this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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askchapo

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Why do people call others "white trash?" I recently discovered this term. (hexbear.net)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by HexaSnoot@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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For me, it's occasionally coming up when I listen to comedians. A year back I also heard a story about a white person who grew up poor, became financially stable with a good job, and then punched down and started calling other white people "white trash."

To me it's obvious this is poor-shaming. But I have a feeling it's far more complex than that. I'm not even white and I feel degraded whenever I come across those words. I barely know what it means, but it breaks my heart anyways to hear.

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[–] Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net 19 points 4 weeks ago

The 1800's were arguably (INarguably?) worse for the poor than today; it may sound like hyperbole for Marx to say society saw them as social scum, but science claimed that the poor and the mentally unwell needed to be killed or sterilized off for the sake of society; we're talking about the era that birthed eugenics.

Conditions today are less drastic, but it doesn't help that the poor and the mentally unwell have been demonized even today.

I'd say there's a combination of this and the mentality mentioned in that (Steinbeck?) quote (paraphrasing cause I don't remember it word for word): "socialism never took off in America because people envisioned themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" at play.