Whitetrash - White Popular Culture

White Popular Culture

Scholars in the late 19th and early 20th century explored the generations of families the authors considered disreputable, such as the The Jukes family and the The Kallikak Family (both were pseudonyms for real families).

Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking (1986) enjoyed an unanticipated rise to popularity. The cookbook, which is based on the cooking of rural white Southerners, features recipes with names such as Goldie's Yo Yo Pudding, Resurrection Cake, Vickies Stickies and Tutti's Fruited Porkettes. As Inness (2006) notes, "white trash authors used humor to express what was happening to them in a society that wished to forget about the poor, especially those who were white." She points out that under the humor was a serious lesson about living in poverty.

By the 1980s there appeared fiction written by Southern authors who themselves claimed redneck or white trash origins, such as Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Tim McLaurin. Autobiographies sometimes mention white trash origins. Gay rights activist Amber L. Hollibaugh says, "I grew up a mixed-race, white-trash girl in a country that considered me dangerous, corrupt, fascinating, exotic. I responded to the challenge by becoming that alarming, hazardous, sexually disruptive woman."