Hillbilly Elegy
Ratings104
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings104
Average rating3.5
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside.
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I started a review of this book, but it stalled out for a while. After the Washington Post opinion piece and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic essay, I feel like it's a good time to talk about it.
What worked for me: Vance has a good deal of self-awareness regarding the hillbilly aspect of his background. He offers details unflattering to him and his family, increasing his credibility in my eyes. He offers another perspective that is at times baffling to me (“As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity”), but useful to know exists. As a teacher, I did appreciate Vance's insight into how difficult it is for kids to have success in school when their home lives are working against what the school is trying to do.
Vance became a conservative in part, I infer, from seeing social welfare being abused. While in the big scheme of things, a century's worth of misused food stamps is completely dwarfed by the amount of money illegally and immoral taken by wealthy financiers a decade ago in the lead-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis, I think the lesson is this: perception of fairness matters. When I used to work retail, at a time when people had physical food stamps (like currency), a person might come in and make several transactions buying 25 cent bags of Cheetos with the $1 food stamp bill. Any change under $1 was returned to the customer in regular coins, not food stamps. A few transactions like this, and the person would buy cigarettes. From me, the same clerk who sold all the Cheetos. Now rationally, a few bucks misused isn't making much of a different in the U.S. budget, but the observer of the person abusing the food stamp system is not reacting rationally, and I think advocates for the poor need to keep that in mind.
Eyebrow-raising things in the conservative world of this book: he alludes to future wife Usha behaving like an “Ayn Rand heroine” as if we're all familiar with what that is. He cites Bell Curve author Charles Murray (mentioned in Coates's essay, not in a positive way) as a source of wisdom. “Fox News...has always told the truth about Obama's citizenship status and religious views,” write Vance. (Rebuttal from Media Matters.)
As Coates described, it's all about race. And yet, Vance appears to embrace a “color blind” philosophy. He is definitely not woke, to use the parlance of our times. “[Obama] conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him,” says Vance. “Holy shit” reads my note on the highlight of this quote. This isn't just turning a blind eye to the effect of race, it's actively asserting, essentially, that racism is not a thing in modern America. His description of meeting his future wife, Usha, raised my eyebrow. Never in the book does it mention her race or ethnicity. (She's Indian-American.) His immediate obsession (“After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I'd learned as a young man, but I didn't care.”) with her combined with her non-white name creates a story in my mind of a naive white man falling hard for the “exotic” (“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly” writes Vance) woman. Not sure how he knows her a year before finding out she's single.
“[Obama] feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color,” says Vance. Ta-Nehisi Coates begs to differ.
A decent read but unbelievably overhyped due to the trump win. There is nothing revelatory in this book. Generational poverty matters. Education and family stability matter. Government can do good but can also get things wrong. That's the basic gist.
Now that so many people are suddenly interested the white working class, J.D. Vance seems to have a knack for timing. But coming from rural Maine - another area of multigenerational rural poverty and little economic opportunity - I have always felt that our policy and discourse has let down, if not completely ignored, people from places like Appalachian Kentucky where Vance's family is from. Vance does an excellent job weaving sociological research in with his family's experiences, providing a touching portrait of a family struggling in the face of poverty, addiction, and trauma. This book expresses empathy for people facing so many structural barriers to their success, but it is also critical of the bitter defeatism and xenophobia that many in this setting have embraced.
