White Trash

This book is required reading for anyone who has an interest in understanding the class, gender, and race-fuelled 2016 American presidential election or just in understanding poor white America.

Riveting and thorough, this book doesn't pull any punches and includes Jefferson's stance on nature versus nurture, opportunist populist presidential campaigns exploiting the poor working class, glorification of poor white America in the media through figures like Dolly Parton and Honey Boo Boo, and the list goes on. Incredible how political history repeats itself.

Comprehensive, but what, in the end, is the point? That we aren't a classless society? Pretty sure we knew that. On the other hand, maybe that's because I'm a Yankee living in the South . . . Seriously, though, the book feels repetitive, on the one hand, and shallow on the other. As a life-long middle-class person, the question I have is why don't the “white trash”–a term I never use–want to rise above their class? At one time, they couldn't. But now?

An eye opening history of white trash in America. It covers indentured servitude from our colonial beginnings, lack of rights for squatters during American expansion, African slavery vs. poor whites in the pre-Civil War South, eugenics, all the way to the present time where white trash plays a part in contemporary culture: TV shows like The Dukes of Hazzard or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as white trash presidents, etc. I was a little disappointed that the book focused mainly on the South, but I loved how it brought in race, self-presentation, and pop-culture. I thought the book did a good job of showing how class and power are tangled up in so many of the historical discussions about what's good for society or what should be done about social problems.

The quote I keep coming back to, because I think it sums up the gist of the book, is this one, from Lyndon Johnson (another white trash president): “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.” It's worth reading the book for all the richness of detail and the many connections that flesh this idea out.

Really interesting book, showing the roots of the class system in the US. In light of this last election, and all the talk about the white, rural vote, this book can help shed a light on some of why they are and have been. We like to pretend there's no class structure here, but it's older than our country, and ignoring it just adds to the problems we have.