Shannon Sullivan > Quotes

“What Morrison’s remark underscores is the blurring of boundaries between black and white that white trash represents. Clinton’s perceived blackness comes from being white trash: white-skinned and poor, with crude culinary tastes, and raised in a defective family in the South.”
― Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

“White trash represent the threatening possibility that a white person could slide into blackness, which would mean for her to lose her racial status by means of losing her class status.”
― Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

“Contemporary white people cannot separate themselves from their racial history, because that history is now. The racism and white domination found in the days of chattel slavery has changed, but it nonetheless lives in transformed ways in the practices, habits, and lives of white people today.”
― Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

“Whether mental, moral, or financial, a poor white person’s impoverished situation must be the result of her own failure: her refusal to work, her lack of intelligence, and her failure to adopt a proper work ethic.”
― Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

“A completely isolated individual, if
such a thing ever existed, could not blush. As Darwin explains, “we cannot
cause a blush … by any physical means—that is by an other action of the
body. It is the mind which must be affected … [by] thinking of what others
think of us.”55 Here we can see the sympathy not just of a person’s body parts
with each other—brain with facial muscles and blood vessels—but also with
the emotionally charged presence (sometimes imagined) of another person.
Blushing is a physiological habit, a way of transacting with the world that
illustrates how other beings are entangled in the psychosomatic functioning
of a person’s body.”
― Shannon Sullivan, The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression

“Good white liberals tend to use the fact of a black middle class (sometimes unconsciously, but other times explicitly and consciously) to affirm their belief that the basic structure of liberal society is just and fair. In contrast to the black middle class, however, the existence of white trash threatens both white liberal ideals of opportunity and white liberal assumptions of openness to and acceptance of people who are different than oneself. White trash are not able to perform the same reassuring roles for white liberals as the black middle class, and so white liberals can tend to be more comfortable around black middle-class people than they are around white trash.”
― Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

“Chicago complained of being invaded by Southern hillbillies, as the national publication Harper’s documented in 1958: “The city’s toughest integration problem has nothing to do with the Negroes…. It involves a small army of white Protestant, Early American migrants from the South—who are usually proud, poor, primitive, and fast with a knife.”78 Like white trash, hillbillies were seen by white Northerners as embodying characteristics that had been exclusively associated with blacks.”
― Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism