HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 85

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HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH
Dreams of Resistance and Status
You're scum, you're fucking white bread .
—David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
WHITE TRASH REBELLION?
Somewhere between the Cheez Whiz hors d'oeuvres and the looped Jerry Springer clip, it hit me: the
“white trash party” trend of the 2000s was a cultural phenomenon best forgotten, and quickly. Sadly,
you can't hold back a fad this debauched. Fueled by topics like White Trash Cooking and White Trash
Etiquette , White Trash Nation websites, college students' love of Daisy Duke cutoff shorts, and hipsters'
apparently innate affection for trucker hats, the trend only grew. And it grew until, in the words of one
awestruck journalist, it shined “brighter than a big, fat 'skeeter getting fried on a bug zapper.” 1 For all
that zap-blue brightness, though, white trash chic turned out to be a decidedly murky affair—starting
with the strange bedfellows it attracted. 2
Reporters, mostly caught up in the pleasure of dabbing the pages of staid venues like Metropolitan
Home with lines like “Jes' belly up to the trough and dig in,” or inflecting New York Times style with
“shonuffs” and “hons,” depicted the trend as a unified phenomenon. In fact, it arose from two very
different places. The props were the same for both—a hodgepodge of white bread, processed cheese,
southern rock, cheap beer, and pregnant teen costumes. They both reveled in stylized poverty. They both
cultivated vulgar ugliness. And both, at some level, attempted to subvert the pretensions of an imagined
elite. But the politics and participants were different.
On one hand, urban hipsters chugging Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in upscale dives dreamt of working-
class authenticity, rebelling against high-class consumerism with aestheticized poverty. Hipster white
trash chic embraced the “simplicity” of mass-produced commodities as an ironic antidote to yuppie con-
sumption. It assembled cool style out of the kitschy trappings of poverty, but in doing so reinforced the
line between hipsters and actual low-income consumers.
On the other hand, segments of the white working class—fans of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy's
self-mocking “You might be a redneck if …” brand of humor—took tongue-in-cheek pride in the icon-
ography of trailer parks, beer bellies, and kissing cousins meant to stereotype them . 3 Here the dream
was a different kind of resistance: armed with “shit on a shingle” (canned corn beef on white bread)
and Confederate flags, white trash parties threw what Foxworthy called “a glorious lack of sophistica-
tion” in the face of an imagined enemy of uptight liberal elites. 4 In this vein, white trash parties, for all
their carnivalesque hilarity, were deadly serious. They appropriated a demeaning insult, turning it into