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

The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author

“This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.”
—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials

In her groundbreaking  bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, co-author of The Problem of Democracy, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.
 
“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. 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 fabric, argues 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 “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.
 
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
 
We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

This book caught my eye when I spotted it during a library trip. Despite being born in Central Appalachia, I have to be honest and say that I do not have the understanding and knowledge that I feel I should have. I also realized that this was the first deep dive into the history of poor white people that I knew about.

I knew poor white people were living in such wretched conditions. All I have to do is go outside, and I can see such wretched poverty for myself. I did not know how deeply such poverty can make a life way harder than it is supposed to be. I was most undoubtedly unaware of the whole sordid history of white poverty.

Yet I felt this burning need to try and understand people’s points of view around here better. In short, I wanted to make somehow Applchia whole Trump narrative make sense. I even read Hillbilly Elegy, and either I have lived outside of Appalachia for so long that I forgot how hard life could be, and I was blind to the fact that the Opioid Crisis was worse than what I heard people say it was. In my head, people taking pain pills for funsies were weird. I mean, I was happy that my post-surgery pills helped with the pain, but it also felt like each limb was hooked up to a different brain and would not corporate. Then I learned that people actually pop some “good” pain pills here in Appalachia and then go and drive. I couldn’t trust myself to walk across a street.

If I understood people here better, I was taught that maybe I could look past the opioids and get to the bottom of this whole third-world living condition.

At first, I picked up a copy of Hillbilly Elegy. After all, Jd Vance was from the same area, so I thought he could be the best at understanding the Why and HOW of white people in poverty.

Let’s just say Hillbilly elegy was more of a memoir that was filled with hate and anger so strong that I felt it while reading. Waves of frustration and hatred roiled off the pages of Hillbilly Elegy. I wouldn’t have become so upset if it had been marketed as a memoir instead of a “study” of Appalachia. As it was, I felt duped.

Then finally, White Trash was published, and I have never prayed so hard to let it be an impartial writer who stays within the facts and not use his book for some revenge against God knows who.

I was NOT disappointed. White Trash is how white people became that poor in a place where dreams were supposed to happen. It goes back 400 years. The pace s fast, though. The book also presents it in a way a layperson could read it and not fall asleep ver some dry, obscure texts that college professors love heaping on students

.At the end of the day, did it help me understand why a whole group of people would vote for trump?

Maybe a little. I still feel as if we want to understand the world through Appalachian eyes, and by this, I mean one who has stayed here and not someone such as me who left for 25 years then come back and the first words out of my mouth is the fuck happened here?

White Trash is a great starting point, but I felt the need to go even deeper on the topic of white poverty.