to be contemplating asking my neighbour to move her newborn into her bedroom at night?

[willow]

Essentially, we live in a semi and neighbour's new baby is in a room that's next to our bedroom. Neighbour is on the floor above. Upshot is that we wake up from baby's cries, well before its parents do. Not even going to go down the advice to prevent cotdeath route, or fact that I think there might be a she who must not be named routine being followed.

Should I ask them, politely, to contemplate having baby in same room as them, at least for a little while until it's settled into a bit more of a routine? Appreciate that I can't demand they rethink where they're siting the nursery - but don't see why we should be disturbed more than the actual parents.

Not to hijack the thread, but 'white trash' is derogatory about white working class people, a term of abuse about someone who is partly defined by their ethnicity and supposedly low social status so for the op to say she is 'not white trash' is a bit silly, particularly as she is using it defensively about herself, presumably to claim some moral high ground....worse than the cattiness that aibu seems to provoke are the casual social prejudices that people seem to think are acceptable to express.

fwiw my first dc cried every night in the middle of the night (he was sleeping in our room at this time) and the neighbours on the other side of the wall banged on it every night. I tried to figure out which flat they were in so as to apologise(ish)/explain that we were trying our best (we really didn't want him to cry every night as we were also not able to sleep) but I never found out who they were. It was of course stressful to think he was keeping other people awake too and I wouldn't have minded if those neighbours had talked to us about it.

worse even than that are people who can't let a thing slide when someone's getting quite a kicking anyway because they MUST be SEEN to be better than them.

it's not racist. it is classist (although i think she was saying that she was not like that, and given that we all know the stereotype to which she was alluding it was a fairly useful term, however broad a brush). chav and ned are classist also, you could say, i doubt you'd have jumped on her for those terms, though.

see i can't imagine what would possess someone to bang on the wall of the room itself, because palpably that's the room that everyone's in. but another floor... i can see the problem.

at some comments!!

willow id take round a congratulations card and ask hows it going etc in friendly blah blah way,then mention something like 'she/he seems to like the nightlife' or something silly like that.just so they know that you can hear.

Aitch it includes the word "white" how can that not be an allusion to race? sorry but that's really a bit daft. The fact that it is usually a term for richer white people to look down on poorer white people does not mean that it is not racist - if it was purely about class then why woudl the world "white" be used at all? Personally I think that ned and chav are also unpleasant, because they are all derogatory, I'm better than you terms, and they are all about stereotyping other people (and trash means that basically you are saying the other person is totally worthless and should be got rid of - very nice).

I lived with my parents till Tom was 3 months and would go to him pretty much straight away when he woke up crying in the night so we didn't wake everyone up!

I would much prefer to hear a baby crying when i'm trying to sleep than ticking clocks, dripping taps, revellers going home at 3am at the weekend (we live in middle of town) and snoring!

I'm due xmas day, so will be interesting if my neighbours would complain!

aitch..... its not about being seen to do this that and the other - in fact by the op defining herself as 'not white trash' she was trying to be seen as something better than the stereotype she was referencing. Racism is being prejudiced against someone because of stereotyped assumptions about their ethnicity, so to say 'white trash' is partly a reference to ethnicity (racist) and partly to their class - are you basically saying its sort of ok to be prejudiced about class, just not race? Prejudice is prejudice and if someone wants to be taken seriously they would be better off not using crude and prejudiced terms.

Would;

"you must be exhausted, I only wake up when she cries, but you have to get out of bed and go down stairs to her and then feed her before you go back to bed, poor you! I was very lazy and kept mine in my bed/room to try to get as much sleep as possible!"

work?

I'm not smug btw, just frustrated.

Oh for crying out loud, this thread is mad!

Go round there and say, congratulations etc, you understand how hard the first few weeks are but is there anything that could be done to lessen the impact of the noise - move the cot away from the wall, move the cot into another room etc? If not, not to worry, you'll buy some earplugs ha ha!

Not U at all.

'course not edd. you couldn't let it slide though, eh?

white trash, like ned or chav or redneck or bogan or trailer trash, is a class term. what is interesting about all of them, funnily enough, is that they've all been claimed with some pride by the people towards whom they are directed. britney's white trash and proud of it, you should take the racist thing up with her.

it stems from black servants looking down on white workers in the field, but it's not used in that manner now. it's bogus to get your knickers in a twist about it as a term, imo, when the weight of cultural advantage is still so heavily towards white people in this society, and smacks of a corporate or council training day rather than actual real life.

aitch - 'course not' what??
I think it stems from upper class white americans looking down on people moving to cities for work, and was then used more generally. It is not bogus, nothing to do with my knickers, its just lazy and offensive to use stereotyped and derogatory terms about any particular social group, including 'chavs' 'white trash' or whoever else. I originally made the point because the op was complaining that she felt other posters on the thread were being harsh on her but she did herself no favours by using prejudiced terms.....that is all.....night!

I think 'white trash' is a racist term. It was used to describe groups in the US who had been considered non-white but were later accepted as a sub-group of whites (such as the Irish). So it was related to ethnicity.

Some people also consider it to be offensive to ethnic minorities who are not white. By qualifying 'trash' as white, it implies that readers would presume by just writing 'trash' that the writer couldn't possibly be referring to a white person, unless the writer specifically stated the whiteness.

I have found a US description that is better expressed than my explanation:

The term "white trash" is offensive in two major ways. First it is offensive to the person who is called "white trash" and then it is offensive to people of color because they know it was coined by those who think all people of color are trash and a distinction had to be made for white people.

i don't think your definition makes it racist, though, does it? and no-one is disputing that it's offensive.

and it was originally a term used by black servants, like i say. undoubtedly classist but used by a black person to differentiate between what they observed to be white and black trash, etc, emphatically does NOT assume all black people to be trash, by definition of their status.

How is it not racist by my definition? Racist originally to Irish people as as an ethnic group and racist because it implies that everyone who is not white is automatically 'trash'.

are the irish a race?

reading some more on it, according to the OED it's my def, black servants etc, but elsewhere it's poor black families differentiating from poor white families.

Sorry AItch x posts. The point is that when the term became popular (Vermont Eugenics movement and so on), people did not, and still do not, refer to 'black trash'. People were subdivided solely by race (black, Indian etc) in the sociological, and anthropological work done, except for white people, who were informally referred to as 'white trash' by various social workers when included in comparative studies with other ethnic groups.

It obviously lacks this history in the UK, but we should be wary of adopting offensive terms from other countries when we are not going to be familiar with the history of those terms.

The Irish are an ethnic group. The UN makes no distinction between racial and ethnic discrimination. Discrimination on grounds of nationality is considered (legally) to be a form of racial discrimination.

There is no such thing in biology as 'race.'

however it is no longer a term of abuse in the US, which also shouldn't be ignored. it's like hillbilly, redneck etc, it's something of which people are perversely proud, having reclaimed the term. deeply unfair not to mention that i think. (and in this sense very similar to ned, formerly non educated delinquent, now reclaimed by gangs of, well, non educated delinquents, in scotland. i think chav is undergoing the same process judging by t shirt merchants in essex.)

re edd's 'are you saying it's okay to be prejudiced etc'? nope. i'm just saying that white trash isn't a racist term. that's all i've ever said, if you read my posts.

and how exactly is 'white' a nationality?

But many people in the US do consider it a term of abuse! Like many terms, it depends on the opinion of the individual and the context in which it is said. There will never be universal agreement on what is racism and which individual groups are to be considered racial or ethnic groups.

But as Trevor Phillips has argued, it would be more just if white working class people were classed as an ethnic minority, so that they could have protection under the Equality Act.

In everyday life, it really doesn't matter what type of prejudice is being expressed. I am not personally more offended by say, homophobia than sexism. I just feel saddened by prejudice in general.

White is a color (sic). Whiteish is a nationality.