Kennedy has a much easier time finding a road to success.

Yes, there is a class system in the United States. How are they like an unlike poor African-Americans?.How are they like and unlike poor Hispanics?.How are they like and unlike poor Northern, Eastern and Western whites?.How are white trash like and unlike other poor whites?.In doing that, however, this hypothetical writer would have to take into account something Isenberg consistently dodges, specifically, these questions: I think it would be a great service for some writer to look deeply at white trash and, in a specific, clear and direct way, tell their story. White Trash, by contrast, is a scattershot effort in which Isenberg throws anything that might be somewhat related to her cloudy theme against the wall, hoping that at least some of it will stick. The value of that great book was that it took a specific family of sharecroppers and looked at them as human beings and described in exquisite detail their lives and their world. In fact, Isenberg mentions a great one - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans. I’m sure there are already books on these subjects. A book about whether white trash - called “clay eaters” - actually eat dirt and why (rather than, as Isenberg does, just cavalierly mentioning this over and over without saying one way or the other whether it factually happens and how widespread the alleged practice is).A book about the lives of the group of people defined as white trash, with an emphasis on how, in fact, they live (and not just how they are thought to live) and on why they live that way.A book about how - and, more importantly, why - some poor people in the South are identified as white trash while others are seen as being a different type.A book on the treatment of poor whites by the Southern elite.Isenberg’s text hints at what some of those books might be: I acknowledge that this book, riding its White Trash title, may lead to other, better books. She is shocked - just shocked! - at the reality that there are rich and poor in this nation, and that it’s hard for the poor to rise up the economic ladder as, ideally, they are supposed to be able to do. Sometimes, it includes poor whites from elsewhere in the country, such as Maine and California.Īnd, sometimes, she’s not talking about white trash at all, but about the fact that, from the beginning, there was the stratification of classes in the British colonies and then in the new United States. Given its title, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Louisiana State University history professor Nancy Isenberg would seem to be a book about a certain group, or class, in American society.īut, throughout the book, Isenberg adamantly and continually avoids defining that group.Ī lot of times, it’s poor Southern whites, but, at other times, it’s only some poor Southern whites.

White trash the 400