Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness.

Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. By Matt Wray. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. [xiv], 213. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-3873-4; cloth, $74.95, ISBN 9780-8223-3882-3.)

Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness is an interdisciplinary examination of "white trash" as a historical and cultural construct that speaks to recent debates about the utility of whiteness as an analytical category. Matt Wray argues that the phenomenon of "poor white trash," a concept evoking both racial superiority and caste-like inferiority, requires scholars to think of whiteness as more than simply the racial domination of nonwhite others. He proposes that whiteness is best understood "as a flexible set of social and symbolic boundaries that give shape, meaning, and power to the social category white" (p. 6). The book applies this methodology to analysis of the "white trash" of four historical eras: the poor, landless "lubbers" on the fringes of respectability and the law in colonial British America; antebellum poor whites as imagined by abolitionists and proslavery apologists; rural whites defined by early-twentieth-century eugenicists as "unfit"; and the poor white southerners targeted by hookworm eradication campaigns. In each case study Wray devotes significant attention to the rhetoric defining particular historical constructions of "white trash," but he also examines how symbolic acts translated into social practices such as sterilization, institutionalization, and public health reform, as well as how whiteness contributed to other racial constructions.

A curious aspect of the term white trash is that it did not refer to people whom historians typically think of as occupying the lower rungs of the hierarchy of whites, such as "not quite white" ethnics, but was more often applied to people of Anglo-Saxon descent residing in rural America. As a result, discourses of depravity and degeneracy were frequently accompanied by discourses of racial superiority and worthiness. Wray reminds scholars that American eugenicists, despite their greater notoriety as the force behind immigration restriction, dedicated a significant portion of their energies to studying poor rural whites and obtaining involuntary sterilization laws. Believing that the so-called feebleminded were concentrated in rural areas, eugenicists designed regional field studies that provided empirical confirmation for their own preconceptions as well as for common cultural stereotypes. The most infamous studies of "degenerate" family lines were conducted in the North and Midwest, but eugenics researchers approached the South with similar ideas and generated similar results. IQ tests administered during World War I, for example, graded one-half of white southern male recruits as "imbeciles" (p. 89). While the category of white trash created boundaries within whiteness, Wray argues, it also buttressed existing racial hierarchies between whites and others. Explanations for poor-white deficiencies--"bad blood," miscegenation, or in the twentieth century, disease--ultimately provided a way for eugenicists and other social commentators to acknowledge that some whites did not measure up while simultaneously endorsing white supremacy.

A final case study revisits the discourse and practices associated with the hookworm eradication movement and shows how both contributed to what Wray calls the "stigmatypes"--or stigmatizing stereotypes--of poor white southerners (p. x). Early-twentieth-century research on hookworm disease provided a new environmental explanation for the deficiencies of southern poor whites that recuperated their superior racial status as "pure Anglo-Saxon stock" (p. 120). Poor whites were no longer to be regarded as racially mixed or biologically inferior but as victims of a debilitating illness that merely caused symptoms of feeblemindedness and laziness. At the same time, however, Wray shows how the movement's popular discourse, which linked the parasite to poor personal hygiene, improper sanitation, and southern "dirt-eating," reinforced existing stigmatypes and contributed to other emergent New South racial and class hierarchies. Poor whites were portrayed as victims and disease vectors but also as potentially worthy citizens and workers who, by virtue of their racial heritage, deserved medical treatment. Hookworm itself was described as a disease of African origin, and black southerners, also plagued by the parasite, were nevertheless left untreated. Hookworm, Wray concludes, ultimately eliminated some of the stigma associated with poor whites, but it also provided a convenient, status-quo-affirming explanation of social and racial inequality.

Wray, a sociologist, is less interested in the cumulative historical development of "white trash" than in the processes of boundary formation that created the category "white trash" or its contemporary equivalent at various moments in time. He describes this work as a "historical inventory," and it relies more on secondary sources than primary historical research to reconstruct the past (p. 17). Although historians may find the two-century sweep of this slim volume problematic, Wray's approach yields significant insight into the persistent and recurring inequalities that defined white as a racial category.

MICHELLE BRATTAIN

Georgia State University