1
" When James Garner called Howard Stern “the epitome of trailer trash,” Stern responded, in his typically scatological fashion, “I can’t believe this guy wants a war with me. He should be busy worrying if he’s gonna have a solid bowel movement.” We know, of course, from Stern’s now two best-selling memoirs that neither his parents nor his own Long Island suburban family live in a trailer. His non-trash origin goes to show that you do not have to be white trash to use white trash sensibilities as a weapon of cultural war, although the fact that white trash’s rocket scientist, Roseanne, grew up so solidly trashy, reinforces the argument that early training counts. "
― , White Trash: Race and Class in America
4
" The whole country looks more like a trailer park every day. As our lived economy gets worse, more jobs are becoming temporary, homes less permanent or more crowded, neighborhoods unstable. We’re transients just passing through this place, wherever and whatever it is, on our way somewhere else, mostly down. “I get really scared sometimes,” my mom tells me, “that the old days are coming back.” She means the Great Depression days she knew in her childhood, and the trailer park days I knew in mine. "
― , White Trash: Race and Class in America
6
" I vowed to remain quiet, to finish what I’d started, sending Jimmy to school. He would graduate in three months, then I would insist that we leave. I would carry out my part of the bargain and I would not lose Jimmy. And so we did move to San Francisco; my husband sent me through college, where I learned, among other things, about being a class traitor. I went my own way, away from him, and threw myself into the struggles of my generation, determined never to forsake my class again. "
― , White Trash: Race and Class in America
12
" So the years 1973–78 were apocalyptic years not just for me, but for the millions upon millions of people around the world dominated by capitalism. For many Americans, especially those in the North and Northeast, the economic conditions in the early 1970s were in fact quite brutal. Between 1970 and 1977, one million jobs disappeared. The rapid and massive displacements of capital and jobs due to increasing globalization and deindustrialization caused immense human suffering for those on the lower levels of the economic ladder, compounded by chronic stagflation and deep cuts in social spending under the Nixon administration.11 Add to these economic crises the political and cultural turmoil of the early 1970s stirred by the Watergate revelations, the abandonment of the gold standard for currency, the energy crisis, the ignominious retreat from Vietnam, and Roe v. Wade.12 For many people, these economic, political, and cultural upheavals made for apocalyptic times indeed.13 "
― , White Trash: Race and Class in America
13
" If we take its namesake seriously, the new abolitionism suggests that white domination is something imposed from without, a social and economic system which enslaves us all, whites and non-whites alike. Thus, all that whites need to do—as Ignatiev and Garvey suggest—is “defect” and “abolish” whiteness. But whiteness, unlike slavery, is not just a social system. While whiteness is undeniably linked to a series of oppressive social practices, it is also an identity which can be negotiated on an individual level. It is a diversity of cultures, histories, and finally, an inescapable physical marker. Even if we understand whiteness to be something like “dominant culture,” what can we say about white women, white homosexuals, white Jews, white low-status men, and the white poor? These groups have certainly not unanimously experienced whiteness as a ticket into the ruling classes. What, then, are we asking a white person to do when we ask her to abolish her whiteness? "
― , White Trash: Race and Class in America
