General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "Trailer park trash" [View all]Hestia
(3,818 posts)Crackers and squatters, rednecks and hillbillies, sandhillers and mudsills, clay eaters and hoe wielders: America has developed a rich vocabulary to describe one part of its permanent underclass. The epithet that subsumes them all, to borrow the title of Nancy Isenbergs formidable and truth-dealing new book, is white trash.
Ms. Isenbergs project in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is to retell United States history in a manner that not only includes the weak, the powerless and the stigmatized, but also places them front and center.
As such, she has written an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents. (Look, here are six more in my mailbox.) Viewed from below, a good angle for no one, Americas history is usefully disorienting and nearly always appalling. White Trash will have you squirming in your chair.
Ms. Isenberg is a professor of American history at Louisiana State University. Her books include a well-regarded biography of Aaron Burr. Her own class background goes unmentioned in White Trash. This study does not require the emotional accelerant of memoir.
Like Howard Zinn in A Peoples History of the United States (1980), Ms. Isenberg presents an alternative interpretation of American history. Unlike Mr. Zinn, she is not interested in crusaders and labor organizers and politicians of a socialist bent. Do not come to her book to learn about the Wobblies. The story she tells is more intimate. Its an analysis of the intractable caste system that lingers below the national myths of rugged individualism and cities on hills.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/books/review-white-trash-ruminates-on-an-american-underclass.html?_r=0