White Trash - 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 a redneck or white trash origins, such as Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Tim McLaurin. Autobiographies sometimes mention white trash origins. Queer 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."

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Famous quotes containing the words white, popular and/or culture:

    Supererogatory divinations one is
    lured on by!
    The routine
    is decent. As if the white page
    were a clean tablecloth ...
    Denise Levertov (b. 1923)

    The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.
    Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)