They have been categorized in terms derived from animal husbandry, as mangy varmints, a 'breed' apart human 'rubbish,' at one with scrubby, barren, or swampy wasteland. They have inhabited the least hospitable places in America’s rural landscape. And after the middle of the last century, Trailer Trash. Each generation created its own stark slurs as it dismissed its expendables and its exploited: They were offscourings. These were America's 'waste people,' who, sometime around the 1820s, came to be called 'white trash.'Ī powerful and persistent taxonomy has provided a touchstone to explain away all those who fail to succeed. The great majority of the early colonists were classified as a surplus population, as expendable 'rubbish'-a rude rather than a robust population. Among the unheroic transplants were convicts, Irish rebels, known whores, ex-soldiers, adults in debt, and the children of beggars, all of whom either chose exile in place of a prison term (or hanging!) or else sold themselves into indentured servitude. Before it became that fabled 'City upon a Hill,' America was, in the eyes of sixteenth-century English adventurers, a foul, weedy wilderness-a 'wasteland,' they called it, where the Old World could unload the idle poor. The language used to describe classes and the poor can be traced back the forceful imprint left by British colonization. Americans continue to tell themselves they believe in social equality, but history tells a different story. Yet over time, America had seen more downward than upward mobility and migration often substitutes for actual class security. How does a culture that says it's a democracy, that prizes equality of opportunity, explain away its persistently marginalized people? With the hallowed American Dream, we try to convince ourselves that social mobility is more than a slogan, and that it has magically erased class as a barrier to success.

White trash the 400 year untold history