On Monday night, a panel of three UW professors will take the stage to address this year’s Go Big Read, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
J. D. Vance, the author of the book, has declined to attend, despite the fact that he will be speaking at a $125-per-plate dinner hosted by a right-wing think tank in Milwaukee just one week later.
This should tell you all you need to know about the politics of Vance’s memoir.
We should applaud Vance for succeeding against the odds given to him as a young man growing up in poverty in Ohio and Kentucky. But we cannot accept his analysis of what causes everything that is wrong with Appalachia — namely, he argues, “hillbilly culture” and its supposed penchant for violence, aggression, pride-to-a-fault, and laziness.
The belief that individuals’ bad choices are to blame for their own poverty is not a new narrative, though in the wake of Donald Trump’s election it is enjoying a resurgence.
When Vance writes that the problems of Appalachia “were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else.
We created them, and only we can fix them,” he ignores the decades of mountaintop removal coal mining accelerated by government and corporations that literally crippled entire communities by selling people’s bodies to Big Coal.
He ignores the decimation of social services by a bipartisan government project that has exacerbated the opioid crisis. He ignores the deindustrialization of the region that has been aided by government and corporations. And on and on.
But Vance doesn’t ignore these because he is unaware. He does so because it fits into his particular worldview — shared by many members of our cultural and political elite—that poor people are to blame for their own poverty.
And increasingly, liberals are inclined to believe this narrative, too. Just peep the Daily Kos article from a month after the 2016 election: “Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for.”
We know that Trump’s average voter wasn’t “white working class” — a term that the mainstream media has unfairly slandered since the election. In fact, his supporters were/are more likely to be affluent and middle-class. And we also know that today’s working class is multiracial, made up of multiple genders and nationalities and many people with a variety of disabilities.
But Hillbilly Elegy is an attempt to explain to the rest of the country why they don’t need to care about Appalachia — if it’s their problem, why should I be tasked with fixing it?
We need solutions that respond to human need, not victim-blaming. We need solutions that improve conditions for the worst-off in our society living under the oppressive regime of the capitalist class.
For students looking for different political answers, the International Socialist Organization is hosting a talk this Thursday on the working class by Sharon Smith — renowned author of Subterranean Fire: The History of Working-Class Radicalism and Women and Socialism.
Smith will counter the myths that Vance puts forward in his memoir, instead analyzing the historic role of workers under American capitalism and identifying their potential to change the world. Rather than focusing blame on those struggling to survive under capitalism, we must point the finger at the system itself.
The talk will take place at 7 p.m. on Thursday evening in Sterling Hall, Room 1313.
Jonathan Isaac is a graduate student in the English Department and a member of the International Socialist Organization. What are your thoughts on Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy? Do you think it is a good choice for the university-wide Go Big Read? Please send any questions, comments or concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
