Matt Wray, author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, is interviewed in the latest issue of the The Atlantic Monthly. Hua Hsu quotes Wray in his article "The End of White America?" Wray, a sociologist, speaks about his students at Temple University: "They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to
be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students
say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a
culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded
socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture …
They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don’t have a
culture that’s cool or oppositional.” Hsu adds, "Wray says that this feeling of
being culturally bereft often prevents students from recognizing what
it means to be a child of privilege—a strange irony that the first wave
of whiteness-studies scholars, in the 1990s, failed to anticipate."