The Qualities and Quantities of Whiteness: Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America in Comparative Review

Nearly seven decades ago, historian Frank Owsley made a lasting, if not flawless, attempt to redraw the social map of the antebellum South. His book, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), revealed a white southern yeomanry of varying character, appearance, and livelihood, challenging the popular preconception of a society made up of enslaved people, a minority master class, and an intractable "poor white" population. Owsley's deft (perhaps "deft" in the sense that it revealed what Owsley wanted revealed) use of demographic statistics showed that the third group was actually a diverse and independent yeomanry, not simply a shiftless, unkempt population (which had been the conventional wisdom since the nineteenth century) unlucky to own neither land nor chattel in a place where land and chattel were virtually the only sources of wealth. His findings suggested that the South had something northerners thought it was devoid of, a middle class of sorts.

It was an ironic assertion of southern nonexceptionalism coming from one of Vanderbilt University's own Agrarian movement, and suitable for the 1940s, but it was hardly a novel suggestion for twentieth-century white southerners who knew their own families' Snopesian ascension from corn crib to country club. "The point [Owsley made] scarcely needed to be asserted, before it was proved," Michael O'Brien wrote thirty years later. "Only the ideological myopia of the generation of New South historians, too bent on coping with the awkward heritage of slave plantation culture, too busy with shying away from its agrarian culture towards their own urban bourgeois society to spend time exploring the niceties of social structure in the countryside had prevented its discovery. For too long, nonplantation whites had meant 'poor whites'" (The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 181).

Owsley permanently complicated the southern class structure, and historians have never entirely rejected his revelation of an antebellum yeomanry. But over the following decades, countless scholars have worked to take slavery and race more seriously than Owsley did. He took the whiteness of his subject(s) as a given, as well as their mutual equality. He never took the agency of black southerners into account. His book was tailor-made for a generation of readers raised on the New Deal and World War II, a time when economically positivist aspirations had not escaped the grasp of Jim Crow. While Owsley did not say it explicitly, Plain Folk of the Old South was not only a book about whites, it was a book about whiteness.

Perhaps the antebellum South did have its own ersatz middle class, but this was dwarfed by the bustling egalitarianism that Alexis de Tocqueville saw in the North. The South (especially the Deep South) was a slave society that created a vast multi-furcated social disparity within the white race. Enslaved people were a source of wealth and free labor, and their proliferation drove wages down to economic oblivion. The creation of plantations placed land and income into a very small number of hands. It's little surprise that the decade before the Civil War would popularize the term "white trash," a descriptor for a population that had vexed North American society since the arrival of Europeans. Euro-American society had always been organized to advantage white people, even in places where slavery dwindled early, and the precepts of white supremacy had been challenged by a wandering, propertyless population since the first days of colonization. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg traces a permanent under-current of "waste people," for whom the twenty-first-century concept of white privilege has little meaning. Isenberg wants to complicate the story of American inequality because "Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class" than what is handed to them via popular culture portrayals of...