White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

Today I'm looking at the book White Trash, a book that talks about the history of class in the United States, specifically poor whites living in the American south from the early colonial era into the modern day. Throughout the centuries this underclass has has been called a number of things: waste people, clay eaters, crackers, white trash, hillbillies, and rednecks. This underclass has been consistently stereotyped as poor, lazy, sexually licentious, uneducated, and morally suspect. Isenberg illustrates that these stereotypes about poor whites, which have been extended to poor blacks as well, have been persistent through the centuries and Isenberg draws on multiple sources to make her point. Obviously covering four centuries makes this book more a broad overview than a detailed investigation but I think Isenberg does a very good job of making her points through the book.

When the United States was first colonized by England the major source of colonists, especially in regions such as Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, were what were considered ''waste peoples''. England had a not insignificant population of unemployed people who, due to the harsh poor and anti-vagrancy laws of the time period, were often in and out of prisons or forced to wander from location to location. In times of war this expendable underclass were pressed into service to fight in Britain's military and in time of peace they were expected to either find work or die through starvation or on the gallows. For colonies thousands of miles across the Atlantic and with high death tolls, an expendable population made ideal candidates to be dumped in the colonies. If they died, then they wouldn't be a burden on the home country. If they managed to learn how to work and thrive, perhaps they could become of economic benefit to the mother country. This stereotype of the poor as inherently lazy and needing to be forced to work is one of the most consistent and has perpetuated to the modern era.

As the South developed into a slave economy, the underclass of poor whites developed an important racial component, which has remained an important aspect of American class and racial relations into the modern era. African-Americans and other racial minorities have been the subject of systemic racial discrimination perpetuated by white elites. The real genius of this system is that so long as the poor whites have blacks to look down upon, they willingly perpetuate the system. Poor whites are often no better off than the poor blacks, but as long as there is the feeling of superiority to someone else, they are willing to participate in the system. This is best illustrated in the rebellion of 1861 in which poor whites were overwhelmingly conscripted into insurgent forces while the rich planter class, who began the rebellion, were exempted from military service including the exemption of all individuals owning more than twenty slaves. Poor whites were the muscle that perpetuated the slavery system.

The latest trend relating to poor whites is the almost voyeuristic pleasure that American culture has taken in looking at the lives of poor, mostly Southern, whites. Isenberg specifically mentions figures like Sarah Palin and Honey Boo Boo, although the growth of popularity in the blue collar comedy group including Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy is definitely in the same vein. The growth of the Tea Party and its ideology, although not mentioned by Isenberg, definitely feels like a continuation of the same ideas. Poor whites are manipulated by white elites into attacking (usually) racial others and acting against their own interests for the benefit of white elites. Based on Isenberg's evidence it appears that the issues we are dealing with today is only a continuation of a centuries-long tradition.

Overall I thought this book was pretty interesting if brief and fairly shallow in its investigation of race and class relations in the United States. However Isenberg makes a consistent argument that poor whites have consistently been seen as an expendable, degenerate breed for four hundred years, useful to white elites when fighting or helping oppress other groups, but largely exploited or ignored by elites when no longer useful. I think this is a book well worth reading to gain insight into both class and race relations in the United States that has shaped political debates to this day.

- Kalpar