Making Blanket Statements: Rethinking the History and Politics of American Social Class
Keyword(s):
In Joan C. Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the reader will find a nation riven by abiding class prejudice. Both have written explicitly with the goal of forcing readers to confront the deep, ugly, and ultimately destructive effects of elite snobbery towards working-class or impoverished white people. They both believe that educated readers tend to minimize or ignore how much class matters and has mattered in American history and to deny their own class biases; these books are meant to make that denial harder to sustain.