Little White Lies: Hope and Untruth in (White) Mobile-Homeownership

For decades, studies have shown that white households have greater access and benefit most from the racialized US housing market. Homeownership is the material realization of the American dream, and for many it is read alongside middle-classness and normativity as cultural markers of hegemonic whiteness. Conversely, this article explores personal narratives from white homeowners that are excluded from this dominant understanding: white mobile-homeowners. I apply the concept of “untruths” to illustrate how my interlocutors discursively situated their racialized hopes, anxieties, and aspirations against the disparaging “white-trailer trash” trope. I then consider how I, as a white, working-class anthropologist conducting “home-work,” was figured into these narratives as representing this idealized—yet deeply problematic—whiteness. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on lies and sincerity, I show how white racial “untruths” reveal a more complex and fragmented whiteness that belies the dreamlike fiction of hegemonic white normativity.