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

by Nancy Isenberg

He had this to say about white trash on driving through Tennessee and seeing a group of “homely” women holding up racist signs: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. 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.” Like the Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner, LBJ knew about the debilitating nature of false poor white pride. As president, he never lost sight of how central class and race were to the fractured culture of the South.

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2007, Andrew Young, the Carter adviser who had been a friend to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said that Clinton was “every bit as black as Barack.” How strange was that: the son of a Kenyan was less black than a Bubba from Arkansas? Young was treating blackness as a cultural identity, and Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and Jakarta lacked Dixie roots.