Annotation & Reflection on Not Quite White

Reflection:

I found this bit from the annotation particularly interesting, as I was able to link it to some of what we studied in my North Carolina History class last semester.  NC was arguably "the" poor-white trash colony for much of the US's early history and some historians think that the little-known (today) Regulator Rebellion, like Shay's Rebellion, inspired the planter class to begin seeking labor more in the form of imported African slave labor rather than relying on the increasing discontented indentured white workers.  Backcountry rural farmers, here referred to as "lubbers" and later as "crackers", were a largely uneducated but highly religious Protestant group of people, mostly descended from Irish and Scot-Irish immigrants who moved to the NC backcountry.  Today, many NC mountain people share the Appalachian dialect, secluded agricultural lifestyle, poverty, deep religious convictions, and distrust of institutions which marked many of their backcountry ancestors. And also like their ancestors, mountain and backcountry people tend to be marked as "dangerous" by the white upper and middle-class-- somehow less civilized or more likely to be involved in petty crime or drugs.

I wrote a long paper on North Carolina backcountry people and moonshining activities last semester, so forgive me if I sound too much like I'm veering into the discourse of History.  However, I found this book to be very much in the genre of social history and much more engrossing than any of the others.  I found the ideas about Boundary Theory and "classifications" interesting as well and paid particular attention to the authors' exploration of various upper-class whites' attempts to explain the perceived "moral unworthiness" of poor whites.  These processes (a kind of "boundary work", to maintain class lines, huh?) continue today, with jokes about backwoods inbreeding which could be viewed as remnants of Social Darwinism ideology in our modern discourses.  The long section on the attempts of middle-class social reformers to blame poor whites' "unworthiness" and poverty on a hookworm epidemic is something I was really unaware of and found totally disturbing.  Overall, Not Quite White does a thorough job of examining the stigmatype of the poor, uneducated white, the evolving perceptions of the "poor white trash" who have existed as an ostracized category in American society from its very beginnings.