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Making Blanket Statements: Rethinking the History and Politics of American Social Class

Review products

Joan C.Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017, £18.00). Pp. 192. isbn978 1 6336 9378 4.

NancyIsenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America (New York: Atlantic Books, 2017, £20.00). Pp. 496. isbn978 1 7864 9298 2.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2019

ANDREW SEAL*
Affiliation:
Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics, University of New Hampshire. Email: [email protected].

Extract

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.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019 

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References

1 Skocpol, Theda, The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 See Williams and Heather Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work–Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle,” at https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/01/pdf/threefaces.pdf.