"Mel" <mel@atj.faq.com> wrote

white trash is lower than ***** *****.

People make that assumption because there is a general myth in the
colonies and former colonies that the black population was not in
a "civilized" environment previously, having come directly from what
is actually a Neolithic or early iron age culture, whereas the white
population must have come from a civilized background and thence
degenerated to a very low state. But this is not true, and is based
on our modern concepts of general access and mobility. In the
colonial days, the European countries provided three sorts or classes
of people, who were very rigidly caste-typed, namely aristocrats and
nobility, among whom were the powerful capitalists and entrepreneurs,
then the religious zealots, adventuring craftsmen and mercantilists, and
mercenary soldiers, and finally huge numbers of felons and wastrels,
collected from the prisons and gutters and sent off to be somewhere
else. The "white trash" of the colonies can generally trace their ancestors
back to those same expelled people. In the 18th and early 19th centuries
those people came from a background in which they had never been
civilized in the first place, the stubborn descendents of barbarians who
never became involved in the advancement of human culture. In the
United States, linguists have traced the "Ebonics" dialects back to
the white trash of Virginia, the pariahs of the English colonies who could
associate freely with the black slaves, from whom the slaves learned
English "culture" such as it was among a population of felons and
deportees. Those people still live in shacks and cabins in the back
hills and out of the way places, very little changed, although some
have moved into trailer parks, people referred to in this country as
"trailer trash".