| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Matt Wray. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 213. Cloth $74.95, paper $21.95.

Matt Wray's book grabbed both my attention and my empathy. Beyond a carefully wrought methodology, compelling analyses, and some very fine writing, it bears the stamp of authenticity. Whiteness studies hasn't been around all that long—since the early 1990s when scholars like David Roediger first published their work—and Wray credits a heightened critical attention to questions of privilege as the field's major contribution. But in part "to resolve tired and tiring debates about how much analytical weight to give to race versus class, or gender versus race, and so on," Wray uses boundary theory to study the processes that grant social meaning. Wray's exploration itself is historically ambitious: he looks at the chronological development of the term "white trash" over the course of the 1720s through the 1920s, tracing what he calls the symbolic boundary labels of "stigmatypes," terms that distinguish "cultural and cognitive divides between in-groups and out-groups, between acceptable and unacceptable identities, between proper and improper behaviors" (p. 23). I don't love the term, but I do like what Wray accomplishes by using it.

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