| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. By Matt Wray. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. xiv, 213 pp. Cloth, $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3882-6. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3873-4.)

In this era of political correctness, certain disparaging phrases remain acceptable in public discourse. Among them is "white trash," and Matt Wray compellingly analyzes the historical context in which the epithet originated and developed. As a sociologist and not a historian, Wray writes from an explicitly theoretical and methodological perspective. His aim is to tie the emerging historical field of whiteness studies to the sociological examination of boundary theory. It is a rather daunting task, made even more difficult by the length of the book (less than 150 pages of text). That Wray succeeds at all speaks to the importance of the work, both in its specific examination of the uses of language to label and categorize groups of individuals throughout American history and in its attempt to expand the scope of whiteness studies to examine power relations within what had been assumed to be a unified, dominant group. Broadly conceived, Wray attempts to "reconceptualize whiteness as a flexible set of social and symbolic boundaries that give shape, meaning, and power to the social category white" (p. 6).

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