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White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
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Helene (hlbickford) | 10 comments I'm not sure I would have finished this if it weren't that we were discussing it as part of the CALL Racism and Diversity Book Group. It was a slog and what gives some history books a bad name. Yes, it's an important topic but really? 120 pages of reference notes? (And yes I did scan and read those. Though they mostly are "On the topic of ... see ... and ..." some do give explanations of the text such as "Scholars have recognized Byrd's reference to Lubberland and sloth, but failed to trace its roots to the folktale of Lawrence Lazy, which circulated orally and was first published in English in 1670. The influence on Byrd is that his lazy Carolinians sit in the corner like Lazy Lawrence." (p. 343) Really, does anyone care about Byrd's sloppy research? Oh, Nancy Isenberg does!

I might have thought better of it if I hadn't read Stamped From the Beginning and Caste first. Isenberg was published in 2016 and maybe six years isn't a tremendous amount of time but we are in a different era of awareness. There are not many stories to humanize her history and it doesn't have a powerful conclusion both of which the other two books had going for them.

Sentences like this one don't help: "Communing with nature draws upon the potent romantic image of the New Word as a prelapsarian classless society. Old tropes meld seamlessly with new cinematic forms: women in Western culture have been consistently portrayed as closer to Mother Nature, lushness and abundance, Edenic tranquility and fertility. There is no rancid swamp, no foul diseases and starvation, in this Jamestown recreation." (p. 9) Maybe Isenberg would write that differently today.

There is an entire chapter on 'Thomas Jefferson's Rubbish.' Yet she writes: "To imagine that Jefferson had some special insight into the anxious lives of the lower sort, or that he truly appreciated the uncompromising conditions tenant farmers experienced, is to fail to account for the wide gulf that separated the rich and poor in Virginia." (p. 87) If Jefferson had 'no special interest' then why a WHOLE chapter on him? Yes, I know, it's historically important but still painful to have to read.

Isenberg does try to connect to modern day references as when she talks about the "duel between one Kentucky "Knight of the Red Rag" and a "great and mighty Walnut cracker" of Tennessee. The nutcracker gave himself an exalted title: "duke of Wild Cat Cove, little and big Hog Thief Creek, Short Mountain, Big Bore Cave and Cuwell's Bridge." (p. 128) So what did this kind of posturing mean? Like certain masters of gangsta rap in the twenty-first century, crackers had to make up for their lowly status by dressing themselves up in a boisterous verbal garb." (p. 128) I'm not sure that the rappers would agree with this, is it a current ethnic slur?

Then there is "If free whites produced feeble children, how could a robust democracy thrive? If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority, a guarantee of the homogeneous population of independent, educable freemen, as Jefferson imagined, then the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unobtainable." (p. 136) Wow! Just wow!

My negativity does not take away the fact that this is an important history book. It really takes it's place in solid research and importance of topic. Take for example on p. 195 as she talks about eugenics: "By 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws on the books, along with an unwieldy thirty-four categories delineating the kinds of people who might be subject to the surgical procedure. Eugenicists used a broad brush to create an underclass of the unfit, calling for the unemployable to be "stamped out," ... If society refused to subject hereditary misfits ... to "chloroform once and for all," then ... they could at least be prevented from "propagating their kind." This brings to mind WWII, Hitler, and the gas chambers used to kill all those not of the superior race.

And she talks about all that Howard Odum tried to clarify. In 1938 he sent questionnaires to 'distinguished academics' asking them to define the term "poor white." "While many said outright that the term was "fuzzy," ... most ... listed as many negative attributes associated with poor whites as came to mind. The most popular adjective was "shiftless." It was connected to a string of synonyms: purposeless, hand to mouth, lazy, unambitious, no account, no desire to improve themselves, inertia." (p. 225)

Isenberg also talks about the work of the TVA and about Jonathan Daniels (not the Keene, NH Daniels) "defending "restlessness" and refusing to call it shiftlessness. ... It was not the photoelectric cell lighting and heating of the big school building that impressed him so much as the "collision of children" inside the school -- the "hill children of the big, poor families" alogside the children of engineers. Here was a clear-cut experiment in class desegregation. If only this was America, he thought." (p. 229)

My favorite chapter was on 'The Cult of the Country Boy - Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ's Great Society." Maybe I could relate to modern references more that historical ones, but this chapter came alive for me unlike the previous ones. The next chapter did that as well but she missed critical opportunities. She talks about Tammy Faye Bakker and Dolly Parton as 'white trash.' Dolly Parton's grandfather was a Pentacostal preacher and "Her image, as Parton confessed in her autobiography, expressed the desire of poor white trash girls to see themselves as magazine models . ... Poverty, for a female went beyond the wretchedness of having no money," (p. 288-289) She misses that Dolly Parton has set up a foundation that gives free books to children from birth to age five. First begun in her native state of Tennessee, Imagination Library is now in four other countries and has given over 157 million free books to children living in poverty. If education is a factor, Dolly is certainly making a difference!

For me the summation and most important takeaway from this book is the paragraph on p. 319: "This brings us to the slavery/free labor corollary. It was James Oglethorpe in Georgia who first put into practice a sensitive and sensible idea: allowing slavery to thrive would retard economic opportunity and undermine social mobility for average white men and their families. In this way, racial dominance was intertwined with class dominance in the southern states, and the two could never be separated as long as a white ruling elite held sway over politics and rigged the economic system to benefit the few. We now know, of course, that slavery and repression of Afro-American talent was tragically wrong. So why do we continue to ignore the pathological character of class centered power relations as part of American republic's political inheritance? If the American dread were real, upward mobility would be far more in evidence." We even seem to have lost the middle class.


Helene (hlbickford) | 10 comments I welcome your comments!


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