White Trash Quotes

“This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That’s what the big world thinks it’s worth, to save white-trash orphans.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“We Finches don't marry the children of rednecked white trash.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“The Anti-Stereotype Sonnet

Black is not evil.
White is not trash.
Brown is not illegal.
Muslims don’t crash.
Women ain't weak.
Jews ain't greedy.
Men ain't playboys.
Queer ain't sickly.
Hijab is not oppression.
Hourglass ain't beauty.
Faith is not delusion.
Atheists don't lack morality.
Assumptions only reveal shallowness.
Beyond stereotypes lies humaneness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, I Vicdansaadet Speaking: No Rest Till The World is Lifted

“Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“Black is not evil.
White is not trash.
Brown is not illegal.
Muslims don’t crash.”
― Abhijit Naskar, I Vicdansaadet Speaking: No Rest Till The World is Lifted

“The person who called me "Lyncher" at first was surprised to find that I was "almost brilliant.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years