Quotes About Inequality

more insidious practices in the colony, wives and children were held accountable for their husband's or father's indentured period of labor.

The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African.47

suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses.

Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." We are a country that imagines

early as 1775, landless tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, voiced a complaint that was common across the sprawling colony: there was "no inducement for the poor man to Fight, for he had nothing to defend.

Slaves were a lure, dangled before poorer men in order to persuade them to put up their land as collateral.

By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds.

from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash.

The words "waste" and "trash" are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation's uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable.

North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony

the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves. Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.

The argument of this book is that America's class history is a more complicated story than we've previously considered. The past informs the present.

Profit-seeking planters and industrious husbandmen, on the other hand, were needed to cultivate the ground for its riches, and in doing so impose a firm hand.7 This powerful conception of land use would play a key role in future categorizations of race and class on the experimental continent.

waste people," and later "white trash," marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children

sharecropper's rhythmic chant (circa 1917): "I'd druther be a Nigger, an' plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck."36

Class status was still based on family name in Pennsylvania, for the top tier was dominated by the Penn, Pemberton, and Logan families—the proprietors and Quaker elites.

critics charged that poor whites had fallen below African slaves on the scale of humanity. They marked an evolutionary decline, and they foretold a dire future for the Old South.

Northerners, especially those who joined the Free Soil Party (1848) and its successor, the Republican Party (1854), declared that poor whites were proof positive of the debilitating effects of slavery on free labor.

We cling to the comfort of a middle class, forgetting that there can't be a middle class without a lower.

Southern politicians shortchanged rural Americans in another crucial way: they made sure that the New Deal's signature Social Security program excluded farm laborers.

Well, apparently addressing racial inequality in one's work is un-American, so I was hauled before the committee.