It almost sounds like a riddle or a koan. What is white but not white? For Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, the answer is so-called white trash.In their contribution to the field-defining collection Whiteness: A Critical Reader, Newitz and Wray (1997: 169) asserted that “‘white trash,’ in many ways, is the white Other.” Yet the discipline of whiteness studies, Newitz and Wray charged, had failed to account for this otherness. It had mistakenly assumed that there was only one form of whiteness, and that all whites shared equally in the “social power and privilege” of whiteness. Instead, they argued, critics should attend to “the differences”—especially the class differences—“within whiteness” (169).To do so would require two things. First, that scholars examine “whether or not . . . stereotypical images of white trash as violent, incestuous, and criminal are true” (171). (They are not.) And second, that critics explore what the category of white trash does to the concept of whiteness more generally. As Newitz and Wray outline it, this latter project entails “the necessity of breaking down whiteness by examining how . . . discourses of differences among whites tend to de-stabilize and undermine any unified or essentialized notion of white identity” (169). In theory, that is, fractions within whiteness, especially those along the lines of class, could reveal the contingency of whiteness.Two new books, out from the same university press, try to make good on these two critical desiderata. (Each cites Newitz and Wray.) The first book sets out to challenge stereotypes of poor whites and the second to show how poor whites unsettle whiteness. Together, the books illustrate the possibilities—but also the limitations—of these approaches.▪ ▪ ▪In Poverty Politics, Sarah Robertson has catalogued what seems like every stereotypical representation of poor whites to appear in print over the last half century. Name a genre—travel writing, photo narratives, life writing, literature, and nature writing—and chances are it has trafficked in stereotypes about poor whites. But her project does not stop with listing and dispelling stereotypes. She also makes the counterintuitive argument that we should not think of poverty in the South as a regional phenomenon but rather as part of a global one. Nor should we settle for simply refuting stereotypes. Rather, we should also recognize what she calls “communitarianism,” which occurs when superficially different but similarly oppressed groups build bridges between and among themselves.Her first chapter, on contemporary southern travel writing, illustrates the approach. Robertson argues that travel writers like to view their journey to the South as a descent into what one writer calls “the Heart of Darkness in the USA” (Fletcher 1998: 5). The ur-text for these narratives is James Dickey’s 1970 novel Deliverance and its fairly faithful 1972 film adaptation. The tropes spring readily to mind: poverty, rural isolation, aberrant sexuality, and other varieties of depravity. Oddly enough, the other side of the southern depravity coin is nostalgia, the belief, as V. S. Naipaul (1989: 222) writes in A Turn in the South, that the South exists “beyond the uniformity of highway[s] and chain hotel[s].” For these writers, the South lies outside civilization, either frightfully atavistic or invitingly premodern. But neither of these ways of looking truly represents the South. Rather, as Robertson nicely puts it, they are “representations of representations” (7) of the South. Travel writing, she argues, is therefore “complicit in the perpetuation of otherness” (5).The second chapter, on photo narratives, renews Robertson’s campaign against stereotypes but advances beyond it as well. Robertson is particularly critical of photographs sponsored by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s, including offshoots like James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). These works include what she calls the rephotography projects that emerged after the republication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1960. (The most famous is Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson’s 1989 work And Their Children After Them.) Most contemporary photography and photo narratives of the South, she argues, encourage the “dominant gaze that has shown poor whites to be either victims in need of state intervention or shiftless and morally reprehensible degenerates” (28). I think Robertson is plain wrong about including Let Us Now Praise Famous Men among such texts. You cannot read Agee’s (1988: x) contempt for reformers, his references to the “stature” of his subjects and their “human divinity,” or his tortured self-consciousness about his project and still think he encourages a dominant gaze. His title is ironic but also not. Moreover, unlike many other FSA photographs—Migrant Mother (1936) by Dorothea Lange most famously—the photographs Walker Evans made for the book have the tenant farmers looking straight into the camera, meeting the gaze of readers and not being dominated by it. In any case, for Robertson, a precious few of these photo narratives offer what she calls “counternarratives, or countervisualities, that destabilize the gaze” (28). Perhaps the best example of these countervisualities is the photographer Wendy Ewald’s Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children of the Appalachians (1985). For this work, Ewald taught photography to schoolchildren in Kentucky and then set them loose to document their own world, free of the outsider gaze that almost always distorts images of southern life.Robertson repeats this dynamic across each of the chapters. She uncovers stereotypes, and then, like a game of checkers, responds with writers—or, in the above case, photographers—who counter those stereotypes. Except for a wonderful close reading of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), which explores the literal versus figurative meanings of trash in the term white trash, this sheep-and-goats approach to texts becomes a bit predictable, at times even tedious. But the book has other problems than just tedium.The first is the insistence that poor whites in the South are not different from the poor elsewhere. Her “approach to class,” Robertson writes in the introduction, starts from the premise “that the exploitation of workers under neoliberalism aligns poor whites in the US South with poor people of all ethnicities across the globe” (xii). Maybe. But I can also imagine that this observation would horrify a historian. You can assert that neoliberalism in one form or another operates the world over and that it does not much care about the poor regardless of where they live. Yet poverty took and still takes different forms in different places and under different geopolitical regimes and therefore creates different attitudes on the part of the rich and the poor toward poverty. Those differences matter at least as much as the similarities. Worse, except for quotations from David Harvey, Robertson provides no evidence for the claim that poor whites in the South are akin to the poor everywhere else. But just because Harvey said it does not make it true.The other problem has to do with an unwillingness to confront racism among poor whites. In her introduction, Robertson emphasizes that her “own focus on poor whites emerges not out of whiteness studies but out of an interest in inequities of neoliberalism and how they are reflected through contemporary forms of writing about the US South” (xiv). Fair enough, but one wonders if it is possible to discuss the inequities experienced by poor whites in the South without inquiring into their whiteness. If you believe historians like David R. Roediger (1991) and others, white poverty owes at least in part to having settled for the wages of whiteness rather than aspiring for real wages. In the game of “social power and privilege,” as Newitz and Wray phrase it, poor whites have more often chosen whiteness over solidarity with their racially different but similarly exploited equals. (Just ask poor Blacks.) Explain and champion them all you like but, as Roediger argues, poor whites bear some responsibility for that choice.Among other things, that is what I take James Baldwin to mean when he says that “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you” (quoted in Thorsen 1989). (Roediger also quotes this line.) Following Newitz and Wray, Robertson wants to validate poor whites as a group “seeking recognition and social justice” (175) and ally them with “other poor communities regardless of race, ethnicity, or nationality” (xxii). But for Baldwin, you cannot have it both ways. If whiteness matters to you, then there are limits to how much you can identify your interests with those who are not white. And whiteness seems to matter to poor whites. You would never know any of this, however, from Robertson’s book, which does not cite Roediger or other historians of whiteness like Theodore W. Allen.When race does appear in Poverty Politics, it takes the form of what Robertson calls communitarianism. For Robertson, communitarianism occurs when the poor of different races set aside their racial identities and recognize their shared class interests. Her principal example comes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), when a white girl, the indentured servant Amy Denver, helps Sethe give birth during her escape from Sweet Home. Sethe later names her daughter after the girl. Robertson acknowledges that while this scene is “too fleeting to ever fully ‘transcend racial divides,’” she nevertheless insists that “its lingering presence throughout the novel maintains a sense of hope both within the novel’s late-nineteenth century setting and for a readership in a period when the shift to neoliberalism was eroding communitarianism” (93).I appreciate the desire to find glimpses of interracial solidarity in American history. I am a sucker, for example, for the role that Walter Reuther, president of the United Autoworkers Union from 1946 to 1970, played in advancing civil rights for African Americans during the 1950s and 1960s. Who today remembers that it was Reuther who raised the money to bail Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow protesters out of the infamous Birmingham jail? But even I have to admit that these instances are the exception and not the rule. Baldwin (1985: 383) again: The utility of the poor white [in the South] was to make slavery both profitable and safe and, therefore, the germ of white supremacy which he brought with him from Europe was made hideously to flourish in the American air. Two world wars and a worldwide depression have failed to reveal to this poor man that he has far more in common with the ex-slaves whom he fears than he has with the masters who oppress them both for profit.Baldwin was writing in 1964, and perhaps poor whites have changed over the last sixty years. Then again, perhaps they have not changed as much as we would like to think.For example, Robertson pushes back against the claim that in 2016 Donald Trump rode the votes of poor whites into the oval office. Responding to a particularly obtuse Irish Times article, Robertson avers that 61 percent of the vote in Buncombe County, North Carolina went to Hilary Clinton while 41 percent went to Trump. This is cherry-picking of the ripest sort. Buncombe County is the home of Asheville, North Carolina, which is hardly a bastion of poor whites. Of whites, maybe, but not poor whites. (According to the census, its median household income is $52,207 [United States Census Bureau Quick Facts 2021].) In the 2020 election, nearby Graham County, which is 88.6 percent white and whose median income is $32,426, cast 80 percent of its votes for Trump and 19 percent for Biden (Park et al. 2021). Assuming that a vote for Trump in 2020 is a vote for whiteness—by no means a safe assumption, but let it go—that is a lot of poor whites voting for whiteness.Poverty Politics does an admirable job of disabusing readers of the stereotypes that beset poor whites in the South. What it lacks, and therefore what makes it incomplete, is any discussion of the stereotypes that poor whites may have for others, especially their racial others. Absent that discussion, there is only so much the book can do.▪ ▪ ▪If Poverty Politics talks about class without confronting the uglier side of race, Justin Mellette’s Peculiar Whiteness at least acknowledges racism among whites. And like Robertson, he keeps an eye out for “the often unconscious bias toward poor whites” (7). Yet his interests ultimately lie elsewhere. Namely, he wants to understand the effect poor whites have on white identity more broadly. Drawing on Newitz and Wray, Mellette posits that from the perspective of other whites, poor whites function as “a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves” (7). As Mellette puts it, “whiteness . . . operates on a sliding scale” (11). If so, then the category of whiteness is “less homogeneous” than whiteness studies allows.His next move, however, is a little more controversial. He argues that poor whites do not just differentiate the category of whiteness; these differences also endanger whiteness, indeed the very concept of white supremacy. In the literature of the South, he writes, “whiteness is presented as both in control but also vexed, powerful yet under constant threat, where those marked as white both hold power but also face pervasive anxiety at the precariousness of their situation” (18). In other words, sharing a region with poor whites, prosperous whites can never feel entirely confident in their whiteness. That, I take it, is the meaning of his title. It refers to slavery, of course, that peculiar institution. (It therefore alludes as well to Kenneth M. Stampp’s 1956 book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.) But the title also invokes a more everyday definition of peculiar, as when someone, vaguely unwell, says that they feel “a bit peculiar.” Poor whites do the same thing. They make other whites feel a bit peculiar.Mellette includes chapters on Thomas Dixon Jr., Erskine Caldwell, memoirists like W. J. Cash and William Percy, and, naturally, William Faulkner. The chapter on Dixon is particularly relevant because few writers did as much to cultivate white supremacy as he, but also because Mellette nevertheless detects in his novels a certain anxiety about white supremacy.Today, Dixon is remembered for the first and second installments of his Reconstruction trilogy, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), the latter of which inspired D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. You could search a long time and not find more racist works than these. Mellette, however, focuses on the last and lesser known of the trilogy, The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). The “Invisible Empire” of the subtitle refers to the Klan, but unlike in the earlier novels, the Klan in The Traitor is not riding to the rescue of white women menaced by lascivious Blacks. Or not only. Rather, it is falling apart because poor whites have taken it over and ruined a good thing.The novel is not worth the space it would take to summarize it, but here goes. Because the Klan has done such a magnificent job of restoring Blacks to a subordinate position, its local leader, John Graham, the main character of the novel, is instructed to dismantle the organization and mothball the robes and hoods. The Klan is soon revived, however, by a bedraggled crew of poor and once-poor whites, much to the dismay of Graham and, of course, Dixon. For Mellette, the novel “hierarchizes whites in an attempt to redefine and narrow the boundaries of whiteness” (25). In other words, the “better” sort of whites, like John Graham, can never put the racially suspect poor whites back into the southern tube of toothpaste. Worse, through their pure slovenliness and selfishness, poor whites threaten the sanctity of the white supremacy the Klan had arisen to protect in the first place. The novel, Mellette argues, “helps establish how demonstrably fragile whiteness is” (35).I have no doubt whatsoever that elite whites looked down upon—and continue to look down upon—poor whites. But the argument that poor whites demonstrate the “fragility” of whiteness does not pass the eye test. To see why, consider Mellette’s chapter on Faulkner. He devotes most of it to As I Lay Dying and the odyssey of the Bundren clan as they travel from their rural farm to the town of Jefferson to bury Addie Bundren, the wife and mother of the family. Everything Mellette claims about the scorn other whites in the novel have for the Bundrens is correct. But an aside in the novel—and his reading of that aside—suggests why whiteness may not be as fragile as Mellette would have it.In an early chapter of As I Lay Dying, Cora Tull, the self-absorbed and superficially more respectable neighbor to the Bundrens, bluntly passes judgment on Anse Bundren, the husband and father of the family. “A Bundren through and through,” she thinks, “loving nobody, caring for nothing except how to get something with the least amount of work” (Faulkner 1989: 22). Mellette quotes one critic of the novel who has commented that casting “Anse as white trash allows the other white farmers to see themselves as hard-working, honest white men somehow constitutionally or biologically different from white trash” (Leyda 2000: 40). And Mellette rightly concludes of this narcissism of minor differences that “whiteness is secure only so long as there is someone or some group lower on the totem pole” (119). But that is just it. Except for those, like the Bundrens, who occupy the very bottom of the totem pole, there will always be someone or some group lower down on it. In which case, again excepting the Bundrens, everyone will feel secure in their whiteness. And even the Bundrens, because they do not know any better or because they can compare themselves to Blacks, can feel secure in their whiteness. Mellette reads Cora as “illustrating. . . . an important aspect of white anxiety,” but one could just as easily read her and the other hierarchies of whiteness in the novel—or in the world—as an aspect of white confidence and composure. Cora can feel her whiteness all the more because she can compare it to the less-white Bundrens. For Cora and others, that is, the white glass is not half anxiety. It is half security—more than half. It is one Bundren less than full.Whiteness may be a sliding scale, as Mellette describes it, but it is also a club to which some have been admitted and others, namely poor whites, have been turned away. Or given, let us say, provisional membership. But those who have joined the club do not necessarily feel threatened by those who have been excluded. By turning others away, they may feel more confirmed in their whiteness. We are the true whites, they can tell themselves, because we are not them. By that light, poor whites do not threaten whiteness. They betray it. It is true, as Mellette observes in his conclusion, that “all shades of whiteness are not created equal” (139). But it does not follow that the whiter shades of white are made anxious by the “lesser” shades, any more than the existence of the poor makes the rich feel any less rich or any more anxious about their wealth. Indeed, the difference likely confirms their sense of wealth. So too with whiteness.Of course, there is another turn of this screw, which is that there is something peculiar about deploying poor whites, those who have occasionally clung hardest to their own whiteness, to challenge whiteness writ large. In homeopathy, like cures like. But you cannot say the same of whiteness. Poor whites do not cure whiteness.No one likes whiteness, no literary critics anyway. Understandably, then, Robertson and Mellette seek places where whiteness may be exposed and therefore vulnerable. But they exaggerate those vulnerabilities. Poor whites have rarely traded their racial identity for a class one, and they pose little to no threat to whiteness proper. If anything, they shore it up. To put it another way, white supremacy is doing just fine, thank you.