White Kids With Problems Are A Joke

Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling

  

Geerling, M. (2008). Fancy white trash. New York: Penguin Group.

 

A university in a town where I once lived had student clubs for students whose skin was black, brown, yellow and red…but nothing for students whose skin was white.  The same was true for special scholarships.   That’s how I feel about how white students are treated in books like Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling.

Being a youth has always been hard, and today it seems harder than ever.  Our children are all surrounded by internal problems of growing up like making moral choices, ethnic identity, charting a career path, etc.; not to mention external pressures like drugs, gangs, alcohol, sexual assault, broken families, etc.   Consequently, we need to give all our students every bit of compassion, support, respect and understanding that we can. 

There are a growing number of books available today that do an admirable job of telling our minority students that we recognize the challenges they face in their lives, we sympathize with their turmoil, and we want to help them in every way we can.  But these same kinds of challenges are felt by all young people…including those whose skin happens to be white. 

Yet white students’ hardships by comparison are traditionally overlooked, trivialized, or ridiculed, as in Marjetta Geerling’s Fancy White Trash.   Geerling writes of the “problems” facing a white family like it’s one big joke designed to make the reader smile or even laugh.  But when a student is in a dysfunctional family like Abby Savage’s, it’s no laughing matter – no matter what color his/her skin is.  White students need the same caring and consideration that we bring to all their classmates of color: respect for yourself and your culture; compassion for all the hardships you face growing up; and all the support we can give you.  If minority teenagers in were depicted with the same kind of comic trivializing that the white teenagers are treated with in Fancy White Trash, I’m sure there would be a universal outcry of protest.  So, when it’s done to white teenagers, why are we supposed to laugh?

Unfortunately, this kind of book is a racial fact of life that has been going on now for far too long.  When do we start telling all of our students that they should be proud of their ethnicity; that the problems they face are serious; and that we are there to love, care for and support every single one of them – without treating some like they are invisible and will be just fine anyway.  While I obviously did not like this book, I am sad to say I expect many students will laugh at it – including the invisible white ones – because that’s what we’ve taught them to do.

Google Images: barnesandnoble.com