White Trash
by Nancy Isenberg Atlantic 496pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17
America likes to think of itself as a nation largely “free from class distinctions”, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. Nancy Isenberg, however, “has no patience with this”. In White Trash, she argues that the country has always been “disfigured” by intense prejudice towards the white working class, towards “hillbillies, crackers, rednecks, trailer trash”. Far from leaving class behind, the early colonists “took their prejudices with them”: America, for them, was an “enormous workhouse” that needed filling with “waste people”. And such attitudes have persisted: in the eugenics movement of the early-20th century; in Hollywood films, which almost always depict poor whites as “degenerates, villains and misfits”. Although White Trash is by no means “perfect” – Isenberg’s tone is sometimes “priggish”, and she writes as though the rest of the world doesn’t exist – it is full of “good stories” and “surprising insights”.
Isenberg is right to be sceptical about America’s self-image, said Clive Davis in The Times. However, her “zealousness” becomes too much: White Trash is “relentless” in its cataloguing of past “crimes and misdemeanours”. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are put in the stocks “for what is, essentially, their inability to be modern, enlightened denizens of the Upper West Side”. Nor does Isenberg appear to have had “any direct contact with the kind of people she is writing about”; she is like a “missionary reading up on a distant country”. It’s odd that a history of class in America hardly mentions “black sharecroppers, or Mexican farmworkers”, said Thomas J. Sugrue in The New York Times. Though ambitious and “masterly”, White Trash fails to acknowledge “that race and class were – and are – fundamentally entwined” in American history.