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White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America QUOTES

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America QUOTES

1 " When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

2 " For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

3 " Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

4 " More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

5 " Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

6 " This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

7 " Unlike others before him, Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could be reclaimed if they were given a fair chance. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

8 " How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

9 " Poor whites are still taught to hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” We "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

10 " If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

11 " Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America’s colonial period and British notions of poverty. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

12 " We know, for instance, that Americans have forcefully resisted extending the right to vote; those in power have disenfranchised blacks, women, and the poor in myriad ways. We know, too, that women historically have had fewer civil protections than corporations. Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft: high-sounding rhetoric, magnified, and political leaders dressing down at barbecues or heading out to hunt game. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

13 " Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

14 " Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

15 " First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy. In "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

16 " Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

17 " For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

18 " British colonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World. After "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

19 " In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

20 " We need to stop thinking that some Americans are the real Americans, the deserving, the talented, the most patriotic and hardworking, while others can be dismissed as less deserving of the American dream. "

― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America