Editing White trash (section)

===Post-Reconstruction===
One of the responses of Southerners and Northern Democrats to Reconstruction was the invention of two myths: the "[[carpetbagger]]s" and the "[[scalawag]]s". The first were those Northern Republicans said to have invaded the South to take advantage of its people; and the second were those Southern whites who betrayed their race by supporting the Republican Party and Reconstruction. The scalawag, even if they came from a higher social class, was often described as having a "white trash heart". They were decried as "Black Republicans", and were accused of easily mingling with blacks, inciting them to seek social equality. Democrats responded with ''[[Autobiography of a Scalawag]]'', a parody of the standard "[[self-made man]]" story, in which a white trash southerner with no innate ambition is nevertheless raised to a position of middling power just by being in the right place at the right time, or by lying and cheating.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=182–86}}

After Reconstruction governments were "[[Redemptionists|Redeemed]]", and Southern states returned to "local control" &ndash; i.e. white supremacist rule &ndash; some Southern conservatives in power expressed their desire to "conserve" the Blacks, and many African Americans, having no real alternative, accepted their protection as their best available option.  This exposed a class-based fracture in the Southern white population. The aristocratic Governor of South Carolina, ex-Confederate General [[Wade Hampton III]], said that the "better class of whites" approved of this policy, but that "the lower whites are less favorable". A Black member of the Virginia Assembly in 1877 was reported  by Democratic politician [[Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry]] as saying that "he and his race relied for the protection of their rights & liberties, not on the 'poor white trash' but on the 'well-raised' gentleman". In 1890, the editor of a Black newspaper editorialized that the demand in the South for [[Jim Crow laws]] did not come from the "best people of the South", but from the "worst class of whites" in that region. {{sfnp|Woodward|2002|pp=49-50}}

Around 1890, the term "redneck" began to be widely used for poor white southerners. State legislator Guy Rencher, a self-proclaimed "redneck", claimed the term came from his own "long red neck".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=187–90}}

[[File:Typical native farmers.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|Puerto Rico (circa 1899): "The farming class is about on a par with the poor darkies down South, and varies much even in race and color, ranging from Spanish white trash to full-blooded Ethiopians."]]