Indeed, it appears that America is more fascinated than ever with its white waste people. In every instance, Americans have despised poor whites-yet they have been unable to look away. Although this section seems at times like a review of a high school history textbook's greatest hits, Isenberg's message is clear: pivotal moments in American history further entrenched poor whites' class and reputation. These chapters cover a lot of historical territory, ranging from westward expansion in the early 1800s, the Civil War, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and finally the attempts at rural white uplift in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty of the 1960s.

Part two, 'The Degeneration of the American Breed,' discusses this process and explains how Americans came to view lower class whites as genetically damaged people with 'bad blood' and defective genes. During those years, both rhetoric and culture helped to further demarcate the divide between worthwhile and worthless whites. Īmericans re-constructed class distinction many times over the course of the colonial period and the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, those people who came to America as British waste people simply transformed into American waste persons: lowly whites who lived and died with constrained social and economic circumstances. The British system of class imprinted itself on American soil from the beginning, and poor white laborers had little chance for social mobility. Part one, 'To Begin the World Anew,' explains how the waste people of England-those individuals who were not profitably engaged in labor of some kind-were imported to America as indentured servants and contracted laborers. White Trash begins in the colonial area, where Isenberg is at her best. Although Isenberg's premise and phrase is at times repetitive, this reader ultimately found 'waste people' to be a useful term in thinking about power and the process by which class is made and re-made. This term is the greatest contribution of the book, and she uses it frequently. Isenberg uses the neologism 'waste people' to describe the 'unwanted and salvageable' lower-class white people of American history (p. Poor whites have been known by many names across time and place, but, like class hierarchies, 'they do not disappear' (p.

She argues that 'white trash' people are a 'central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative,' and are essential to American national identity (p. The premise of her book is straightforward: America has a class system and always has. As the title of her book suggests, Nancy Isenberg's White Trash seeks to ambitiously re-frame 400 years of American history-from the colonial period to the present-through the lens of class.

White trash the 400