What are you reading?

"White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg subtitle "the 400 year untold history of class in America." She's a professor at LSU who spends time in C-ville, too.

It explores the intentional class system of the landless poor from settlement to today. While it obviously includes the African American experience it mainly focuses on the whites, and how both societal conventions as well as laws kept them stuck and powerless. Much of it is centered around political history. And she discusses the times "white trash" have made it to high offices and positions, such as the presidency of Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton.

But it primarily shows that the "American dream"--that anyone can succeed, is fiction, always was, and reserved for the upper reaches. Jefferson's acceptance, and endorsement, of the split society is especially interesting. That's the split between poor and wealthy.

The book just came out this summer so it misses the current ugliness from the recent campaigns (which I do not wish to open to discussion here), but it explains our history to put those things in an understandable context.

On a somewhat positive note, though, it shows the shared oppressed experience common to most Americans, regardless of race or nationality.

ETA: finished it.  the end sort of meandered with more opinion but the beginning was more historical exposition.

Dec 14, 2016 13:52:40 GMT -5 mccjeff said:

Dec 14, 2016 13:44:50 GMT -5 kuriti said:

I've read one and liked it, but not made it back to the others. I tend toward non-fiction because so many true stories are as good or better than fiction, and they really happened!

According to someones telling of the story.

I am intrigued to find that most of the non-fiction I read today contradicts the non-fiction I read yesterday. I often find that yesterday's non-fiction was sometimes, in fact, fiction--an example is Captain John Smith's writings, upon which so much Virginia history is based.

Sometimes it's a factor of new or better information, but more often, better perspective.  But I learned in my albeit brief days of journalism that there are no facts and every writing is opinion.