White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
View on GoodreadsNancy Isenberg's history of poor white Americans from English colonization forward — the language ("waste people," "lubbers," "crackers," "trash"), the policies, and the deliberate construction of a despised white underclass as feature of American social organization, not bug.
Core ideas
- The Founding Fathers didn't believe in a classless society — they expected and accepted a permanent poor white class, and built institutions assuming its existence; the "American Dream" myth is a much later overlay.
- The eugenic-pseudoscience period (Buck v. Bell, the Jukes and Kallikaks studies, forced sterilization) targeted poor whites as much as it targeted racial minorities, and the same intellectual apparatus produced both.
- Contemporary "white working class" rhetoric — both sympathetic and contemptuous — descends from a 400-year discursive tradition; the book makes you hear the layers in what sounds like recent vocabulary.
Published2016
Pages460
ISBN9780670785971
ReadMar 2025
