The Istoriaphile’s Corner

When I was 10, I was afraid of the kids that moved in next door.  The children in the house across the alley were younger and smaller than me, but they were a noisy bunch and they always seemed to be spoiling for a fight.  Whenever I went outdoors, they were there, in their yard, calling me fatty, and offering me a knuckle sandwich.  One day, my mother entered the fray, screamed back at the kids and hauled me into the house.  “Keep away from those kids,” she said, even though this was a needless directive.  I wasn’t going near any kid that picked on my size.  “I don’t want you playing with them, they are nothing but P.W.T.”  PWT meant Poor White Trash, the group of people my mother hated most. I thought a lot about those kids while I was reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America.  Ms. Isenberg’s central argument of the story is, despite statements to the contrary, America never has been a classless system.  Instead, we segregate ourselves into cliques characterized by income, education, address and antecedents and, where I grew up, the condition of one’s lawn. Where I lived, the homes of the influential and affluent were recognizable by the…