is the term applied to the "bad poor", not the romanticized "noble and hardworking" "good poor" One word applied to such people was "tackeys" or "tackies". According to the Oxford Dictionaries, it was once applied to horses of little or no value, then was transferred to people seen to have little or no value. There may have been an intermediate time when it was used to describe those who may have been wealthy but had no family roots or good breeding. It now generally refers to anything that is cheap, shoddy, gaudy, seedy, or in bad taste. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, historian Nancy Isenberg compiled a long, but hardly definitive, list of derisive names that have been used to refer to poor whites: As a racial slur In the journal Critique of Anthropology, J. Z. Wilson argues that the term "white trash" "stands as a form of racism", and Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, writing in The Minnesota Review consider it an instance of "Yoking a classist epithet to a racist one." It is described as a "racial slur" by Lucas Lynch, and filmmaker John Waters considered it the "last racist thing you can say and get away with." In 2020, Reader's Digest included "white trash" on its list of "12 Everyday Expressions That Are Actually Racist". Description and causes Description Many poor whites in the 19th century South were only able to locate themselves on the worst possible land, since the best land had already been taken by the slaveholders, large and small. They lived and attempted to survive on ground that was sandy or swampy or covered in scrub pine and not suited for agriculture; for this, some became known as "sandhillers" and "pineys". These "hard-scratch" inhabitants were seen to match their surroundings: they were "stony, stumpy, and shrubby, as the land they lived on." Many ended up in the mountains, at the time the first frontier of the country. After the Civil War, these people began to be referred to as "hillbillies". In the popular imagination of the mid-19th century, "poor white trash" were a "curious" breed of degenerate, gaunt, haggard people who suffered from numerous physical and social defects. They were dirty, callow, ragged, cadaverous, leathery, and emaciated, and had feeble children with distended abdomens who were wrinkled and withered and looked aged beyond their physical years, so that