2017.Īs Nancy Isenberg describes in her new book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, one question that polite American society has always asked itself is whether poor whites can really be considered white (or even truly human). White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. While questioning whether the book fully steers clear of the elitism it otherwise aims to uncover and question, Daniel Falkiner finds much food for thought in its pages. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in Americ a, Nancy Isenberg traces the historical emergence and instantiation of ‘poor white trash’ as a chastised category within the US social fabric, as a further challenge to any continued assumptions about the supposedly classless nature of US society. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today’s hillbillies.

Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing-if occasionally entertaining-poor white trash.

White trash book review