Racism is a negative phenomenon that has been damaging society for many centuries. Even though many people believe that it only involves the skin color and the place of birth, various racial discriminations are also based on other notions. It refers to the fact that class, appearance, and gender of some individuals can result in the same adverse consequences as racial peculiarities. White trash is the most suitable example that demonstrates how it works.
The given term appeared in the 1850s to determine poor and uneducated whites who lived in the South (“Blood Will Tell: The Nationalization of White Trash” 61). However, it took a while for white trash to become known in the Midwest and the North of the US, which happened because such people migrated.
Here, the most exciting thing relates to the fact that other whites objectivized these people. It can be explained by intraracial contests of belonging, meaning that individuals could not utilize the privileges of whiteness because of their social status. It means that poverty was considered more significant than skin color.
In addition to that, representatives of white trash created anxieties about the stability and content of racial identities. It is so because some people believed that white individuals of this origin would contaminate the American nation because of their ignorance and visage (“Blood Will Tell: The Nationalization of White Trash” 69).
The information above stipulates that racialization is a harmful phenomenon. On the one hand, it hurts objectivized people because they feel discriminated against in homogenous communities. On the other hand, this notion is detrimental for society since the latter loses a part of its members because of their social or gender peculiarities. That is why all forms of racialization should be eliminated to create democratic a world.
Work Cited
“Blood Will Tell: The Nationalization of White Trash.” Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People, edited by John Hartigan Jr., Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 59-107.