral worth to cultivation of the soil. For their part, nineteenth-century Americans did everything possible to replicate class station through marriage, kinship, pedigree, and lineage. While the Confederacy was the high mark—the most overt manifestation—of rural aristocratic pretense (and an open embrace of society’s need to have an elite ruling over the lower classes), the next century ushered in the disturbing imperative of eugenics, availing itself of science to justify breeding a master class. Thus not only did Americans not abandon their desire for class distinctions, they repeatedly reinvented class distinctions. Once the government of the United States began portraying itself as “leader of the free world,” the longing for a more regal head of state was advanced. The Democrats swooned over Kennedy’s Camelot, and Republicans ennobled the Hollywood court of Reagan.