The Reality of Downward Mobility

The Reality of Downward Mobility

CoverArtAmericans have a long-standing habit of ignoring the needs of the poor, writes Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The Untold 400-Year History of Class in America. Instead, cultural commentators and politicians alike have noticed the poor only when they could score some political or cultural point by doing so, blaming the poor for their poverty, for lacking education, and for facing health crises that passed most other Americans by. Isenberg is meticulous in demonstrating how pervasive and ingrained the habit of poor-shaming is, tracing it from its origins in the first British colonies right up to the present day. The “American Dream” of social mobility is a myth, Isenberg concludes, as is the idea that we’re committed to eradicating poverty. To borrow the words of an impoverished wanderer, the poor will always be with us.

The epilogue is perhaps the most powerful chapter in the book, pointedly shredding any lingering devotion to the myth of the self-made man a reader might possess. It summarizes the backdrop against which our present political dramas play out – although Trump is mentioned only once, and not as a political candidate, it is impossible to read this chapter and not think of the white, working-class fury his candidacy has captured. It is impossible, too, not to think of Congressional debates about food stamps, or pundits slicing and dicing the latest employment figures. These conversations are as old as European colonization of the continent, Isenberg argues, and perhaps if we could understand that we are regurgitating arguments from one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred years ago, we might better understand the problem we think we’re trying to solve (but in reality are not).

The book is a weighty accomplishment – yet there are puzzling holes in Isenberg’s chronology and argument. Isenberg never once addresses the class dimensions of massive immigration into the nineteenth-century North, preferring to stay focused on the South’s rural poor. Yet urban poverty was an enormous problem in that era, and the working and living conditions of immigrants often appalling. Isenberg doesn’t address child labor, or efforts to reform and eradicate that practice, which comes as a necessary precursor to any public school system, no matter how badly that system wanted for funds. World War II is completely absent from the text, and no explanation is offered for why the 1940s should be withheld from our consideration. Race and class are also never really examined as the bedfellows they are. Asian immigration is ignored, as is the poverty experienced by many Native people.

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Most strikingly, the voices and opinions of the poor themselves are missing from this book. This is a confounding irony – that in a book that argues that middle- and upper-class individuals refuse to meaningfully engage with poverty and the impoverished, Isenberg does the same. We never hear how poor individuals understood their situation, how they defined their sense of belonging and culture, or what they thought they needed from their government. We read the opinions of cultural commentators on Dolly Parton, for example, but none from Dolly herself. What Isenberg has written is an intellectual history of ideas about class in America, but one which suggests the impoverished have no ideas of their own.

Finally, class is an ill-defined category in this work, which is somewhat understandable given that the history of class is woven through more than one economic system – class today cannot mean exactly what it meant in Virginia in 1625. Still, even within chapters, there are shifting definitions of what is under consideration – does Isenberg mean to talk about those who are unemployed? The working poor? Impoverished individuals who do not own property, but work the land? Can one be poor and yet own property? Should renters only apply?

There is much in this book that I did not know, and am glad to have encountered. Beyond all else, a book that insists we look at the history of class and poverty is a welcome reminder of how many stories we have yet to do justice. It is also entirely possible that I want to read the book Isenberg didn’t set out to write. But I found White Trash to be a tantalizing beginning to a much bigger story. I’m looking forward to reading the works that take up the conversation Isenberg has begun.

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