White Trash

The New York Times Bestseller,with a new preface from the author ΓÇ£This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.ΓÇ¥ΓÇöDwight GarnerThe New York Times ΓÇ£This eye-opening investigation into our countryΓÇÖs entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.ΓÇ¥ΓÇöOThe Oprah Magazine ΓÇ£White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.ΓÇ¥ ΓÇöT. J. StilesPulitzer Prize-winning author of CusterΓÇÖs Trials In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in AmericaNancy Isenbergco-author of The Problem of Democracytakes on our comforting myths about equalityuncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-presentalways embarrassingΓÇöif occasionally entertainingΓÇöpoor white trash. ΓÇ£When you turn an election into a three-ring circusthereΓÇÖs always a chance that the dancing bear will winΓÇ¥ says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabricargues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today’s hillbillies. They were alternately known as ΓÇ£waste peopleΓÇ¥ ΓÇ£offalsΓÇ¥ ΓÇ£rubbishΓÇ¥ ΓÇ£lazy lubbersΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£crackers.ΓÇ¥ By the 1850sthe downtrodden included so-called ΓÇ£clay eatersΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£sandhillersΓÇ¥ known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skinragged clothingand listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policypopular literature and scientific theories over four hundred yearsIsenberg upends assumptions about AmericaΓÇÖs supposedly class-free societyΓÇôΓÇôwhere liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth centuryand the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaveswhich factored in the rise of eugenicsΓÇô-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJΓÇÖs Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a classwhite trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nationΓÇÖs history. With IsenbergΓÇÖs landmark bookwe will have to face the truth about the enduringmalevolent nature of class as well.