When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? by Charlotte Hays

Author:Charlotte Hays
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Remember when . . .

Gentlemen were embarrassed to use vulgur epithets when conversing with ladies—instead of learning vulgur epithets from conversing with ladies?

An English professor at Emory University in Atlanta recounts similar experiences. “Last year, in my freshman class on print and digital media, we had a discussion about the F-word,” writes Mark Bauerlein in a 2012 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “and I was astonished to hear two of the brighter students in the class arguing for its use as a singularly expressive token. When I raised the issue of propriety, they claimed that any stigma was just a generational thing, and that when their generation matures, the F-word and other expletives will have normal status.”

Students of Arnold Toynbee will readily recognize what is going on here. In a famous chapter of his A Study of History entitled “Schism in the Soul,” Toynbee wrote that it is a sign that a society is disintegrating when it takes its cues for manners and customs from the underclass. Toynbee describes such societies as being “truant” to their own values. The British historian may have had been a trifle stuffier than your average American—he regarded an apache scarf on a public school lad in the 1940s as “proof positive that the proletarian style was à la mode”—but he does describe what we see around us today.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.