I love a little etymology on a Saturday morning:

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you'd probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s. It arises not in Mississippi or Alabama, but in and around Baltimore, Maryland. And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks--both free and enslaved--to disparage local poor whites. Some of these poor whites would have been newly arrived Irish immigrants, others semiskilled workers drawn to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in the postrevolutionary building boom, and others still may have been white servants, waged or indentured, working in the homes and estates of area elites. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources--the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.

While white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech.

Over the next forty years, the term began to appear more and more frequently in print. In 1854 white trash appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin--her defense of the abolitionist play [sic] that had garnered her international fame. Stowe devoted an entire chapter to “Poor White Trash,” explaining that the slave system produced "not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable." The degradation was due, Stowe argued, in part because plantation slavery locked up productive soil in the hands of a few large planters, leaving ordinary whites to struggle for subsistence. But there were other factors as well: "Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of 'poor white trash,' says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said."

A little searching does redeem their gaffe somewhat--Stowe's novel was the best-selling novel of the American nineteenth century, but even so many Americans saw the story done as a musical play. The first stage adaptations of the novel were being done--without Stowe's permission--hard on the heels of its publication. But it's still a stretch to call Uncle Tom's Cabin a play, and slips like that do make one wonder what else isn't quite right about the history offered here. Experts on American etymology, ethnic history, and eugenics are more than welcome to offer their assessments.