Well, looking at my article, yes:
Considering how they act/talk – these days – it’s totally justified.
But the snobbish – but often very justifiable hatred against poor whites is nothing new. It amazes from the following article what snobs and racists – the great leaders and thinkers in the US and elsewhere were regarding the topic (a lot of the fallout from the eugenics movement):
In his classic study, Democracy in America (1835), French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville sees the state of poor white southerners as being one of the effects of the slave system. He describes them as ignorant, idle, prideful, self-indulgent, and weak, and writes about southern whites in general:
From birth, the southern American is invested with a kind of domestic dictatorship … and the first habit he learns is that of effortless domination … [which turns] the southern American into a haughty, hasty, irascible, violent man, passionate in his desires and irritated by obstacles. But he is easily discouraged if he fails to succeed at his first attempt.[16]
Another theory held that the degraded condition of poor white southerners was the result of their living in such close proximity to blacks and Native Americans. Samuel Stanhope Smith, a minister and educator who was the seventh president of Princeton College, wrote in 1810 that poor white southerners lived in “a state of absolute savagism,” which caused them to resemble Indians in the color of their skin and their clothing, a belief that was endemic in the 18th and early 19th century. Smith saw them as a stumbling block in the evolution of mainstream American whites,[17] a view that had previously been expressed by Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur in his 1782 book, Letters from an American Farmer. Crèvecoeur, a French soldier-diplomat who resettled in the United States and changed his name to J. Hector St. John, considered poor white southerners to be “not … a very pleasing spectacle” and inferior to the prototypical American he celebrated in his book, but still hopes that the effects of progress would improve the condition of these mongrelized, untamed, half-savage drunken people who exhibit “the most hideous parts of our society.”[18]
For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist and pre-eminant American lecturer, writer and philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century, poor people of all kinds – including poor white Southerners – lived in poverty because of inherent traits in their nature. The poor were “ferried over the Atlantic & carted to America to ditch & to drudge, to make the land fertile … and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of greener grass…” These people Emerson referred to as “guano” were fated to inhabit the lowest niches of society, and he specifically excluded them from his definition of what an American was. Emerson’s “American” was of Saxon heritage, descended from the Danes, Norsemen, Saxons and Anglo-Saxons, known for their “excess of virility”, their “beastly ferocity”, and – at least in Emerson’s eyes – their beauty. These were not traits which were shared by the poor white Southerner. Americans may have degenerated somewhat in comparison to their ancestors, one of the weakening effects of civilization, but they still maintained their superiority over other “races”, and white Southerners of all kinds, but especially poor ones, were themselves inferior to their countrymen from New England and the north.[19]
Some, such a Theodore Roosevelt, saw poor “degenerate” whites – as well as the mass of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (those from northern Europe having been accepted in the Ango-Saxon white race) – as being a major part of the problem of “race suicide“, the concept that poor whites and unwanted immigrants would eventually out-procreate those of the dominant and superior white “race”, causing it to die out or be supplanted, to the detriment of the country.[20]
Blacks have always had loathing toward them, first, because they (the white trash) are NOT very nice to them – and second, because – like anyone else – they get off on feeling superior to someone (probably the same situation exists now with Mexicans).
Poor white trash were generally only able to locate themselves on the worst land in the South, since the best land was taken by the slaveholders, large and small. They lived and attempted to survive on land that was sandy or swampy or covered in scrub pine and not suited for agriculture; for this they became known as “sandhillers” and “pineys”.[12] These “hard-scratch” inhabitants were seen to match their surroundings: they were “stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as they land they lived on.”[13]
Restricted from holding political office due to property qualifications, their ability to vote at the mercy of the courts which were controlled by the slave-holding planters, poor whites had few advocates within the political system or the dominant social hierarchy. Although many were tenant farmers or day laborers, other white trash people were forced to live as scavengers, thieves and vagrants, but all, employed or not, were socially ostracized by “proper” white society by being forced to use the back door when entering “proper” homes. Even slaves looked down on them: when poor whites came begging for food, the slaves called them “stray goats.”[14]
However, like the Irish – the poor whites were simply not getting beat with bullwhips, having their wives raped, their men emasculated. Later on, they were not getting lynched – hideously tortured (burned alive etc.) – officially segregated against, persecuted with a double-standard regarding sexual relations.
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