White trash/Talk

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I'm afraid that the new, improved version strikes me as an overblown, long-winded, largely irrelevant (to the subject) exercise in politically correct WASP-bashing victimology. -HWR

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I utterly disagree. In fact, I'm impressed by your ability to be "overblown, long-winded, [and] largely irrelevant" in only one sentence. What an ugly abuse of the English language: "politically correct WASP-bashing victimology". Try using something other than buzzwords some time if you actually want to make a point. --TheCunctator

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Oh, I think you got my point. But perhaps not. Obviously the author is so committed to the "whiteness is privilege" mantra that he cannot see the absurdity of claiming that "white trash" are "non-white". -HWR

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I'm fine with someone disagreeing with what has been put forward so far, but what is the alternative to it? It's not like "victimology" (a great word, by the way, like Delillo's "Hitler Studies") doesn't come from somewhere. That is, people really were victimized by upper class people who specifically identified themselves as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. They explicitly excluded anyone who wasn't that. And they implicitly believed that to be WASP was to be chosen by god. That was as true for the puritans as it was for Henry Ford.

But you are right, HWR. There isn't an easy answer, even if WASP bashing seems like it should be so true. Most abolitionists were WASPS. And even if Henry Ford was a fascist and desperately afriad of all of the "colored" people of the world, be they black or Italian or irish or german, his son and grandson established some of the most progressive and powerful charities in the western world.

So, I say again, what is your alternative? And more generally, how should we deal with these entries that are so clearly not about fact in the sense that we normally imagine in an encyclopedia. 100 years ago, they would have pretended or not been aware that a controversy even existed. I can't count the number of antique encyclopedias I have read which talk of the "five races of man" --the black, the white, the yellow, the red and the brown-- with a complete sense of authority and "factuality". I mean, how do we construct useful, factual entries about important concepts which are, by their very existence, controversial and opinionated? I personally reject the quasi-journalistic minimalist approach of saying only what is absolute fact as being both too dictionary like and generally useless. Rather than dealing with a problem, I feel that such an approach just avoids it. And avoiding these issues, letting them fester, is its own kind of action and therefore judgement. By saying noth we are expressing an opinion and affecting the debate.

But what should we do? --trimalchio