Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I’m almost finished with Matt Wray’s Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Yeah, it’s a quick read. Plus, I cheated. At work, I spent coffee breaks, lunch, and gotta get my head clear of bug chasing breaks reading the book. I figure I’m more productive that way. *smirk*

I’m kinda whooped after a 10-7, so I probably won’t say much that’s profound, saving that for more sustained look at the book later. Meanwhile, I did get a kick out of Wray’s chapter on the eugenics movement which classified people by racializing body types, skin color, posture, gait, skull shapes, noses, and so forth. As the professional middle class grew, it increasingly founded it cultural hegemony and class and racial supremacist institutions on the use of science to legitimize its claims. In this case, there were countless studies down on imbeciles (of which there were three types) and morons who were, funny enough, the top of the heap. I’m too lazy to scan it, but there’s an illustration reprinted for the Survey in 1915. The Survey was the leading journal of the growing social work movement, not some obscure outpost of creepiness.

The illustration is of a staircase. Against each step, the feebleminded, imbeciles, and morons sit, droop, lean, stand, or try to climb the steps. The first sitting figure is of what looks like a boy, The Idiot, whose life is spent in mere survival.

The next step serves as a rest for a woman in a maid’s cap. She’s leaning, stooped against the step, head bent downward. She’s a Low Grade Imbecile whose life is spent doing simple menial work.

The next is a man, leaning more casually against the step. He’s a Medium Imbecile who performs simple manual work.

Above him stands a woman facing the step, hands palm downward, resting on the top of the step. Her head is raised high, as if proud, and she doesn’t appear depressed, bedraggled, downtrodden or shorn of all hope, as the rest do. Instead, she’s looking up the stairs, as if she wants to climb higher. She a High Grade Imbecile who does complex manual work.

Finally, there’s a man leaning against the step, looking as if he’s working hard or struggling to try and mount the step. He’s a Moron who does work that requires reason and judgment.

I don’t know; it just slayed me because all I could think was: shit, we’re all freakin’ imbeciles and morons by that standard.

Wray discusses the history of the term white trash: who was being described by it and who was doing the describing. During the post-civil war eugenics era, poor white trash and white trash were a problem because they were seen as morally inferior, intellectually incapable, promiscuous, criminal, and — most terrifying in the south — people who wouldn’t respect the race line. The Virginia Racial Integrity Law of 1924 was to prohibit marriages between whites and nonwhites, to keep the white race pure.

What was at stake wasn’t the behavior of middle class and upper class whites. They apparently knew enough not to marry blacks and Native Americans. The problem was the sexually degenerate poor white trash who couldn’t keep their legs together, ever. And their lustiness meant that they refused to uphold the color line (which originated in Virginia — the concept) and would actually marry blacks and Native Americans. Quelle Horreur!

So, on the basis racialized body characteristics such as bowed legs, buck teeth, skull shapes, head sizes, musculature, posture, hair texture and skin color, poor white trash were marked. Marked as moral, intellectual, and social inferiors and degenerates. They were nomadic, vagabonds, criminal, immoral, perverse, dirty, and incapable of aspiring to the family ideal of two married heterosexuals and children. Instead, their families split up and/or they lived in multi-generational and communal households where they mixed it up with the definitely not-whites.

As this movement continued what emerged was, not only a terrifying (to the white professional managerial class) propensity to marry and have children with blacks and NAs, they were shiftless and lazy to boot. Thus, they were poor because they were biologically incapable of being anything but poor. That is, they were not just stupid and dull-witted. They lacked industry. They lacked a work ethic.

And it wasn’t just the south. As I’ve mentioned before, the documents of a powerful eugenics society in Vermont were discovered some years ago. It’s a testament to the way the same principles were in operation in the North. The growing urban professional middle class were terrified of the existence of poor whites. Their wanton sexuality meant that, as white middle class women had fewer and fewer children, and the marriage age rose, people were afraid that places like New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Ohio, and elsewhere would become overrun with imbeciles who would breed amongst one another for generations, producing more degenerate offspring at alarming rates. There goes the neighborhood: lost to drunkards, imbeciles, morons, lunatics, criminal, sickly people. In a city like Cincinnati, for instance, there was a moral panic about the threat of The Feeble minded who were at the center of the city’s problem with criminals, juvenile delinquents, prostitutes, paupers, beggars, tramps, and slatterns.

What to do with these people? IF nothing was done, they’d contaminate and pollute the good folk! Eugenicists wanted to institutionalize them, sterilize them, and sometimes simply kill them. In the south, the institutionalization rate was 50 per 100,000. In New England and Mid-Atlantic states, the rate doubled to 96 and 97 per 100,000.

ahhh. damn. getting to tired to write. More later.