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

by Nancy Isenberg

In spite of the founders’ noble dream of an informed public, the American political landscape has never been able to sustain itself as a place for sound deliberation. Nor does American democracy consistently confer power to a calm problem solver.

most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy.

fear of unleashing genuine class upheaval—which even the liberal elite were loath to do—led significant numbers to blame the poor for their own failure.

American democracy has never accorded all the people a meaningful voice.

Power (whether social, economic, or merely symbolic) is rarely probed. Or if it is, it never becomes so urgent a national imperative as to require an across-the-board resolution, simultaneously satisfying a moral imperative and pursuing a practical cause.

We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations.

Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game.

The underclass exists even when they don’t rise to the level of making trouble, fomenting rebellions, joining in riots, or fleeing the ranks of the Confederacy and hiding out in swamps, where they create an underground economy.

Class defines how real people live. They don’t live the myth. They don’t live the dream.

We are a country that imagines itself as democratic, and yet the majority has never cared much for equality.

We see how inherited wealth grants status without any guarantee of merit or talent.

We give children of the famous a big head start, deferring to them as rightful heirs,

While it is not discussed very often, our society still measures human worth by the value of the land people occupy and own.

Location is everything. Location determines access to a privileged school, a safe neighborhood, infrastructural improvements, the best hospitals, the best grocery stores.

We have always relied—and still do—on bloodlines to maintain and pass on a class advantage to our children.

Statistical measurement has shown convincingly that the best predictor of success is the class status of one’s forebears.

Without a visible hand, markets did not at any time, and do not now, magically pave the way for the most talented to be rewarded; the well connected were and are preferentially treated.

The discomfort middle-class Americans feel when forced to acknowledge the existence of poverty highlights the disconnect between image and reality.