Matt Wray > Quotes

“Where the lubber had been dismissed as a social castoff, the cracker was targeted for arrest, imprisonment, vigilante terror, and death.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“In 1850, there were only eight graduate students in the entire United States.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“Early race scientists, such as the ethnologists of the American school, rose to prominence through their characterizations of "inferior" racial types such as Africans and Indians, offering a scientific basis for the ideology of racial supremacy.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“the major legislative achievements of the eugenics movement included a set of involuntary sterilization laws that targeted not immigrants or people of color, but poor "feebleminded" whites.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“poor white trash became the subject of extensive public debates in the antebellum period.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“Dramatically and effectively, the Times article established symbolic and social linkages between blacks and poor whites and assigned responsibility for the disease to both.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“empirical eugenic research that focused on immigrants, blacks, Indians, Asians, and ethnoracial minorities was almost nonexistent compared to the number of studies of poor rural whites.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“From this result mental weakness, general incapacity, and unfitness for hard work.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“how could authorities distinguish between a white person who was merely poor by circumstance and one who was biologically predisposed to poverty, crime, and low social standing?”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“social sanitation,”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“Population figures are imprecise, but a number of sources offer the following distribution: Of a total of 12 million people in the southern states in the 1840s, 4 million were classified as black and 8 million as white. Of the whites, less than 50,000 were slave owners with twenty or more slaves; more than 75 percent of whites owned no slaves at all. In this highly stratified society, black slaves were, for the most part, formally excluded from owning property or selling their labor (see Linden 1946; Den Hollander 1934; and Hahn 1983). In most areas of the South, poor whites, although formally included in property rights, found it difficult to acquire property or to sell their labor: they had little capital to accomplish the former and, faced with an economic system that exploited the coerced labor of slaves, they had few opportunities to realize the latter. Under slavery, poor whites occupied a very unusual position: formally included in the system, they were in practical terms redundant labor. While slaveholders would sometimes hire white workers to perform tasks considered too dangerous or risky for slaves, in general, poor, nonslaveholding whites were left to fend for themselves, a situation that, as we have seen, earned them pity and contempt from black slaves.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“the skin he saw was somehow "smoky," "dusky" colored, and "sickly yellow" all at the same time. Like the antebellum figure of the dirt-eater, the Smoky Pilgrims apparently carried the telltale marks of their degeneracy on their skin zs”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“Whereas the studies that preceded it focused on poor rural whites, who may or may not have been
of mixed racial descent, Mongrel Virginians concerned itself with a small mixed-population group in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills of western Virginia that Estabrook dubbed the Win (White-Indian-Negro) tribe.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“symbolic violence”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“With the advent of eugenics, this situation changed. What had begun as a distinctively regional term emanating from the upper South soon became transregional, with meanings that were recognized in faraway places. As poor white trash traveled and entered into local dialects, it formed a chain of associations that symbolically linked local poor whites to those in other rural places. A large part of the cultural success of the eugenics movement lay with the way in which it used this chain of associations to group together the local images of poor rural whites in New Jersey, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and everywhere else. It incorporated and expanded upon the shared perceptions of southern poor whites as immoral, lazy, dirty, criminal, filthy, and perverse and offered an explanation that could be generalized to the entire group. That the stigmatyping images of poor rural whites was, by the late nineteenth century, firmly established as a shared cultural schema ensured that eugenicists did not have to work very hard to make their case. The power of this shared perception, coupled with the rising reformist power of the professional middle class, resulted in efforts to achieve a rare and extreme form of exclusion: the biological eradication of an entire population through coercive reproductive control.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“For poor whites, some of the most pernicious, invidious, and damaging distinctions imposed by eugenicists were those that focused on intelligence and cognitive skills, areas of human ability that these professionals regarded as key to establishing and organizing a just and meritocratic democracy.”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

“sclerotic,”
― Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness