Sure, but she wasn't white trash, she was rich and famous and got invited to all the cool rich and famous parties. She was being eccentric, and perhaps sometimes went slumming, but that didn't change her social class.

she was wealthy and trashy. how is a description of behavior a class in society? anyone at any moment can stop being white trash, just stop acting trashy. Youll still be poor, sure, but not white trash.

You don't understand the point. An important aspect of class is what you like to do, what you consider ok, what you appreciate or accept in others. People who would be catalogued by others as "white trash" do not consider their behavior to be "trashy" in this sense, they don't think there's anything wrong with it.

You saying "just stop being trashy" is exactly proof that you view them as lower class than yourself. It's similar to people who think saying "ain't" is somehow less correct than "isn't", or that rap music is uncultured. All class markers.

i think your mixing up terms like class and culture. not all low class people have the same type of behavior.

> what you like to do, what you consider ok, what you appreciate or accept in others.

this is describing a culture

> exactly proof that you view them as lower class than yourself.

i don't think you understand what your talking about now. another post said the same thing. trashy is undesirable behavior from people. not acting trashy doesn't move you between classes. You just stop fitting the description of trashy.

You think of class as layers of wealth. But that's only part of it. The most important part is culture.

>Do they understand how little of their world I’m familiar with? Do they understand how much implicit knowledge they take for granted that I don’t have?

If you have that knowledge, you have the connections to regain your wealth. The people who act trashy, if they would learn to not act trashy, they most likely would change class - have different friends, make more money.

You're hearing something that other people are not if you've ever heard someone refer to Paris Hilton as "white trash." They might call her "trashy," but never white trash, because that would be absurd. She calls you white trash.

Class and culture are mixed up, they can't be completely separated.

Also, when you call some behavior "trashy", it's undesirable from your point of view. The people engaging in it may not find it trashy at all.

Class is relatively subtle because it is context dependent - classic example: a rich person wears ripped jeans to show they are rich, a poor person wears ripped jeans because they can't afford new jeans. And the situation seems silly until you cotton on to the insight that this game is being played around the ambiguous middle who can afford new jeans, but if they wear ripped jeans would be mistaken for the poor...

"White trash" would be a reference to a culture - beliefs, expectations and norms held by a group of people. Paris Hilton may have acted trashily, but is not part of that culture. The beliefs, expectations and norms that she is working to would be different and probably upper class ones.

I think Thomas Sowell has some interesting scholarship on the topic, with regards to the roots of lower class culture in America.

If you look at this from a class perspective instead of race (hard in the current media environment) it makes sense.

Rather than focus on the white in “white trash” think about the word trash.