White Trash

Really interesting book, showing the roots of the class system in the US. In light of this last election, and all the talk about the white, rural vote, this book can help shed a light on some of why they are and have been. We like to pretend there's no class structure here, but it's older than our country, and ignoring it just adds to the problems we have.

This book is required reading for anyone who has an interest in understanding the class, gender, and race-fuelled 2016 American presidential election or just in understanding poor white America.

Riveting and thorough, this book doesn't pull any punches and includes Jefferson's stance on nature versus nurture, opportunist populist presidential campaigns exploiting the poor working class, glorification of poor white America in the media through figures like Dolly Parton and Honey Boo Boo, and the list goes on. Incredible how political history repeats itself.

Comprehensive, but what, in the end, is the point? That we aren't a classless society? Pretty sure we knew that. On the other hand, maybe that's because I'm a Yankee living in the South . . . Seriously, though, the book feels repetitive, on the one hand, and shallow on the other. As a life-long middle-class person, the question I have is why don't the “white trash”–a term I never use–want to rise above their class? At one time, they couldn't. But now?