Let's assume I put together an article discussing the plight of the inner city minorities. Along the way, i peppered it with words like "thugs", "criminals", "trash", and in the context of the conversation made it clear that the majority of these individuals in these particular neighborhoods were minorities.

Racist, right? Nope, calling them as I see them. Walk by Cabrini Green sometime (if you dare) and do a brief racial survey of the occupants there. You will find very few whites there; in fact, according to anecdotal evidence, whites are denied housing there because the people who push the papers are afraid of what would happen there. Sadly, if the colors were reversed, a Fair Housing Discrimination lawsuit would be in the offing, and you can bet some heads would roll.

The standards of political correct discussion change, however, when discussing the plight of the souther rural poor. The same people who would pop a vein if you referred  to these thugs by the color of their skin quickly toss out the phrase "white trash", and impute racist philosophies upon them without knowing the individual. While racist attitudes run rampant among the southern rural poor, they are no more (or less) rampant, in my experience than criminality among the inner city minorities. In fact, just as in the inner city, most of the citizens of the southern rural poor are simply trying to get by, and realize the best way to do that is not to expose the attitudes for what they are.

The term "white trash" is no more an appropriate label for someone living poor in the south than the various racial invectives that are hurled at the inner city minorities. Yet somehow, in the push towards political correctness, it became OK to discriminate, as long as the target was white. In fact, according to the definition of racism spelled out in the Seattle Public Schools' policy, blacks and other minorities cannot be racist because racism only exists when it is someone with greater social influence acting towards someone with less.

I've learned to live with the label "white trash". In fact, I can hyuck it up with the best of them. But when it is used as an insult, I can't help but wonder why it is acceptable while similar insults directed at persons of different skin colors are not.