One time when J.D.’s mom took exception to something the boy said in the car, she hit the accelerator and sped up to 100 miles per hour, screaming that she was going to kill them both. When he jumped in the backseat hoping to protect himself from the impact, he recalls, she instead pulled the car over “to beat the s- -t out of me.” The evening concluded with Mom being hauled away in a police car.
One of J.D.’s stepdads, Bob, though kindhearted, had a bad case of “Mountain Dew mouth.” Half his teeth had fallen out, the other half were black, brown and misshapen.
J.D. and his people are called rednecks, white trash, hillbillies. But Vance made it out of the holler, way out. The Marines led him to Ohio State, then Yale Law School and finally a job as a principal at a Silicon Valley investment firm. Looking back on his youth, and all he fled, yields a frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It’s a superb book given an extra layer of importance by its political reverberations: When Vance returns home these days, he sees yard after yard festooned with Trump signs.
Nancy Pelosi says blue-collar white men vote “against their own economic interests” because of guns, gays and God, “God being the woman’s right to choose.” The Washington Post noted that this group does care about gun rights more than the average voter but it’s a myth that their views on gays and God differ much from everyone else’s, and Pelosi’s regal dismissal of the bitter clingers is not only too reductive, it’s an attitude that drives voters away from the Democratic Party…
Finish reading: Why ‘white trash’ Americans are flocking to Donald Trump – Kyle Smith | New York Post
HWH Comment: This white guy Kyle Smith may think it’s okay to call poor white people white trash, but this poor white person thinks he’s a racist for doing it. Just because hillbillies call themselves names, doesn’t make it alright for everybody else to do the same. Blacks call themselves names too. He could easily have said ‘niggers’ are flocking to Hillary Clinton, but he didn’t and won’t because he’d be out of a job and maybe a city or two might be burned to the ground as a result, maybe even another cop sacrificed would be on the menu.
Kyle Smith likes to shock people, especially when he knows there won’t be any adverse consequences and especially because the author of the book uses the term, but there is such a thing as decency in writing, and responsibility in reporting on what somebody else has written in a tasteful, non-offensive way.
Women don’t burn cities either when you call them ‘cunts’, but it’s a disparaging term and not many writers would use it. That Kyle Smith thinks it’s okay to disparage anyone through the written word, shows he’s not much of a writer or a communicator when he has to resort to abuse to shock somebody into reading one of his articles.
Kyle Smith knows nothing about tasteful or communicating effectively.
Yeah, niggers are flocking to Hillary Clinton and white trash to Donald Trump. The word trash denotes inhumane. It’s something you dump, something you throw away as worthless. There’s nothing about nigger or even kike that denotes or even connotes the same worthlessness as trash. Trash is by far the worst. The term white trash is racist by definition. There is nothing good nor useful about that term.
Hillbilly is different unless used in a disparaging way.
Kyle Smith knew that as he wrote this trashy piece of worthless writing, as if he was writing a book review – using a review format to cover for his slick and slimy need to disparage poor white people – that served only to stink up the New York Post.
And shame on J.D. Vance for stereotyping his own people in such a disparaging way. He may claim that he’s just being honest and I will argue that many a people who claim honesty aren’t telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They tell a portion of it, leaving out the honest parts that would complete the picture or story. Maybe you all should note that there are lots of poor white people who don’t live in the hills of any state. And there’s more that defines a person than the number of teeth they have.
When I first came to Cleveland I was called white trash by an irate black woman, shaking her finger in my face after I caught her stealing. I did not think it was okay, nor did I take it lightly.
For Kyle Smith to put the term in the title was over the top. To use apostrophes instead of quotes was misleading – whose quote was it anyway? To use it in the same sentence as Donald Trump was passive-aggressive writing meant to influence and harm, not enlighten, suggesting that Donald Trump was white trash via association with those who support him – another bias.
Find a new profession, Kyle Smith.
HAPPY WHITE HORSE™ 