Review: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

I am looking forward to a book discussion tonight of this fascinating, excellent, depressing but educational book. It explores how the government and its leading thinkers have dealt with and treated the lower class through the last 400 years in America.

In a word, they were always treated awful but just how awful... that I didn't know. While I knew there was talk of eugenics in America way before the Nazis discussed it I didn't know, for example, that it wasn't just blacks they were considering - and sometimes did -  sterilize but also poor whites. I didn't know that many of our nation's founders and leaders believed that people in the lower class were genetically disposed to always be poor, that they believed for hundreds of years a stereotype that they could not and would not
try to get themselves into a better position of society, that they believed those who were the most poor were that way because they were lazy not because they were hopeless and being screwed over, generation after generation.
This is an important read. Just as reading someone like Howard Zinn made many, including me, consider that the history taught in the  textbooks was leaving out important people, details and arguments so does this book show that the history books almost always focus on the winners  and the upper class. It was also pretty interesting to read, for example, that 50 or 60 years ago people were trying to make these same argument
recently made by Bernie Sanders and, before him, the Occupy movement: That the government was doing all it can to help the top 1 percent at the expense of the other 99 percent.
A big surprise for me was that as bad as slaves, after they were released, were treated they were sometimes treated better - and deemed harder workers - than poor whites.
I know some who are put off by the title but the book explains that the various slurs used against the lower class became more than just words - they summed up exactly how most government leaders treated this. This is definitely an example of why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
lastly, i was blown away that even after the slaves were freed poor white people were still treated as, well, trash. This included poor white people who fought in World War I. The idea that there was a genetic predisposition for folks to be "lazy" also blew me away.