Talk:White trash

Factual issue: tobacco brides

The article claims 'The Virginia Company also imported boatloads of poor women to be sold as brides.' This is misleading. The women were transpored to America, but they weren't "sold". The men paid for their transport but they were incentivised with land, inheritance and the right to choose their own husbands.

The Atlantic confirms, 'Although the financially strapped Virginia Company was eager to recoup the costs of sponsoring the Jamestown brides, it was not selling women.'

History.com also agrees: https://www.history.com/news/jamestown-colony-women-brides-program

Wikipedia already has a page outlining what the tobacco brides were, so this part of the article should be aligned with that page.

Suggestion: reword or add context.

Lewisguile (talk) 09:54, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Also, "boatloads" is arguably loaded language. A more neutral approach would be to indicate roughly how many women were transported. Lewisguile (talk) 11:56, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

@Lewisguile HIstory.com is not a reliable source. See RSNP. Doug Weller talk 10:12, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

That's good to know. The Atlantic and the other sources from the page on here should be more than enough. Thank you. Lewisguile (talk) 19:13, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

I checked and I didn't use History.com for that section. The current wording uses RS from the tobacco brides page. Lewisguile (talk) 06:38, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Back to the slur or not-slur question

This may be regarded as an un-wikipedian entry but it is beyond me - and probably a lot of other ordinary people who see this article - that it is not made quite clear in the article that this is a racial slur first and foremost.

Some examples are listed where a few people chose to wear this epiteth voluntarily. I'm sure similar examples can be found with diligent research in the case of other racial slurs (if this would be sufficient to demote these other slurs to "pejoriative terms", let me know, I'm willing to do the research). But as I understand, there is no such source for this article that would enumerate the slur and non-slur usages of "white trash" through history, and would make a comparison between the numbers. Until there is no such source, it remains a matter of interpretation. I'm sure many editors here would be happy to point me to some sources - deemed "trustworthy" by some remote ejudicating process - that claim that this term is not a racial slur at all.

I didn't bring sources that claim the opposite, instead I would like to submit the question: how much more obvious does a racial slur has to be in order to be admitted as such?

I'm simply appealing to the sanity of the editors. Again, I cannot be critical enough about archived discussion where people were arguing along the lines (without being dismissed) that majority races cannot experience racism, and therefore, no pejorative term can be a slur against them.

I wouldn't bother bringing this up if these were not the arguments on which this matter hinges on. I find these arguments completely inadequate, and I think it would do a great deal of good - without offending ANYONE - to give this term the proper damnation by calling it what it is, a racial slur. 84.206.25.242 (talk) 13:25, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Sadly, this isn't how it works. If there's consensus among WP:RS that this is a slur, we should call it a slur. If they're split, then we should say "so and so says it's a slur; so and so say it isn't". It's as simple as that. If you have some reliable sources to indicate either way, please share them. Our personal opinions aren't really relevant here. Lewisguile (talk) 15:21, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't editorialize, let alone provide damnation. As I have argued previously, reliable sources generally describe terms like "redneck", "hillbilly", and "white trash" as socio-economic signifiers and not primarily racial slurs. In short, it's the word "trash" that's derogatory, not the word "white". Straying into WP:FORUM territory here, but I don't think Dolly Parton is being racist towards white people when she expresses pride in her "white trash background". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 17:17, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

The thing is, people who have been socially constructed as white can't feel the blunt end of racism, because they've already been preemptively whitewashed since birth! Racism is designed to create/maintain them as a people (sg.) whom it can benefit, in addition to creating/maintaining nonwhite peoples as peoples (pl.) whom it can exploit.

The author i'm replying to, who is without a doubt pale as a grub, ought not to pretend that he doesn't know the score here. Slurs resonate, and distinguish themselves from pejorative terms, because they have centuries of trauma and human pain behind them giving them force. White people, who have only existed as such since 1500 or so, have certainly had a traumatic and painful history, but their oppression has never been on the basis of racial othering, it's been cultural and economic--carried out by their own elite groups, and often explicitly in the name of maintaining the larger racist system.

Unfortunately the social realities of this case preclude you from using an apples-apples comparison and saying that all examples of ethnically pejorative terms should be treated identically. They are not treated identically in practice, and this non-correspondence is essential to their functioning, so why should wikipedia elide that? 2601:540:200:5290:712F:45AB:6B41:59B1 (talk) 10:47, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:White trash (disambiguation) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 00:34, 21 May 2025 (UTC)