Nancy Isenberg White Trash Summary

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America serves as an uncompromising and expansive attack on mythmaking in American culture. The author, Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University, retraces a story that serves as a bracing reminder of the persistent contempt for the white underclass. Isenberg (2016) states that, “if slavery is America’s original sin, maybe class is it’s hidden one.” This book is a historical look at the white poor, which have been with America in various pretenses over the last 400 years.

Her book begins in colonial America—where excess poor people were sent by the British to form what Richard Hakluyt envisioned as “one giant workhouse” (MacGillis, 2016). In the all the original

Quoting directly from texts of founding fathers and prominent political figures, their writings show that “upper class” citizens often claimed that poor whites in the South had sunk to such a miserable level that “bad blood and vulgar breeding” had turned them into an irredeemable “notorious race.” Moving forward, Isenberg talks about how the southern plantocracy’s approach to poor whites differed from those of the northern elites. The Southern ruling class chose to intentionally keep the lower class of whites “utterly ignorant” (Isenberg, 2016). She also exhibits how the lives of poor whites brought them into opposition with the Confederacy. This often occurred through army desertion, conspiracies with slaves in isolated communities, and even the establishment of the Free State of Jones in Mississippi (MacGillis,

The book chronicles how at various moments, politicians (such as Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson) turned humble roots into a mark of “backwoodsman” authenticity in an attempt to sympathize with the common man. As Isenberg’s account moves into the middle of the 20th century, she offers an interesting account of something as simple as the concept of trailer parks. These structures were built to provide housing for war-industry workers; however, these communities also gave rise to a completely new and disparaging stereotype: trailer trash. She also captures the continued and unconscious judgmental depictions of poor southern whites during the civil-rights era. In addition, she shows how, starting in the 1970s, there began to be a new fixation on ethnic heritage, which instilled a semi-ironic pride in “redneck” identity (Isenberg, 2016). By the time her book reaches the late 20th century, though, the social and economic texture begins to fade way. Instead, Isenberg opens a discussion on representations of poor whites in pop culture and celebrity politics and offers some trite commentary on the current political