Can I read Not Quite White : White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness on EtoBox?

Not Quite White : White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness by Wray, Matt is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Not Quite White : White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness about?

White trash. The phrase conjures up images of dirty rural folk who are poor, ignorant, violent, and incestuous. But where did this stigmatizing phrase come from? And why do these stereotypes persist? Matt Wray answers these and other questions by delving into the long history behind this term of abuse and others like it. Ranging from the early 1700s to the early 1900s, Not Quite White documents the origins and transformations of the multiple meanings projected onto poor rural whites in the United States. Wray draws on a wide variety of primary sources—literary texts, folklore, diaries and journals, medical and scientific articles, social scientific analyses—to construct a dense archive of changing collective representations of poor whites. Of crucial importance are the ideas about poor whites that circulated through early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, such as hookworm eradication and eugenic reforms. In these crusades, impoverished whites, particularly but not exclusively in the American South, were targeted for interventions by sanitarians who viewed them as “filthy, lazy crackers” in need of racial uplift and by eugenicists who viewed them as a “feebleminded menace”

Who reads Not Quite White : White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness?

Author

Wray, Matt

Publisher

Duke University Press Books

Published

2006

Language

EN

ISBN

9780822338734

Category

history

Subjects

Psychology, Science, Fiction

Rating

3.85 / 5 (77 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14