His use of the world “we” transforms the personal reality of his difficult childhood into a universal experience. The broadest point made by Elegy on the basis of this experience is that “public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”
The argument that corporations did not help create the problems of Appalachia is stunningly ahistorical, but not even the most problematic claim Vance makes.
The National Review, which employed Vance as an occasional contributor, was positively gleeful about the book’s release. Their review, one of the first, all but explicitly congratulated the author for at long last proving that white Appalachians have “followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.” The American Conservative also helped sustain the first wave of publicity for the book in the summer of 2016, and took particular relish in republishing comments from liberal-leaning and nonwhite individuals in praise of it.
“Would you believe,” columnist Rod Dreher excitedly shared, “that two other liberal correspondents who wrote to praise Vance are black and gay—one of them is an immigrant—and both identified Vance’s discussion about moral agency among the poor as critically important?” For many conservatives, the beauty of Elegy was not just what it said about the lot of poor white Americans, but what it implied about Black Americans as well. Conservatives believed that Elegy would make their intellectual platforming about the moral failures of the poor colorblind in a way that would retroactively vindicate them for viciously deploying the same stereotypes against nonwhite people for decades.
It is not possible, in my view, to separate Elegy from the public persona crafted by Vance over the course of his book tour, his numerous engagements as a political pundit, and his still-forming plans to revitalize the region through venture capitalism and a possible run for political office. The most interesting trait conveyed by this persona is its overperformed humility.
Despite graduating from Yale, authoring a best-selling book about the region, and commanding what he calls a “preposterous amount of money” for public speaking engagements, Vance consistently denies claims that he is acting as an “expert” about Appalachia and, to a lesser extent, the Rust Belt. He is simply an individual burdened with the dual identity of both cosmopolitan elite and hillbilly everyman, performing what he calls his “civic responsibility” to contribute his talent and energy to solving social problems.
“It’s an indictment of our media culture that a group that includes tens of millions of people is effectively represented by one guy. I feel sort of uncomfortable being the guy,” he told the Washington Post. He bemoans this trend as he appears on major news networks analyzing the region’s white working class, and as he delivers TED talks about Appalachia. He is so uncomfortable being the spokesperson for a region whose personal experiences have become symbolic of the realities of millions that he recently sold the film rights to Elegy to Ron Howard.
Perhaps Vance is an incredibly rare breed of humble venture capitalist turned regional memoirist turned social reformer. But perhaps it is wise to consider if this humility is just a strategy. By framing his celebrity as “reluctant,” Vance shores up an image of his insight as accidentally and authentically profound and not, for example, shaped by his three years writing for a conservative publication, or his mentorship under controversial figures like Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and the entrepreneur and political activist Peter Thiel.
Of course, Vance makes no secret of his conservative leanings, but he displays a remarkable tendency to opt himself in and out of the genealogy of conservative writers on race and poverty as it suits his purpose. Using pseudo-academic theories of “brain drain”—including citations—he justified the belief shared in a New York Times op-ed that venture capitalism might stimulate the region. But when he was pressed on social media about the negative implications of his framework, Vance stated, “I don’t infer that [the region] suffers from brain drain. My point was simply to discuss the attraction of home.” The “accidental profundity” granted to Vance must be gratifying, if not something of a backwards compliment, but it also allows him to escape more explicit associations with other controversial work and theories.
In early 2017, the conservative intellectual and white supremacist Charles Murray embarked on a campus speaking tour funded by the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow. University communities protested Murray’s presence on their campus forcefully, leading to a particularly tense incident at Middlebury College in Vermont. Murray’s lectures refreshed observations he shared in his now five-year-old book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, though he adapted them to our current political moment. Many protesters, however, were alarmed by the scientific racism standing at the center of his career as a public intellectual.
Best known for co-authoring 1994’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Murray made his name peddling what the New York Times called “racial pornography.” His belief that African Americans are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence, manifested through IQ testing, became part of the lexicon of the culture of poverty through his suggestion that many forms of government assistance harmed society by encouraging the overpopulation of the intellectually undesirable. “For women near the poverty line in most countries in the contemporary West, a baby is either free or profitable, depending on the specific terms of the welfare system in her country,” he wrote.
Murray, like many other conservative social scientists, enjoys playing an old game in which he occasionally flips his script to contempt for poor white individuals in order to mitigate the racist origins and applications of his beliefs. Coming Apart, for example, proved to be less controversial than The Bell Curve, although he frequently uses the success of the former to re-affirm the latter. He recently told author and podcaster Sam Harris that he not only stands by The Bell Curve’s conclusion, he feels that his evidence is stronger and more relevant than ever.
Disruptions of Murray’s invited talks at Middlebury and elsewhere ignited a widespread debate about free speech and the twenty-first-century university. Some pragmatic observers of this debate suggested a telling workaround to mitigate campus controversy. Columnist Louis Shucker, for example, wrote in the Reading Eagle that “Perhaps a better selection would have been J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy.” The implication is that while the two share similar beliefs about poverty and race, Vance is baggage-free in a way that Murray is not.
Let us give him some baggage, then.
A RACIAL PRISM
Vance uses an enduring myth about race in Appalachia and parts of the Rust Belt to give Hillbilly Elegy its organizational logic. It is, in essence, the magic that transforms Elegy from a memoir of a person to the memoir of a culture. Central to Elegy is Vance’s belief that both historic and modern white Appalachian people share a common ethnic ancestry in the form of Scots-Irish heritage. He connects this belief, in turn, to his claim that shared ethnic heritage has endowed contemporary white Appalachians with certain innate characteristics that hold the key to understanding why their home is, as he puts it, a “hub of misery.”
The shared culture of Appalachia, he writes, is one that “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” It’s worth noting that my distinction—“white Appalachians”—is not one that Vance uses. In the world of Elegy, all Appalachians are white.
He writes in the introduction, “The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, ‘In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in t
he country. The family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.’”
This observation, presented as an endorsement of Vance’s construction of Scots-Irish whiteness, comes from a blog post written for Discover magazine in 2012 entitled “The Scots-Irish as Indigenous People,” by a writer named Razib Khan. It argues that bracketing all white people together in discussions of white privilege leads to “perverse situations.” As an example, the post offers the hypothetical case of Malia Obama, who would be able to “benefit from affirmative action” due to her race, while the “child of a poor family from Appalachia who was white would not gain any preference.”
Vance continues, “This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits—an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country—but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or most important, how they talk.” This shared Scots-Irish ancestry and the traits that it endows, Vance argues, means that “the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive.” This cohesion, in turn, has caused white Appalachians to reproduce, almost literally, negative social outcomes in isolation.
“We pass that isolation down to our children,” he writes, invoking visions of genetic heredity. He points out that “many of us have dropped out of the labor force or have chosen not to relocate for better opportunities. Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity in which some of the traits that our culture inculcates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” He concludes his introduction with the hope that readers might gain from his memoir an appreciation for “how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.” This is a remarkable statement, because the only way to truly understand Hillbilly Elegy is through a racial prism, one that centers a mythical form of whiteness that has a dangerous history.
In his willingness to present white Appalachians as a distinct ethnic entity, Vance has placed himself in a disturbing lineage of intellectuals who relished what they presumed to be the malleable whiteness of Appalachia for its ability to either prove or disprove cultural beliefs about race. This belief manifests in two ways. The first, which we’ve already begun to unpack, is the more modern and recognizable conservative impulse to discount the links between structural racism and inequality. Why can’t poor Black people get ahead? It’s not racism or the structural inequality caused by racism, many conservatives argue, because then what would explain the realities of poor white people?
The lives of poor white people, especially those with the additional burdens of addiction or legal issues, become the empirical proof for conservatives that we have based our attention to racism on fractured logic. The irony, of course, is that even as we become the ambassadors of this colorblind worldview, poor white people can’t escape the generic moralizing of their betters, who got a head start honing their brand of arrogant tough love and hard truths on Black communities.
The second manifestation of this belief is more complicated and requires us to go back in time to discover how white Appalachians were transformed, in some intellectual circles, as a race or “stock” unto their own and the consequences that followed. Vance didn’t invent this particular fiction, he simply exploits it to provide his narrative with a cohesiveness and cultural weight that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Why does that matter? There’s a phenomenon that occurs in Appalachia in which writers and other creatives who anchor their work in ideas about the unique genetic or cultural qualities of Appalachians also harbor close associations with eugenicists. Yes, eugenicists.
It turns out that if you create and sell a version of Appalachia as a place filled with defective people, eugenicists start paying attention to your work. The esteem, as you’ll learn, isn’t unilateral. I’m going to give you three examples—and no prizes for guessing that the mutual appreciation between Vance and Charles Murray is among them—but each episode is separated by enough time and space to demonstrate that this is both a pattern that persists and a pattern that should be stopped.
THE SCOTS-IRISH MYTH IN POPULAR HISTORY
What’s up with the culture of Appalachia? The first thing we should pull apart is that there’s really no such thing as “Greater Appalachia,” a term Vance likes to use. Maintaining flexible definitions of Appalachia is appropriate. The boundaries of the region reflect tensions between political, cultural, and geographic definitions. But the use of the term “Greater Appalachia” in Elegy is telling. Like so much of Elegy, “Greater Appalachia” is the invention of a particular political moment that has been recycled to serve a different political moment. “Greater Appalachia” is connected to a 2012 work of popular history by Colin Woodard called American Nations. Woodard, by way of explaining contemporary political divisions and particularly the rise of the Tea Party, posits that America is not one nation, but eleven.
Each nation, according to Woodard, possesses a “dominant culture” that holds clues for understanding positions on everything from gun control to racial equality. One such nation is “Greater Appalachia.” Woodard writes, “Founded in the eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands… it transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty.”
Elegy invokes other popular histories as well, particularly Virginian politician Jim Webb’s 2004 book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Although Webb is a Democrat, he shares with Vance a history of military service. Webb uses this tradition as a starting point for his exploration of Scots-Irish culture. Born Fighting is largely a recuperation and celebration of Webb’s Scots-Irish “redneck” roots, which he credits for his successes in military and political leadership. Like Vance, Webb maintains that the people of Appalachia have unique genetic qualifications that have produced innate traits and characteristics. Webb, however, is more laudatory of these than Vance and even goes so far as to state that “no other group has been more denigrated, attacked, and even feared by America’s evermore connected ruling elites” than the Scots-Irish.
Webb’s work relies on shaky historical foundations but exploits a very real turn in scholarship, primarily among a segment of Civil War historians, which sought to explain class differences among white people in a slave-holding society. Starting in the 1980s, Civil War historians Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald pioneered the “Celtic thesis,” which argued on the basis of remedial research that more than half of white Southerners, prior to the Civil War, were of Celtic stock. Because of this, the thesis suggests, the Civil War might be best understood not as a rejection of slavery, but as a clash of white ethnicities as Anglo-Saxon elites in the North attempted to forcibly impose their worldview on a largely Celtic South.
If you think that tangentially plugging into academic scholarship exonerates Vance, I have bad news. McWhiney and McDonald, with their emphasis on shared white ethnic heritage and their mitigation of white supremacy as a feature of antebellum life, became the favorite historians of white nationalist groups. McWhiney even participated in the founding of his own hate-group, the League of the South, which recently came to Pikeville, Kentucky, to rally with Nazis in defense of white families. Both McWhiney and McDonald eventually denounced the League of the South, but not before helping to legitimize a particularly virulent strain of neo-Confederate thought still in currency.
Writer John Thomason observes in the New Inquiry that, “Even as Vance wags his finger at the vices of his fellow hillbillies, he cannot help but to insist on the innocence of their whiteness.” In constructing the Scots-Irish—the hillbillies in Hillbilly Elegy—as a race unto their own, Vance can argue that it’s simply their innate characteristics that have set them
on this destructive path that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, not their racism. This is highly alarming and, as Thomason argues, makes racial determinism “more palpable to audiences that might normally be on guard against white nationalism.”
Vance appears to take particular relish in using inaccurate constructions of Appalachian whiteness to complicate universal notions of white privilege. As he told Ezra Klein from Vox, “The problem, as I see it, is that we haven’t necessarily developed a great vocabulary to describe disadvantage in a newer, much more culturally diverse country…it’s not just that talking to that kid [a young person from West Virginia] about white privilege is not an especially useful way to understand his real disadvantage. It’s that it actually makes it harder for him to see the disadvantages that other people face.” The idea that confronting racism risks irrevocably alienating individuals of all races is both a common and predictable strain of thought among conservatives, but it becomes more sinister when it is propped up by the belief that the white individuals in question represent a disadvantaged race unto themselves.
In Elegy and in Vance’s comments about Elegy’s subjects, white Appalachians take on the qualities of an oppressed minority much in the same way that conservative individuals view African Americans: as people who have suffered hardships but ultimately are only holding themselves back. This construction allows conservative intellectuals to talk around stale stereotypes of African Americans and other nonwhite individuals while holding up the exaggerated degradations of a white group thought to defy evidence of white privilege.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 6