Reviewed by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.1

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Reviewed by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness*. By Matt Wray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xii + 213 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $21.95 (paper).
When I grew up poor, rural, and white (with a half-Indian mother) in Oklahoma, "white trash" was a fighting term. As migrant sharecroppers moving from farm to farm, my family fit the bill, but we didn't consider ourselves as such. For us, "white trash" referred to people who didn't work, who were in and out of jail, or who lived in cars or shacks down by the river. It was a dreaded state of being—just a little bad luck, and there you were. And this fear remains forever, no matter how changed one's economic status. The 1997 book Matt Wray—who experienced similar stigma—co-edited, White Trash: Race and Class in America, was a liberating read for me. Finally, someone was taking up this forbidden topic.	1
Wray's new book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, is a brilliant and original monograph that both expands and challenges Whiteness Studies, which tend to deal with an undifferentiated white ethnicity; Ethnic Studies, which largely omit class analysis; and Labor Studies, which are not interested in the phenomenon of poor whites. Although Wray is a sociologist, here he masters interdisciplinary methodology and does not interrupt the narrative with theoretical arguments, shifting them, rather, to the excellent footnotes. The text is accessible to non-specialists and undergraduates along with scholars and graduate students. This would be a fine textbook for any number of courses.	. . .

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