ABSTRACT
The chapter provides an overview of research on the various marginal white populations throughout history; that is white people who have been called white trash, rednecks, hillbillies, chavs, bogans, redlegs or poor whites. Wray and Wolfe ask, what, if anything, can the study of marginal whites teach us about both the boundaries and the limits of whiteness in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Are they an exception to the rule of whiteness that proves that rule, or are they a rebuke to the very concept of white supremacy itself? How do marginal whites from a theoretical perspective fit (or not fit) into the growing body of research called critical whiteness studies and the study of race and class more generally?
