Down Here, We're All A Little White Trash

It’s a well-known fact that the South is filled with a rare breed of humans that we like to lovingly call “white trash”. White trash has been around forever and has, in many ways, plagued and enriched all of our lives. We laugh at the white trash on TV shows such as Raising Hope and My Name is Earl, but what I don’t think you all realize is that you laugh because deep down inside of you, there’s a little bit of white trash, too.

Every Southerner, born, bred or otherwise transplanted here, has something they do that is in some way considered WT. In my neighborhood, we have an entire family of people who I would consider to be WT. And it’s not just because their 3 year old son runs naked through the neighborhood at least once a day, or the fact that we see him stand on the top of their minivan and watch traffic go by, or that he uprooted the dead mini tree out of their front yard and proceeded to hit the other kids and their minivan with it. They do other WT things, too. My husband and I lovingly call their child “naked baby”. We’re sure his name is something spectacularly WT like Cletus or Jimmy Bob, but "naked baby" just stuck. They have a thousand cars parked around their house, and sometimes we drive by and their front door is standing wide open for hours while they let their pack of WT kids roam around unsupervised like little yard apes. But here’s the thing... we really know nothing about them. For all we know, the dad could be some genius nuclear engineer or the mom could be the heir to a huge old Southern fortune. Not likely, but the point is that we all have our white trash tendencies.

My husband and I are offenders, too. If you sat on the other side of my subdivision on a Sunday afternoon, you’d see rotten fruit flying over the back of our fence and landing in the empty lot behind our house. At first glance, you’d think “Wow, what white trash people. They’re throwing rotten fruit into the empty lot instead of just throwing it in the trash.” But in reality, my husband is “feeding the birds”. A lot of it has to do with wanting to chuck fruit as far as we can throw it, but we’re also helping to preserve the local bird population. The thing is, after watching us shot-put oranges, apples and pumpkins over our fence, you’d never know my husband is studying to become a surgeon and that I work in finance. Around Christmas time, when you look into our neighborhood and see the house with the MILLIONS of cheap-looking Christmas yard ornaments all strung up and shining so bright that it knocks out half the town's power, you might think “WOW! So white trash.” But again, it’s just us. Whether naturally ingrained in us or bestowed through our raising, we all exhibit some signs and symptoms.

My dad is a math whiz. He can literally compute things in his head like a human calculator, which is to be expected since he’s an accountant. But you’d never know he has a deep dark secret: he burns trash. My mother works at a school and used to teach autistic children and English as a second language. The woman’s a saint, but she also likes to shoot Starlings (they're demon black birds, don't feel bad for them) off of the back porch … in town.

  

A plague on the classiness of the Old South, or a natural instinct passed down through generations of Southerners? I say, look inside yourself and decide.  Perhaps you’re a garbage burner, an I-like-to-use-my-yard-as-a-parking-lot person, or even one of those people who walk into Walmart wearing pajamas and fuzzy bunny slippers.

Or you have a car that looks like this.  

Whichever white trash poison you choose, accepting and embracing it may be the first step towards the full growth of your true Southern roots. What are your white trash tendencies?

Now if you’re sitting there thinking “I don’t do anything that’s even remotely white trash,” you are a dirty rotten liar … and probably not much fun.

It's the South, Y'all!