Welcome to the white-trash nation

Swank’s family may have good cause for embarrassment by her podium proclamation. White trash, after all, didn’t start out as a funny slogan on an overpriced T-shirt. In “Gone with the Wind,” Mammy warns Scarlett O’Hara against acting like “white trash.” In its original 1890s definition, the term is a slur against impoverished and uneducated white families in  slave-era South — doubly biting in its implication that all non-whites are trash (hence the “white” distinction). It’s also used in “To Kill A Mockingbird” to describe the Ewell family, the patriarch of which is a violent, incestuous drunk.

In a recent episode of England’s hit soap opera “Coronation Street,” a character accused his sister of behaving like her “white trash friends,” and the nation exploded in controversy. Fans were appalled by the show’s use of an insult with racist overtones. Meanwhile, back on these shores, white trash still retains the associations of trailer parks, Camaros-up-on-blocks, screaming babies, unemployment, public drunkenness, lack of education or social skills — but not the social stigma.

Trash lit
These days, hipsters who 10 years ago would have embraced grunge grow long mustaches like the one worn by the title character in “Earl.” White trash now spawns the same pop-culture ephemera associated with past trends. Like the “Preppy Handbook” and “Hipster Handbook,” we now have the “Down Home Trailer Park” book series by Ruby Ann Boxcar, and "White Trash Etiquette," by Dr. Verne Edstrom, Esq., due out this summer.

Plus, we have the style bibles of white-trash couture: reality shows. What’s more uncouth and stereotypically hick-like than obnoxious and seemingly unintelligent people grappling for fame and fortune sans hard work or talent? Beyond “The Jerry Springer Show,” there’s “Nanny 911” and “Trading Spouses,” revealing to the world America’s inability to raise its children. And don’t forget one of the original reality shows, “Cops,” still going strong.

Fashion statements aside, do we really want to embrace white trash as the new cool? Take, for instance, the antics of current white trash pinup girl Britney Spears and her no-means-of-visible-support husband Kevin Federline. The real-life Beverly Hillbillies recently got a visit from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and a deputy sheriff. It seems a doctor reported their baby, Sean Preston, suffered a skull fracture six days before he was brought to the hospital. Two months earlier, Britney was caught driving with baby Preston on her lap.

It don’t get more “Cops” than that, folks. And it don’t get more white trash than “Cops.”

Helen A.S. Popkin was raised with a car up on blocks in the front yard and "educated" in the Florida public school system.

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