![]() And where does that term come from? It comes from the idea of waste land. For example, the early indentured servants, the poor who the British wanted to dump into British colonial America, they were called waste people. And both of these big concepts come from the British. And you’ll see that just by paying attention to the words people use … what comes up over and over again, is the way the discussion of class throughout our history has forced on the centrality of land and land ownership, as well as what I call breeds, or breeding. There are a long list of slurs and of terms such as waste people, vagrants, rascals, rubbish, lubbers, squatters, crackers, clay-eaters, degenerates, rednecks, and of course, trailer trash. I began to look more closely at how Americans talk about class. ![]() Now this is a problem that Americans have – they often prefer the myth over reality. ![]() And we think that that idea, that promise, goes all the way back to the American revolution, that at that moment we broke free from the British system and that somehow we unburdened ourselves from the English class system. And that's rooted to this idea that we believe in social mobility. We are told over and over again by writers, sometimes journalists, but mainly politicians, that we are an exceptional country, that we embrace the American dream. I became interested in figuring out the language: how do Americans talk about the poor? And then I realized that this is connected to the larger problem Americans have about class, that they believe a myth. He has this amazing line where, at the same moment that he’s calling for the education of the poor, something the Virginia legislature would reject, he refers to the poor as “rubbish.” I became very aware of the importance of how Jefferson talked about the poor. But it also had to do with when I was working on “Madison and Jefferson,” which I coauthored with Andrew Burstein. Part of it has to do with my graduate training my first book dealt with race, class and gender. When you’re a historian, you gravitate toward certain issues. When did you first start working on the idea of the “poor white” or “poor white trash?” It’s a bracing, sometimes upsetting read, beginning with its name, a term which still causes deep offense in some quarters. The book has been on Isenberg’s curriculum for 15 years, as part of a history class called “Crime, Conspiracy, and Courtroom Dramas,” which she teaches at Louisiana State University.įrom “Mockingbird,” Isenberg’s book travels back to the first English arrivals on the American shore, tracing four centuries of how we talk and think about class (and race) in our most unequal union. Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash” begins by looking at the characters in "To Kill a Mockingbird." Both the book and the movie play with the divide between Atticus Finch, who is saintly and proper, and the poor white family, the Ewells, whose daughter’s false rape accusation is at the story’s center, as an example that there are two kinds of white people in the South.
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