Nancy Isenberg has produced, in White Trash, a dreadfully stupid and lazy book. It is badly written, poorly conceived, and incompetently executed. Isenberg would join the long line of American debunkers and would-be debunkers of a familiar and surpassingly tedious sort: “Sure, Americans sent a man to the moon, but what about the United Fruit Company in Guatemala back in 1954? Huh? Huh?”
Isenberg’s argument, if we may be so generous as to call it that, is this: The American culture was not born ex nihilo on July 4, 1776, and in the English parts of the New World colonists reproduced some form of the English class structure; the freedom-seeking Puritans were not alone, but were joined by all manner of riff-raff dispatched by English powers as a form of domestic social hygiene, making the United States a kind of Australia before there was an Australia; the United States today is not a society without class divisions.
Comments