Douglas’s Reviews > White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America > Status Update

Locke not so subtlety promotes breeding of 'Leet-men' to produce generations of Leet-men, a class between slaves and freemen

John Locke is founding member of the Royal African Company which secured a monopoly over the British slave trade.

Literally called waste people. America was seen as a waste land, as in idle land/ undeveloped land, outside the circle of commerce. The waste land required waste people

Here was England's opportunity to thin out its prisons and siphon off thousands; here was an outlet for the unwanted, a way to remove vagrants and beggars , to be rid of London's eyesore population. Those sent on the hazardous voyage to America who survived presented a simple purpose for imperial profiteers: to serve English interests and perish in the process.

'Lubbers, rubbish, clay-eaters, crackers' The existence of the underclass has been with us since first European settlers arrived on these shores