In private, though, Johnson was not always kind to poor rural whites. 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.
Yeah, but that's not trashing poor whites as a group because they're poor, because they're white, or because they're poor and white. That's recognizing why racism is so pervasive and persistent, which is relevant to helping both poor whites and african americans as groups of people who've been beaten down and put at each other's throats by the rich because the rich benefit from poorer citizens fighting with each other rather than combining forces against wealth.
