White trash
In her groundbreaking history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing--if occasionally entertaining--"poor white trash." The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society--where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted "poor white trash" against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics--a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization.
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What Hacker News says
- It's odd to me that you circumscribe justice to only "minorities".
On the left, we don't use the word "minority" any longer, because the number of people in the group is largely immaterial in its marginalization.
Instead, we talk about "marginalized" groups which, regardless of their size, face systemic disadvantages peculiar to themselves. I consider the American white masses to be marginalized in ways made clear to me by Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash"[1], despite our numerical predominance (and complementary privileges).
So when one seeks to falsify Feminism, it doesn't strike me as remotely relevant to discuss the overall ratio of women:men. Women's marginalization is no less significant because it's widespread. To falsify Feminism, instead, one must adopt immutable definitions of "women" "men", I think.
I haven't personally teased apart my own socialized gender ontologies, however.
- ...are stupid even to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions. If you actually cared about the impact — and weren't just cynically cashing in on environmentalism's recapitulated caché — you'd be shorting big markets. The biggest threat to the world is unbridled capitalism, which VC's like you are incapable of abandoning. May as well ask a fish to bicycle.
This post is a pitiable joke, whose highest purpose is to stand in a museum, one day, as a testament to how blindly we charged into the apocalypse. I only hope that museum's curated by our children, and not whatever species finds our remains.
For a good, hard look at why I believe this, read Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything," and Peter Frase's "Four Futures."
If you're daring enough, you can follow those with Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets" and "Witches, Midwives, & Nurses" for a deep look at how and how long we've been going wrong.
If that all doesn't make you straight up suicidal (let alone quit maintaining your startup pyramid scheme), I have more reading suggestions for how to turn this ship around.
- Recommendations:
Non Fiction: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
https://smile.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-Americ...
It sometimes reads like "A People's History of the United States", but the chapter about Andrew Jackson's election would seem like they were forcing the analogies to the 2016 election if not for the fact that it was published beforehand.
Fiction: American Gods https://smile.amazon.com/American-Gods-Tenth-Anniversary-Nov...
I think lots of people will like this book, but certainly those who are into road trips across America.
- The book "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg explores the class views of all the founders, she excerpts a small portion of her work here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...
