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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).
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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. |
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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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Wray sought to "focus, whenever possible, on specific moments and places where poor whites became the subject of sustained or intense public scrutiny and debate" (p. 134) through a chronological approach that begins with the British colonial period and moves from the early American republic on to the antebellum South. The first two chapters are historical but probe contemporary texts to great effect. The next two chapters address the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and focus on particular social campaigns to alleviate the situation of poor whites: the eugenics movement and the eradication of hookworm. |
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Although Wray's application of boundary theory develops the definition of white trash by locating it in social relationships rather than as an essentialist category, this move has the potential to be ahistorical and overly generalized. Wray purposely omits the Appalachian Mountains population, and he does not mention Dust Bowl migrants and the derogatory moniker "Okies" applied to them in place of white trash. |
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Wray acknowledges the predominant Scots-Irish and Irish composition of the American populations designated as white trash but does not explore the relationship of this ethnicization to English colonization of Scotland and Ireland. The poorest of the settlers, mostly indentured servants in the early colonial period, can be considered refugees from conflicts there. In particular, the Scots that the English transported to displace the indigenous Irish in northern Ireland assumed a colonial settler arrogance, but many lost their lands there and dreamed of gold and wealth in America, where they squatted on Indian lands, fought Indians, and revolted against England in order to be able to take more Indian land. I have called them the "foot soldiers of empire." Despite these struggles, most ended up losing to large land companies and moved on. |
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In excluding this history, a kind of "American exceptionalism" can creep in. Similar populations can be identified in European settler colonies elsewhere, such as the former Rhodesian Boer settlers in South Africa; the pied noir in Algeria; the former settler colonies of Spanish America; and, of course, "white trash" in the other English settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. |
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Hopefully, future studies by Wray and others will not be restricted by theory in advancing research and study of these important post-colonial phenomena.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
California State University, East Bay
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