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Isenberg on Role of White Poor in American History (Audio) · Bloomberg Intelligence

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  Speaker 1: This is taking stock with Kathleen Hayes and Pim Fox
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  Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio Race, Racial Injustice. We hear so much
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  Speaker 1: about this of late, for many very important compelling reasons.
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  Speaker 1: Certainly it's something that's talked a lot about in this
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  Speaker 1: run up to the presidential election in November. But unfortunately
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  Speaker 1: your Hillary Clinton, perhaps her reference to deplorables about half
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  Speaker 1: of Donald Trump's supporters, uh in the current situation has
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  Speaker 1: I think put a spotlight again on the question of class,
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  Speaker 1: which Nancy Eisenberg does in her latest book, which is
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  Speaker 1: called White Trash, The four year Untold History of Class
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  Speaker 1: in America. Nancy is a professor of American history at
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  Speaker 1: Louisiana State University and she joins US Now. Nancy, one
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  Speaker 1: of the things that many people point out if you
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  Speaker 1: look at a lot of Donald Trump supporters, whether they
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  Speaker 1: are deplorable or not, they tend to be a lot
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  Speaker 1: of them white men who didn't go to college, and
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  Speaker 1: a lot of them didn't even finish high school. Um
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  Speaker 1: or do they do? Many of them fall into this
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  Speaker 1: category of what we have traditionally called white trash. Well,
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  Speaker 1: it's really complicated. I mean, for example, Nate Silver has
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  Speaker 1: found people voting for Trump come from a higher class bracket. Um.
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  Speaker 1: I think the media image has been generated by the
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  Speaker 1: images from the rallies. Uh. And there was a really
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  Speaker 1: good New York Times editorial of someone who went to
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  Speaker 1: the rallies and talked about the you know, the kind
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  Speaker 1: of hostility and anger that was being voiced. Uh, you know,
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  Speaker 1: calling Hillary Clinton the B word. Uh. So I think
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  Speaker 1: this is part of the problem that we have is
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  Speaker 1: when we try to figure out who are Trump's supporters. Um.
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  Speaker 1: I think that we we want to say it's the
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  Speaker 1: white working class. But as I've written elsewhere, you know,
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  Speaker 1: the working class in the sense is not just white
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  Speaker 1: male anymore of people in unions or women, and a
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  Speaker 1: third are minorities. Uh. But I think it goes back
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  Speaker 1: to a much older narrative, a narrative that I also
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  Speaker 1: write about, which has to do with a long history
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  Speaker 1: of Southern politics of pitting poor whites against blacks. And
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  Speaker 1: this first came out with you know, Donald Trump using
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  Speaker 1: very explicitly racist rank language in the way he talked
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  Speaker 1: about immigrants and sort of describing them as criminals and
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  Speaker 1: rapist uh. And the fact that you know, he was
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  Speaker 1: encouraging violence against a black protester at one of his rallies.
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  Speaker 1: Uh So this also I think contributed to the image
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  Speaker 1: of assuming that you know, Trump's following uh fall into
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  Speaker 1: this category, and that Trump in a certain way has
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  Speaker 1: borrowed from the rhetoric of Nixon and the idea of
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  Speaker 1: the silent majority, which was an appeal to poor, lower
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  Speaker 1: class whites, and also fed this racial battleground by claiming
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  Speaker 1: that blacks were unwelfare and whites were being you know,
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  Speaker 1: weren't being given the same kind of court um. And
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  Speaker 1: this is, unfortunately, I think of a long along part
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  Speaker 1: of our history. I mean, I talked about James Vardeman
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  Speaker 1: back in the early twentieth century. Uh, we could talk
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  Speaker 1: about Little Rock, Arkansas, which I also write about, but
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  Speaker 1: I think we we do have to be careful in
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  Speaker 1: Clinton's case, using deplorables with the wrong word, you know,
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  Speaker 1: it sounds closer to degenerates. But the what she was
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  Speaker 1: really getting at, as we know, was they're they're kind
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  Speaker 1: of hostile, anti gay, anti Muslim, uh anti uh, you know,
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  Speaker 1: black rhetoric that unfortunately has been the mainstay of a
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  Speaker 1: lot of Trump's rallies and and the issues that he
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  Speaker 1: talks about Professor eisen Eisenberg. I just wanted to maybe
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  Speaker 1: see if we can kind of connect it here to
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  Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the economy and income, because,
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  Speaker 1: of course, the report for a real median household income
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  Speaker 1: in the United States rose five point two uh in
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  Speaker 1: twenty fifteen from the previous year, and that's the largest
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  Speaker 1: in percentage terms that's been recorded by the Bureau since
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  Speaker 1: it began tracking these statistics back in the nineteen sixties. Also,
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  Speaker 1: the poverty rate fell by a little bit more than
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  Speaker 1: than one percent, the biggest decline since. Can you talk
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  Speaker 1: a little bit about those kinds of economics in the
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  Speaker 1: context of your work. Yeah. I think one of the
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  Speaker 1: things we have to realize is that even though you
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  Speaker 1: statistically you can see an increase um. One of the
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  Speaker 1: things I like people to think about is that if
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  Speaker 1: you were to look at the map of the United States.
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  Speaker 1: I talk about the importance of class zoning. People live
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  Speaker 1: in class zoned neighborhoods. We know there are certain regions
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  Speaker 1: of the country that have done much better. I talked
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  Speaker 1: to a Washington Post journalist who was out in rural
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  Speaker 1: Colorado and found out that women make fifty cents on
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  Speaker 1: the dollar two men uh, in this rural area. So
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  Speaker 1: the problem of measuring gains is that it's really erratic
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  Speaker 1: across the country. So you can't generalize. I don't even
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  Speaker 1: need to men ginn Appalachia. I mean, that's been a
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  Speaker 1: law has a very long history, uh, you know, of
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  Speaker 1: suffering from poverty. I mean, at the time that the
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  Speaker 1: Great Society was introduced by L. B. J. The Appalachian
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  Speaker 1: region was suffering from four to six times the level
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  Speaker 1: of unemploy employment you know, in any place in the country. Well,
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  Speaker 1: to underscore what you're describing, media as part of the report,
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  Speaker 1: media incomes did not budge significantly in rural areas, while
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  Speaker 1: in cities they grew more than seven and the South
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  Speaker 1: saw significantly weaker income growth than the West. Yeah, and
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  Speaker 1: that's really important. I mean, one the focus of my
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  Speaker 1: book is the problem of the rural economy. What we
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  Speaker 1: tend to forget is that rural economies experience less social mobility. Um.
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  Speaker 1: This is true even at the time of the American Revolution.
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  Speaker 1: In fact, Great Britain had more social mobility because it
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  Speaker 1: was a more commercial society than the colonies. And this
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  Speaker 1: is true historically. So this is why we can't generalize
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  Speaker 1: from urban to rural. Those are like vast differences economy.
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  Speaker 1: Muckley and I think, you know, you know the other
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  Speaker 1: thing that we have to keep focusing on. We gotta run,
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  Speaker 1: We gotta run. Nancy Eisenberg, Professor of American History, author
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  Speaker 1: of the new book White Trash, the four hundred year
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  Speaker 1: old London story of class in America. This is Bloomberg