Nathan T Freemyer

“Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” We”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward--and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run--because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story. The”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum’s data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia—the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America