The relatively nascent field of whiteness studies has been instrumental in recasting the privileges of whiteness as a complex set of societal factors beyond mere skin colour. As Matt Wray's work on southern whites illustrates, these factors have profound effects on who may lay claim to the benefits of whiteness and who is relegated to the margins of social betterment.

After placing his work in a matrix of sociological theory that presents stereotypes or “stigmatypes” as cognitive tools for ordering and bounding multifarious social actors, Wray offers a “rough chronology” of the development of white trash and related boundary terms from the 1720s to the 1920s. Beginning with a discussion of William Byrd's lubber, Wray retraces a number of boundary renegotiations which not only demarcate access to the privileges of whiteness but, more importantly, inform the ways in which non-privileged social groups (the “other”) are accommodated.

Thus, as colonial America moves towards independence, the lethargic and immoral lubber is refigured as the “treacherous” cracker – a target not of “amusement and desire” but rather “arrest and death,” a social actor in need of containment, control, and surveillance (52). The inherited ideological battles of a nation on the brink of civil war and in the midst of a profound expansion in scientific understanding once again redefine non-privileged “white” individuals as either the unfortunate residuum of an archaic slave economy or the result of genotypic inferiority. By the progressive era two centuries of speculation on the causes of “white degeneracy” reach their apogee with a national crusade for its eradication – either through eugenic containment (involuntary sterilization) or public health initiatives supported by a growing medical profession (hookworm eradication). The result is an impressive look at how boundary negotiations are intimately linked to historical shifts in class structures, political economy, scientific inquiry, and religiosity.

While methodologically sound, the reader is left wondering about the specificity of racial boundary constructions. By choosing to focus on the rural South, Wray's analysis seems to intimate a unique racial hierarchy within the region, one that may or may not be applicable to other parts of the country. Is poor white trash endemic to the South or constitutive of a much larger limning of privileged whiteness? How, for example, would racial boundaries in the West or Mid-west compare to Wray's analysis?

Overall, Wray is most effective in his problemetization of de facto privilege based solely on skin colour and does a sound job of articulating the complex interplay of cultural power dynamics which intersect and invest importance in particular phenotypic traits. Such insight furthers the deconstruction of racial hierarchy by challenging its innate position within collective perception and highlighting the inconsistencies that arise when skin colour ascends to cultural primacy.