Posts by Danielle
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That Invalids' Benefit thing cuts very close to home for my family
Seriously. If they try to make a certain member of my family work any more than the part-time job he has, we may as well kiss his hard-won ten-year sobriety goodbye. He just couldn't mentally handle full time work. To say nothing of his two chronic, painful medical conditions and the lingering traumatic effects of a serious head injury. There's absolutely no way.
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Poor whites didn't so much carve out a place for themselves by being extra racist as wind up just as disenfranchised as the black slaves themselves, as great tracts of land - and the means to generate wealth - slaves - were tied up in the hands of a very few wealthy plantation owners.
Yeah. But I'm not talking about their status in the economic context of slavery (and later sharecropping), but their cultural 'place'. Which is clearly defined by 'not-blackness' as well as 'poor whiteness'.
I am also going to immerse myself in some Dolly Parton box set goodness, thanks 3410. :)
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I can see how you would think that Danielle, but no, not at all.
Well, perhaps all my history lecturers in my PhD programme in Houston were extra-specially-sensitive snowflakes and made that explanation up from scratch, but that's why, they explained, none of them ever used it.
The idea that poor whites in the 20th century carved out a place for themselves by being extra racist to the black people slightly lower on the totem pole is basically a truism at this point, however. And given that you missed out this rather key point from your link: 'while white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech', it's pretty clear that there's a race-based subtext to the term in the USA, at least. This quote sums it up for me: 'White Trash is identified as such through being perceived as "acting like Blacks" which in the language of racism is actually worse than being Black because it constitutes a degradation of "racially superior" Whites'. (That's from White trash: race and class in America by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz.)
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the more race-neutral term 'trailer trash'
Yeah, although speaking as someone with a lot of 'trailer trash' connections, I have spent *so much time* in double-wide trailers. Half our friends in Texas lived in them; half my family in Louisiana lived in them. I mean, they all have central air conditioning and freaking ensuite bathrooms. They're actually bigger than my current house!
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IIRC, the US etymology of 'white trash' is pretty racist, because it implies that all black people are *already trash*, but the white folks need to be demarcated into trashy/not trashy.
(Of course, most people who use the term here don't do so within that particular historical framework, so the broader meaning is lost.)
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Bugger the skinhead/snob debate, here's my problem with Christchurch: my tiny brain finds it impossible to navigate a flat place. I need several carefully arranged dormant volcanoes, two harbours and a western range of hills to work out where the fuck I am.
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Asian cigarettes
A long talk, a few cans, if you can?
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(With one exception, a very loud moron called Rocky, quite dark skinned, who used to parade onto stages chanting 'kill all blacks").
Oh god... shades of Dave Chappelle's black, blind Ku Klux Klan grand wizard...
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Front row for Elvis Costello & The Attractions in 1978
O HAI: I totally hate you. :)
of course the inevitable hairdo full of gob. Actually, pogoing around under a rain of spit was something we all got used to - it was sometimes even quite refreshing in a twisted sort of a way...
Oh ewwww. I think reason number two (number one being: born in 1974) why I could never have been a true punk was the... crustiness. Remember that scene in the recent Sex Pistols documentary where Steve Jones (I think) says 'I was just interested in getting my dick sucked'? All I could think about were the poor groupies: 'oh god, did he ever *shower*?' Yeah. I am kinda persnickety.
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the Clash's indomitable self-mythology
Which is why they kind of, sort of... annoy me a little bit. It all seemed so terribly po-faced...
(That being said, I've watched the recent documentaries with interest, and I like a lot of their songs. And Sandinista is awesome.)
Note: 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go' is currently the only song I have managed to 'play' flawlessly on Rock Band. So, there's that.