White Trash : The 400-year Untold History of Class in America – Nancy Isenberg
“A corps of pundits exist whose fear of the lower classes has led them to assert that the unbred perverse — white as well as black – are crippling and corrupting American society. They deny that the nation’s economic structure has a causal relationship with social phenomena they highlight. They deny history. If they did not, they would recognize that the most powerful engines of the U.S. economy — slaveowning planters and land speculators in the past, banks, tax policy, corporate giants, and compassionless politicians and angry voters today — bear considerable responsibility for the lasting effects on white trash, or on falsely labeled ‘black rednecks,’ and on the working poor generally. The sad fact is, if we have no class analysis, then we will continue to be shocked at the numbers of waste people who inhabit what self-anointed patriots have styled the ‘greatest civilization in the history of the world.'”
Essential reading to understand inequality in the United States.
CCSE work on race and class:
Opposing Racism and Human Bondage in the United States
“Mark Robert Rank, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has long researched poverty and inequality and written other books on those issues, uses a musical-chairs analogy to explain.
“’The traditional way of looking at poverty in the United States’ focuses on those who are experiencing it,’ Rank said in an interview with MarketWatch. Most economists point out that people living in poverty may have less education and fewer skills, and some health problems, he said. ‘That certainly explains who tends to lose out at this “game”. But that’s only explaining who isn’t finding a chair. It doesn’t explain why there aren’t enough chairs in the first place.'”