Why they bash 'white trash'

That process started with the ideology of black inferiority, which emerged as a justification for slavery, and the concomitant ideology of white supremacy. In pre-Civil War Southern society, the presence of poor, uneducated and uncouth whites presented something of a problem for the advocates of slavery: They were living, breathing proof that whiteness and superiority were not the same.

By the 1850s, poor whites found themselves caught in the debate over slavery. In 1854, abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe argued that "white trash" were the victims and byproducts of slavery, in which the planter class monopolized tillable soil and left poor whites struggling to survive. Pro-slavery advocates retorted that the source of the white underclass was not slavery but the tainted blood that ran through these depraved people's veins.

In other words, in order to maintain the idea of white supremacy, white elites had to de-racialize their poor - remove them from the group. They were "white" in skin color only. Just as the one-drop rule - which held that any person with any amount of African blood would be considered black - kept the white racial category "pure," so did the creation and disowning of "inferior" whites. "The term 'white trash' gave a name to people who were giving 'whiteness' a bad name," said Matt Wray, a Temple University sociologist and the author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. "It meant that they were behaving in ways that didn't suggest that they were the master race."

By the turn of the century, eugenicists were studying poor rural whites and documenting their social dysfunctions. They eventually made the fatuous connection between Southern white poverty and "consanguinity," or shared blood - which meant incest. The accusation stuck, and many poor whites were labeled feeble-minded and became the victims of the forced-sterilization programs that began in the 1920s.

Mr. Cheney was probably not fully aware of the whole sordid history he conjured. But his casual joke suggests not only that political correctness does not apply to all groups equally but also that there are corrosive, nonracial social divisions in this nation that are easily ignored and even tolerated. For too long, we've spoken of social tensions almost exclusively in terms of race. Perhaps the nomination of a black man for president will let that story line fade so that we can finally focus on the ever-present, easy-to-miss issues of class.

Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, where this article originally appeared. His e-mail is [e-mail].