She saw every girlfriend as a potential daughter-in-law. When I started chasing after girls based more on how long their legs were or how pretty their eyes were, my mother was always quick to inform me if they were really worth my time. I’d make a new friend at school, and the first thing my mother would do was go through my new friend’s family history with me. My mom was always rather class conscious. ”The white poor have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across centuries attest: Waste people. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well. 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. In her groundbreaking history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy Isenberg 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 nancy