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
That's more fact than a lot of this debate. White was a real touchy word 100-200 years ago and CANNOT be judged on what we today might imagine is a clear and stable definition. Irish people were EXPLICITLY non-white. As were Swedes. As were all sorts of European immigrants. Even today you hear the epithet of "black comb irish" which singles them out as not belonging to the racial group defined as "white". Whatever that racial group might actually contain is unclear. It has always been more defined by what it DID NOT contain. And yes, that is a messy and unclear situation. But it is a factual one. A shorthand of the time was to say that, despite a person's physical appearance, it was easier to identify their whiteness by way of their pocketbook. But that wasn't always true either. Certainly there were grades of non-whites and grades of whites. French aristocrats in Lousiana, for example, were sort of white, but if they came to New York city their catholicism and Frenchness would have created distinctly racial problems. We still see this today in places like Northern Ireland, were the debate is not only political, but distinctly racial, ethnic and cultural, even though from an American point of view at least we would classify both groups as "white".
Classification requires empirical foundation. Race can only be proven to empirically exist if there is a defineable biological distinction. Without a biological foundation, race cannot be empircally investigated and therefore cannot be classified in any sort of concrete terms. Therefore it need not follow that White Trash be a defineable subset of the category of "white." It can in some cases be imagined in that way, but it is not empirically so. That is what it means for a term to be essentially subjective. If the term is subjective, it does not belong to a solidified hierarchy and therefore cannot be said to include or exclude anything with certainty. The discussion can only be about its possiblities, and about specific examples of those possibilities in action.
This of course raises all sorts of sticky questions about what the Wikipedia is and can do, and that may be a seperate discussion. I agree with your general uneasiness about the entry as it stands. As the principle author thus far, I can say only one thing with certainty: I ain't sure about it. My mom's old time white trash from West Virginia. But her earliest American ancestor was a Hessian soldier that switched sides. So, from a nineteenth century point of view she would be German, but no one knew her families heritage because they had all assimilated so completely (like everyone else) that they were part of the country at the time. They were poor, and their skin was pale, and that made them White Trash. It didn't make them White of the Trash variety. It made them White Trash which was its own separate mess. The name evolved because of notions of biology and class and category, and people might have imagined that they were accurately describing her family and her genetic heritage, but that was in their heads and had nothing to do with anything else. My Dad is half Swedish, half English. But both familes had been in the country for several generations, which makes him essentially American like my mom. But he had money when he was a kid in Michigan in the fifties. That made him middle class. My mom lived on a mountain with a tin roof and eight other siblings. That was what made her White Trash. Her whiteness was incidental to the term. It was her perceived "trashiness" that was important when she interacted with other people. She studied hard to minimize her accent and become an English teacher. She assimilated. But assimilation was not an empirical, biological act. It was cultural. It was subjective. --trimalchio
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