You can get away with calling something “white trash” in polite company, on cable television and in the headline of a magazine article. An article in The New Republiconce posed the question of whether President Trump might be “a white trash icon.” For some reason, the term manages to come across as less offensive than most other racial slurs.

Yet “white trash” could be called the Swiss army knife of insults. It’s deft in its ability to demean multiple groups at once: white people and people of color, poor people and people who “act” like poor people, rural folks and religious folks, and anyone without a college degree.

So why does “white trash” still get thrown around without much pushback?

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