Thank you, Eugene Robinson, for talking about the other "real Americans"

[ancianita]

48. Thank you. This brings up Isenberg's "White Trash - The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America"

the well-researched history of how whites have been conned to think they've been free from America's very founding. By exclusion. Whites' exclusion by the ruling classes of Europe, they by turn, their own conditioned exclusions creating further exclusions by religion, education, "race theory" and policies, and the divisive class/race politics that cloud and maintain perspectives that promote old European exclusions. When the British (more than other European colonizers) colonized, it wasn't just land, but mind.

Nancy Isenberg analyzes the formation of an intractable caste system that lingers below the national myths and stories of rugged individualism and cities on hills.

Ms. Isenberg contends that adults in America are spoon-fed their history as if they were toddlers -- of great religious values, colonies, universities founded on enlightenment "principles," yet practicing class exclusions on all people born poor white or non-white.

She demonstrates that most early settlers did not come to escape religious persecution. “During the 1600s,” she writes, “far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable ‘rubbish.’

Ms. Isenberg does not skimp on economic analysis. She notes how the central engines of our economy, from slave-owning planters up through today’s bank and tax policies, have systematically harmed the working poor. “We have to wonder,” she writes about her book’s subjects, “how such people exist amid plenty.”

Part of her answer is the “backlash that occurs when attempts are made to improve the conditions of the poor,” from the New Deal through Obamacare. “Government assistance is said to undermine the American dream,” she writes, adding: “Wait. Undermine whose American dream?”

Class begins and ends with the corporate dream to control humans for its own ends, by force, legitimized force through policy, then myths that blame its human victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/books/review-white-trash-ruminates-on-an-american-underclass.html