In Defense of J.D. Vance

The April 8th opener for Saturday Night Live, “Donald Trump Goes to Kentucky,” is the latest example of what many Appalachian academics, activists, and advocates feel is outsiders taking liberties with extreme representations of our people and culture.  In the skit, four Kentuckians from Boone County (not in Appalachia or the coalfields) express concerns to President Trump who is there to relish in undying support.  They express their concerns.  Trump replies in his vague and ridiculous manner.  Each of them sit down a little shell shocked, but still wanting to believe the president they elected has their best interest at heart.  Almost immediately after the skit aired, my Facebook newsfeed was ablaze with offended eastern Kentuckians admonishing the writers of the skit for stereotyping and making us out as idiots. A little later, came more blogging about liberal elitism and how the Democrats are to blame for our communities’ Trump votes. 

This ridicule came on the coattails of another phenomenon recently spearheaded by those who wait to critique every commentary or representation of Appalachia -- adamant backlash against J.D. Vance and his New York Times bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.  If you Google the book and “criticism”, you’ll find enough written to keep you reading for a few days.  The most complete and well-written of these criticisms comes from Bob Hutton, a senior lecturer of history and American studies at the University of Tennessee in the urban Appalachian city of Knoxville.  Hutton’s “Hillbilly Elitism: The American Hillbilly Isn’t Suffering from Deficient Culture.  He’s Just Poor,” was published in Jacobin in October 2016.  Hutton convincingly accuses Vance of writing to play into the need of white elites to have a scapegoat for the problems of working class America, assuming that capitalism creates the opportunity for upward mobility if one is rightly motivated to pull oneself up by the bootstraps.  Hutton writes, “But of course, the book is not aimed at that underclass (few books are), but rather a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that white American poverty has nothing to do with them or with any structural problems in American economy and society and everything to do with poor folks’ inherent vices.”  More about these vices later.

The critics of SNL and Vance have a point.  Politics overall is elitist these days, and there’s a vast history of corporate colonialism and indentured servitude of the Appalachian people that goes largely ignored.  You have to be wealthy or have the backing of wealth to even make a viable run for federal offices.  And, yes, Hillary Clinton was excruciatingly off base with her remarks about putting coal miners out of work, and proved to many in my community how out of touch the last 8 years in DC was with the Appalachian coalfields voter.

Take for instance, a segment on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 that was part of the recent national media bombardment of my community, including CBS Morning and Evening News, Al Jazeera English, and Fox News.    The reporter interviews people at one of the clinics in my hometown of Whitesburg, Kentucky who benefitted from Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.  All but one who shared their vote were Trump voters.  All of them acknowledged that repeal and replace would be harmful to them directly, but they expressed their willingness to accept that Trump was thinking of them.  One saying, that it wasn’t doing away with their insurance, but he was “redoing” it.  Another saying, “I believe he can turn this thing around.”  Of the choices we had on election day, Trump was the wild card.  Trump was the shot in the dark.  He spoke directly to the coal miner.  He spoke directly to the working class.  Not only that, but Trump has not been a career politician.  He’s been a business man.  This represents not being swayed by “the man” because in nearly every sense of the phrase, Trump is the man.  In a land where the economy is the pits, a third of us are at or below the poverty line, and our desperation is being fueled by greedy pharmaceutical companies playing into hopelessness and complete disdain directed toward us by the rest of the country, who are you going to support?  The businessman or the candidate who plans to put miners and coal companies out of business?

Who has the right to tell the story of coalfields Appalachia?  So many of us are tired of Appalachia being portrayed as all white, ignorant, addicted, unhealthy, and self-saboteurs.  While it is true that our communities are not homogenous, and we have a wide variety of beliefs about who we are and how to go about fixing things here, the fact is that there is truth to stereotype whether or not we like to admit it.  In most coalfields counties 80-90% of the community identify as Caucasian.  Given that population, most of us are considered working class or unemployed, and few of us have a college education. Check the numbers.  When adjusted for population, 5 of the top counties for rates of drug overdose deaths in 2013 were in eastern Kentucky.  The number of babies in the United States needing hospitalization because they are born addicted have nearly doubled in the last 4 years with the greatest increase in a region of states including Kentucky.  Kentucky also ranks #5 in the most obese states category for 2015.  I could continue listing stats all day long.  While within those characteristics are individual variants, it cannot be ignored that there’s a narrative here being overlooked.  In the unwillingness for our own activists, advocates, and scholars to publicly admit these truths matter, are current whether or not you contextualize them, and are not just overblown stereotypes gotten wrong by outsiders, we are missing the opportunity to create a real community lead movement with the potential of addressing the deeply rooted trauma we have experienced at the hands of corporate colonialism and indentured servitude.  
 
The aversion to claim and rightfully address the very statistically concrete facts about our own communities has been demonstrated in the onslaught of these various critiques.   J.D. Vance has become a media celebrity for both liberals and conservatives.  This is not pleasing to many living and working in the thick of the Appalachian coalfields where Vance makes reference to his obtaining the status of bonafide Scots-Irish hillbilly.  Mrs. Betty Hale Williams who grew up on Wolf Pen in Knott County, Kentucky just one holler down from the renown Appalachian author and poet James Still on Dead Mare Branch says of the elegy, “I thought he hit the nail on the head.  And things are worse now with drugs involved.”  Those who are taking strong offense at the book are those who feel like Vance is telling the wrong story of Appalachia, or not an Appalachian story at all.  They are among those who feel ownership in the voice of Appalachia and the white working class consumed by the outside world. 
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Taking a deeper look into the reaction to Vance’s memoir gives us an insight into the collective psyche of those of us who directly identify our work as either Appalachian academia, community development, non-profit, journalism, or social justice.  Ivy Brashear, a journalist and non-profit employee from eastern Kentucky, added an essay to the many written at the 2017 Appalachian Studies Association Conference in Blacksburg, VA criticizing J.D. Vance and his memoir.  In that essay, Brashear writes.  “The fact that people will read his book, and assume that all Appalachian people are trying to actively run away from their culture, and that if they are smart, they will understand it to be less than and the people they came from to be crazy lunatics is, to me, one of the more personal attacks that Vance hurls at Appalachian people in his 261-page simultaneous fetishization and admonishment of my culture.”  Yet, Vance says specifically in many places in the book that it is hillbilly culture that served him as much as it hindered.  Can this not be said for any culture and is it not a good thing to examine this truth?  Here’s one in particular: “…Mamaw would kill anyone who tried to keep me from her.  This worked for us because Mamaw was a lunatic and our entire family feared her.  Not everyone can rely on the saving graces of a crazy hillbilly.  Child services are, for many kids, the last pieces of the safety net; of they fall through, precious little remains to catch them.  Part of the problem is how the state laws define the family.”  Clearly, Vance uses plain language about his reality with as clear a sense of pride at what it did do for him and his success.

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has made him the talk piece, the go to guy, the expert on all things “Trump Country”, working class poor, and “hillbilly”.  Brashear and others have concluded that Vance is sharing “his own non-Appalachian experience”.  The question, who or what is Appalachian, plays a chiding role in many of the arguments discounting Vance’s book as anything and everything but representative of the Appalachian experience and culture.  Sociologist from the University of Kentucky, Dwight Billings says of Vance, “He has only visited family members in eastern Kentucky, or attended funerals there.  His inventory of pathological traits – violence, fatalism, learned helplessness, poverty as a “family tradition” – reads like catalog of stereotypes that Appalachian scholars have worked so long to dispel.  Vance’s Appalachia is refracted thru the distorted lens of his own dysfunctional family experience.”

While there’s a lot that can be said about this Billings quote and about our current circumstances in coalfields Appalachia, whatever the dysfunction in his family, the take away is Vance is Appalachian.  Vance is from Middletown, Ohio by birth which touches corners with an Ohio county that according to the Appalachian Regional Commission is Appalachia.  Frank X. Walker of Danville, Kentucky in Boyle County has coined the term Affrilachian to identify himself as African American and Appalachian.  Fact is however, if we use the same maps to justify Vance is not Appalachian, neither is Frank X Walker.  Appalachia is proud of Walker, as we should be, he is a tremendous poet and social advocate.  Walker claims us.  So does Vance.  Yet, it seems a great many would like to dictate who, given many of the same geographical credentials, can claim us and part of our story.

Vance couldn’t help that his grandparents migrated from Jackson, Kentucky (in Appalachia) when newly married to Middletown.  His grandparents, like many others, moved north out of the coalfields for work during periods of boom and bust in the mining industry.  Ask any displaced Appalachian and their descendants where home is and it can become really complicated deciding who is who. 
J.D. Vance is the product of colliding worlds just as my communities’ Trump voters.  He comes from first and foremost the idea that the American Dream is obtainable for any American citizen.  Add to that the traditional American family is still described as father, mother, and children. Finally, throw in the realities of being identifiable as – “hillbilly”.  Vance’s mother was raised by Appalachian parents visiting Breathitt County as often as possible as many displaced Appalachians do.  Vance himself spent a great deal of time in Jackson with his great grandmother and his grandmother’s siblings.  Vance’s writing or his perspective can’t be discounted by saying his narrative is “non-Appalachian”.

If you read into the canon of popular Appalachian literature, you will find there an often romanticized version of life not unlike the southern gothic.  The reality on the ground is much barer bones and earth.  Vance brings up some hard questions, especially for those of us in coalfields Appalachia who are facing the biggest upheaval our economy has ever seen with no tangible plans as to how to fix it.  All we have is the “silver buckshot” as those in the region working in community development and “just” economic transition like to call the effort of throwing out many ideas to see which ones of them stick. 

It doesn’t matter if the image some want the outside world to see is Mamaw fighting the coal company, her and her shotgun, squaredances and cakewalks, or breaking beans on the back porch with Aunt Sue.  Those are images that one could be very proud of, but the reality of what the coalfields hold close to their hearts is not so simple.  Vance’s book is a memoir.  Vance writes in “Elegy” about the struggles that are shown by the statistics related to our region.  Statistics don’t lie.  They do not tell the whole story, but neither does ignoring the facts, sweeping them under the rug.  It is not Vance’s responsibility to write the experience of his critics, or mine, or yours.  He was using his own family’s experience to give a human story to a very apparent and statistically defined class and/or region related crisis.  Vance uses his story to explain how parts of our culture that served us well under past conditions are no longer.  It isn’t a surprise that he would question how he, of all people, could end up where he is today, and if he could, how could others?  It’s a question that he doesn’t claim to have an answer for anywhere in the book.  The closest he comes is with this line - “We do need to create a space for the J.D.s and Brians of the world to have a chance.  I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush, or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”  There is absolutely something to be said for the origins of these problems, and in those origin stories we can discover possible solutions for today.  However, we can also get so caught up in getting the backstory right, that we also forget the people, a great many of which have no context for their problems aside from their family story.  Placing the blame for our problems in the right spot, does nothing to get us passed where we are now.  What will change if the right people are blamed for the regions despair?

Vance doesn’t make any secret of the fact that he is a conservative thinker though he vacillates somewhere in a moderate range compared to those adhering to Tea Party politics or fundamental evangelical values based in religious duty.  This makes Vance a target for the effort of discrediting his ideas, and even his “right” to make any definitive comments on Appalachia by those who see things as more complicated than Vance’s extremely simplistic conclusion – “These problems weren’t created by governments or corporations or anyone else.  We created them, and only we can fix them.”  By “we”, he means the people of Appalachia and the Rust Belt and other white working class Americans.  I believe his explanation is too simple, but I think his point is missed.  Vance also says, “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”  This statement coming earlier in Vance’s conclusion gives the basis for the meaning of the latter.  Like any one-dimensional piece of writing, lines taken out of context can seem a heinous immorality.  It is up to Appalachians to fix these problems, but first we must admit the problems Vance highlights with his family story are there and not uncommon among Appalachians living today.  The fact of the matter is, if these problems are left unaddressed they will hold back if not all together squash any real progress toward diversifying the economy and attracting people to the region to spend money.

Sure, Vance doesn’t do a good job of describing a diverse Appalachia.  He uses studies done by people with questionable theories of poverty, gender, and race to explain certain social trends (like Charles Murray an American Enterprise Institute Scholar and graduate of Harvard and M.I.T who the Southern Poverty Law Center labels as a white nationalist, though Vance as much mentions being influenced by William Julius Wilson a Harvard sociologist who is considered progressive and is African American, having read him at age 16).  Yet, he brings into light the issues of addiction, generational poverty, and learned behaviors of how to work government systems for relief. Vance adds to those realities the inability to find work, low educational attainment, and interpersonal violence.  Then, he dares to mention that despite a myriad of grants, policy reform, and welfare relief thrown at these problems, we are experiencing the same issues as we were trying to address in the 1960s.  What is true about many of these efforts is we can’t pinpoint that this or that project worked and will last beyond any government changes, expired grant periods, or community organizers coming and going.  With L.B. J’s War on Poverty, infrastructure was addressed, but the arrival of economic diversity did not come with it.  There have been some successes with farmer’s markets and local foods programs which if sustained will help some folks supplement or replace an income with farming, and there’s definitely a need for fresh, affordable foods in the region as believe it or not, many areas are rural food deserts.  My own employer, Appalshop is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary and was began as part of the War on Poverty effort.  Appalshop employs a number of folks, preserves our heritage, promotes local news and stories, and brings in tourists.  But, these things are a drop in the bucket, a beginning, and doesn’t directly address any of the problems Vance is questioning in the long term.

Hillbilly Elegy highlights a culture in crisis, and Vance is right there too.  Aspects of our way of life allow these problems to be ongoing.  Ask the artists in the region how many people have told them that they could and should try to make a living at art.  Ask the unwed or wedded woman in her 30s living in the region how many times she’s been asked when she’s going to have a baby whether or not she’s healthy or financially secure.  Ask the churchgoer or several how much their church serves the community and how.  While at it, ask them how much they hear politics preached from the pulpit.  Ask anyone middle aged or under how many times that they’ve been told by their parents and other elders that if they want to do anything with their life they should leave the mountains.  Ask how many feel they have to change the way they speak depending upon who it is they’re speaking to.  But, the most troubling of cultural drawbacks we face is the way we deal with problems that cause us to seem weak, embarrassed, or by some standards immoral.  We pretend they don’t exist, at least in public.  Vance by airing our dirty laundry has triggered the response of people scrambling to show that these problems do not define us.  Yet, to those in the thick of these realities, they often do.
Vance gives the problems of family dysfunction and addiction a human story with his own lived experience.  This experience has shaped the man who he has become, including his politics.  To negate his experience and his claim to his own identity is to say his story does not matter and does not have a place equal to or amongst our own.  The Trillbilly Worker’s Party is a new podcast made by some of the region’s thinkers.  Their first podcast was called – J.D. Vance is a Snitch.  One of the hosts suggests she wants to buy Vance’s mother a drink for her woe.  Yes, the podcast is in jest, but it goes to show we only allow some things to be spoken of in mixed company.  With Vance mentioning the problems we as a culture are trying to hide away, he requires us to answer for them.  In today’s Appalachian study, activism, community development, social justice, progressive non-profit world, that laying bare is far from the popular thing to do. 

We have a divide in our communities in relation to the problems highlighted by Vance’s book.  We have those who are in the midst of the problems and suffering directly because of them.  Those who have brought themselves out of the problems.  Then, there are those who see these problems as apart from them, something experienced by “those people”.  There are members of all three groups who are so embarrassed by the problems and the national misunderstanding of them, that it has rendered them unable to talk openly and constructively about them, and therefore has slowed any response to them in hopes that at some point it will go away, or at least we’ll stop having to answer for them when out in the “real world”.  This shuttering away is inhumane.

The role that mainstream media has played in making us ashamed of our own difficulties is not to be ignored.  We can’t undo Diane Sawyer swooping in filming choice segments that definitely would entice viewers all the while coining a new term to describe our dental health.  Remember “Mountain Dew Mouth?” Vance does for better or for worse.  Sawyer is just one of many outsiders exploiting our problems without also showing the world any of our own efforts to combat them.  The idea of “solutions journalism” as an answer to what proponents see as negativity and inaccuracy in mainstream media’s depiction of Appalachia, is often misunderstood.  The goal, in the words of the Solutions Journalism Network, is not to “soothe people or provide hope”.  It is to, however, “allocate appropriate attention to stories of constructive problem-solving, stories that are important and compelling but often neglected”.  Because our problems of dysfunction, poverty, and addiction are so huge and have been overlooked from within for so long, there are few stories about how we are addressing this problem to report.  To even bring up the problem can draw sighs of disgust from colleagues and those who feel we should be working on highlighting other parts of the Appalachian narrative in order to better the region.
 
One of the most troubling aspects of all the energy folks have put toward criticizing J.D. Vance is that books that are taking on problems like addiction in a humanizing, beautiful way written by Appalachians like Night Garden by Carrie Mullins have gone somewhat overlooked on the national stage.  Why can’t we spend time, if we are going to critique, highlighting examples that might serve to educate a national audience about the actualities of these issues?  Why can’t our writers and journalists who do have an outlet in the national arena engage in a more productive conversation rather than a he said – she said? Wikipedia says solutions journalism stories should “identify the root causes of a social problem; prominently highlight a response, or responses, to that problem; present evidence of the impact of that response; and explain how and why the response is working, or not working. When possible, solutions stories also present an insight that helps people better understand how complex systems work, and how they can be improved.” Let’s just do that if we want the narrative of the region to change.

In the words of Jon Falter, a Whitesburg resident who has been himself 5 years drug free, “this problem is not going anywhere.”  This is true about addiction.  It’s true about the depression and fatalistic attitudes.  It is true about the violence that these things enable.  It is true about the generational poverty as a default symptom of the rest.  With 61% of eastern Kentuckians believing that their children will have it worse off financially than they do and 1 in 3 reporting that a friend or family member has a problem with addiction to prescription pain medications, we cannot deny that it will take more than what is currently happening on the ground before we will see any change in the bigger issues that plague our homeland.  Vance is not wrong, or being stereotypical by bringing up this situation as he experienced it whether or not you agree with his simplistic analysis.  I commend him for it.  Now, what are we going to do about it?  First, we have to claim the problem and claim the part of it that is cultural, then better explain the part that was a direct result of corporation money gone awry, and failures in public policy.

Another of these outskirts of Appalachia white men of working class American origin, Jared Yates Sexton recently wrote of Hillbilly Elegy – “The thesis at the heart of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault. Sure, there’s a culture of fatalism and “learned helplessness,” but the onus falls on the individual.”  Vance either intentionally or was encouraged to write his memoir to be readable by someone who has zero background with Appalachian history, or he himself has none.  It is a memoir written to be quickly consumed.  It was written to be a springboard for deeper conversations as Vance has clearly shown with his numerous interviews with both conservative and progressive media outlets.  It is not an academic text.  It is Vance’s experience and Vance’s conclusions drawn by the shape of his experiences written in an attempt to encourage action before it is too late.  As Sexton highlights, Vance writes, “Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, ‘the feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”  How effective do we think we can be at addressing our problems from within?  It seems not much as we are consistently waiting on funding from somewhere, waiting on a near to obsolete industry to revive, waiting on the powers that be to notice and take pity… waiting for another day.  Sometimes, our choices don’t seem to matter, especially when we’re wondering where our next meal comes from. 
It’s time to stop debating whether or not Vance has any claim to Appalachia, which he clearly does, whether or not he adheres to the thoughts of “white nationalists” which if he has thought of those, he’s also considered the work of African American progressives and points it out just as often, and if Vance is riding the sensation of the Scots-Irish Appalachian stereotypes which do come from somewhere.  It is pointless and distracting from what we should be doing.  What we should be doing is getting into the parts of the community that all these national reporters seem to find with exploitative ease and get the real story, claim it, and understand it.  This is the conversation that needs to be had, so that we can then take action to redeem it.  Let’s stop hiding from it and baselessly criticizing this man for a book that is mostly memoir, a small part commentary, and even smaller part of that political. 

What is it that the world of Appalachian academics, organizers, politicians, non-profits, social justice proponents, and more not want us or the world to know that J.D. Vance’s book has created such strong pushback?  Is it that our work to date is making very small dents in a very huge problem made of American steel?  Is it fear that funders and conservatives will see us as too far gone to help?  Is it shame?  Is it romanticism?  I think it is all of these things, but I am not willing to continue hanging dark drapes over clouded windows.  I’m not ashamed of my homeland and the people I know and love.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t sincerely question whether or not I should keep my children here, but for now, I cannot give up.  Agree with Vance or not in terms of politics and analysis of our culture, but acknowledge the real questions his book brings up.  Our region just voted for Donald Trump in no small part because they are being ignored and their “real” voice unheard. 

Vance has given voice to things that I and others I know have experienced firsthand.  I value his story and the questions it raises.  I hope that eventually the debate will be put to rest about the man’s character and we’ll instead start taking a deeper look at the realities of life it lays bare.  I had the opportunity to exchange emails with Vance after I read his book months ago.  He wrote to me, “I love my people, and I really hope that comes through in my book.  But for all the beauty, there are families like mine and yours, and we've got to recognize the good in those families and the bad if we ever hope to help them.”  Having read his book, it clearly does.

Thanks to Isaac Boone Davis and Robert Gonzales for help with editing and words of encouragement!