Who Are These White People?: “Rednecks,” “Hillbillies,” And “White Trash” As Marked Racial Subjects

There are few better critical openings onto the operations of whiteness than through its meaty, soft underbelly, as represented by “rednecks,” “hillbillies,” and “white trash.” These terms are applied to vast numbers of white people, in each instance emphatically inscribing a charged form of difference marked off from the privileges and powers of whiteness; each term demarcates an inside and an outside to mainstream white society. Though it is easy to assume these racial epithets are synonymous, the differences from which they are historically derived and that they continue to inscribe depict fundamental social dimensions of whites’ lives and interests that are both obscured by the concept of whiteness and critical to the task of rendering this racial identity in specific terms rather than abstractions or generalizations. The manifold uses of these derogatory labels in U.S. popular culture offer an excellent means to grasp both the enduring intraracial dynamics that have long maintained the unmarked status of whiteness and the intriguing, complex current forms of name-calling that whites engage in as they attempt to navigate increasingly fraught social terrains in the United States from economically tenuous subject positions.