White Trash: Race and Class in America

Rating:
Summary: Academic stuffiness (yawn)
Review: Skip "White Trash : Race and Class in America". It's pretentious and obviously written by authors who've never done a hard day's manual labor, let alone been to a Monster Truck rally. Amazon offers Jim Goad's "Redneck Manifesto" - a much smarter and grittier look at America's white working class (written from someone who's been there).

Rating:
Summary: Ha, ha, ha
Review: You would think that the term "White Trash" was just invented when it's been around for years and years. This book was pretty darn good! As a former southern non-belle let me say my piece. I was accused of being WT mainly because I lived at the end of a dirt road and my grandparents lived on a "hill"(billy). (We weren't rednecks though. Rednecks were the racist types, we said). We were just plain poor and lived up from a community of blacks who lived in shacks on stilts on the river. Going to high school I could see the snarl on the faces of the city kids who quickly judged you by where you lived (dirt road) and what your father did for a living (peon job at Olin). I used to think my cousins where more WT than I. Now who has the last laugh -- my kinfolk have all that land that the Martha Stewart types covet and will pay through the teeth for it, and do now that the land value there has risen by almost 90 percent. (Go away yankees). Granted, nowadays I smirk at the WT crowd on the afternoon talk shows but I could've been there. It really is a class issue and maybe they're happy eating Spam and listening to Elvis and shopping at Wal-Mart. At least they're somewhat content and not miserable like some rich Malibu people I know.