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76 reviews for:
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Anthony Harkins, Meredith McCarroll
3.97 AVERAGE
76 reviews for:
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Anthony Harkins, Meredith McCarroll
3.97 AVERAGE
This looks so good!
Available through PINES - need to place hold.
https://wvupressonline.com/node/774#2
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why This Book? | Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll
Part I. Considering Hillbilly Elegy
Interrogating
Hillbilly Elitism
T. R. C. Hutton
Social Capital
Jeff Mann
Once Upon a Time in “Trumpalachia”: Hillbilly Elegy, Personal Choice, and the Blame Game
Dwight B. Billings
Stereotypes on the Syllabus: Exploring Hillbilly Elegy’s Use as an Instructional Text at Colleges and Universities
Elizabeth Catte
Benham, Kentucky, Coalminer / Wise County, Virginia, Landscape
Theresa Burriss
Panning for Gold: A Reflection of Life from Appalachia
Ricardo Nazario y Colón
Will the Real Hillbilly Please Stand Up? Urban Appalachian Migration and Culture Seen through the Lens of Hillbilly Elegy
Roger Guy
What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in Twenty-First-Century America
Lisa R. Pruitt
Prisons Are Not Innovation
Lou Murrey
Down and Out in Middletown and Jackson: Drugs, Dependency, and Decline in J. D. Vance’s Capitalist Realism
Travis Linnemann and Corina Medley
Responding
Keep Your “Elegy”: The Appalachia I Know Is Very Much Alive
Ivy Brashear
HE Said/SHE Said
Crystal Good
The Hillbilly Miracle and the Fall
Michael E. Maloney
Elegies
Dana Wildsmith
In Defense of J. D. Vance
Kelli Hansel Haywood
It’s Crazy Around Here, I Don’t Know What to Do about It, and I’m Just a Kid
Allen Johnson
“Falling in Love,” Balsam Bald, the Blue Ridge Parkway, 1982
Danielle Dulken
Black Hillbillies Have No Time for Elegies
William H. Turner
Part II. Beyond Hillbilly Elegy
Nothing Familiar
Jesse Graves
History
Jesse Graves
Tether and Plow
Jesse Graves
On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power
Meredith McCarroll
Olivia’s Ninth Birthday Party
Rebecca Kiger
Kentucky, Coming and Going
Kirstin L. Squint
Resistance, or Our Most Worthy Habits
Richard Hague
Notes on a Mountain Man
Jeremy B. Jones
These Stories Sustain Me: The Wyrd-ness of My Appalachia
Edward Karshner
Watch Children
Luke Travis
The Mower—1933
Robert Morgan
Consolidate and Salvage
Chelsea Jack
How Appalachian I Am
Robert Gipe
Aunt Rita along the King Coal Highway, Mingo County, West Virginia
Roger May
Holler
Keith S. Wilson
Loving to Fool with Things
Rachel Wise
Antebellum Cookbook
Kelly Norman Ellis
How to Make Cornbread, or Thoughts on Being an Appalachian from Pennsylvania Who Calls Virginia Home but Now Lives in Georgia
Jim Minick
Tonglen for My Mother
Linda Parsons
Olivia at the Intersection
Meg Wilson
Appalachian Apophenia, or The Psychogeography of Home
Jodie Childers
Canary Dirge
Dale Marie Prenatt
Poet, Priest, and “Poor White Trash”
Elizabeth Hadaway
List of Contributors
Sources and Permissions
Index
Available through PINES - need to place hold.
https://wvupressonline.com/node/774#2
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why This Book? | Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll
Part I. Considering Hillbilly Elegy
Interrogating
Hillbilly Elitism
T. R. C. Hutton
Social Capital
Jeff Mann
Once Upon a Time in “Trumpalachia”: Hillbilly Elegy, Personal Choice, and the Blame Game
Dwight B. Billings
Stereotypes on the Syllabus: Exploring Hillbilly Elegy’s Use as an Instructional Text at Colleges and Universities
Elizabeth Catte
Benham, Kentucky, Coalminer / Wise County, Virginia, Landscape
Theresa Burriss
Panning for Gold: A Reflection of Life from Appalachia
Ricardo Nazario y Colón
Will the Real Hillbilly Please Stand Up? Urban Appalachian Migration and Culture Seen through the Lens of Hillbilly Elegy
Roger Guy
What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in Twenty-First-Century America
Lisa R. Pruitt
Prisons Are Not Innovation
Lou Murrey
Down and Out in Middletown and Jackson: Drugs, Dependency, and Decline in J. D. Vance’s Capitalist Realism
Travis Linnemann and Corina Medley
Responding
Keep Your “Elegy”: The Appalachia I Know Is Very Much Alive
Ivy Brashear
HE Said/SHE Said
Crystal Good
The Hillbilly Miracle and the Fall
Michael E. Maloney
Elegies
Dana Wildsmith
In Defense of J. D. Vance
Kelli Hansel Haywood
It’s Crazy Around Here, I Don’t Know What to Do about It, and I’m Just a Kid
Allen Johnson
“Falling in Love,” Balsam Bald, the Blue Ridge Parkway, 1982
Danielle Dulken
Black Hillbillies Have No Time for Elegies
William H. Turner
Part II. Beyond Hillbilly Elegy
Nothing Familiar
Jesse Graves
History
Jesse Graves
Tether and Plow
Jesse Graves
On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power
Meredith McCarroll
Olivia’s Ninth Birthday Party
Rebecca Kiger
Kentucky, Coming and Going
Kirstin L. Squint
Resistance, or Our Most Worthy Habits
Richard Hague
Notes on a Mountain Man
Jeremy B. Jones
These Stories Sustain Me: The Wyrd-ness of My Appalachia
Edward Karshner
Watch Children
Luke Travis
The Mower—1933
Robert Morgan
Consolidate and Salvage
Chelsea Jack
How Appalachian I Am
Robert Gipe
Aunt Rita along the King Coal Highway, Mingo County, West Virginia
Roger May
Holler
Keith S. Wilson
Loving to Fool with Things
Rachel Wise
Antebellum Cookbook
Kelly Norman Ellis
How to Make Cornbread, or Thoughts on Being an Appalachian from Pennsylvania Who Calls Virginia Home but Now Lives in Georgia
Jim Minick
Tonglen for My Mother
Linda Parsons
Olivia at the Intersection
Meg Wilson
Appalachian Apophenia, or The Psychogeography of Home
Jodie Childers
Canary Dirge
Dale Marie Prenatt
Poet, Priest, and “Poor White Trash”
Elizabeth Hadaway
List of Contributors
Sources and Permissions
Index
“Sometimes those who complain loudest about stereotypes are also quickest to use them.” - Jim Minick (367)
This book was a collection of essays or poems that criticize or respond to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I can understand that some Appalachians would be offended that Vance’s description of hillbillies aligns with stereotypes that are not true of every person in the area. But this book itself is hypocritical, because for instance, it criticizes even Vance’s title of his book for saying “a culture in crisis” as if his experience speaks for the entire Appalachian culture, while this book is titled “a region responds” as if this book contains a well balanced mix of the region’s voices. The reality is that this book only seems to have voices from the liberal middle or upper class, people who (like Vance) used to be from Appalachia but left and were educated in expensive universities. Why not interview some Appalachians who were NOT college educated and who still live in the area? You could give them a copy of Vance’s book to have them read it if they haven’t read it yet, and then ask afterwards what they thought.
Many readers of that book apparently read it to gain insight into why Appalachians voted for Trump. But his memoir didn’t really explain it. This book does a better job at answering that question.
The first half of the book is all negative criticism of Hillbilly Elegy. The authors of these essays are just offended that there is anything at all negative said about hillbillies. About halfway through the book on page 171, the essays start to get more positive of Elegy. I liked these latter essays more because I tended to agree with them. So, going in order of the essays as they were laid out in this book, I will give my own criticism:
“What is culture other than a set of modes or habits that are subject to human choice and change over time” (29)?
I would define culture as the social norms of a society. I wouldn’t say they are much of human choice, or that they change much over time. Culture is usually used as a way to excuse “the way things are” in a society, that it’s unchangeable and people inside and outside of it just have to put up with it.
Dwight Billings says Hillbilly Elegy is “an advertisement for capitalist neoliberalism and personal choice. I did not choose to write about this book; it chose me” (38).
I’m a firm believer in personal choice. The memoir does not have its own will, so there is no factual way that it can choose you to write about it. Someone may have asked you to write about it, but that would be a person, not the book. And ultimately you still chose to comply.
In Vance’s opinion, the problem of Appalachian poverty “boils down simply to the bad personal choices individuals make in the face of economic decline—not to the corporate capitalist economy that creates immense profits by casting off much of its workforce or the failure of governments to respond to this ongoing crisis” (40).
Poverty has been a problem across the world for centuries. When government tries to fix it, it’s usually in the form of socialism and communism which just becomes corrupt and fails. I think government could help some poverty by banning outsourcing. But handing out free money to the poor is not a good solution, because it’s just a temporary fix and doesn’t motivate people to work for their own money. Just because corporations in Appalachia took their business elsewhere doesn’t mean the people living there should throw up their hands in defeat and stop trying to get another job. There are still personal choices when it comes to finance. One can choose to move out of the blighted area for a better life. One can choose to not waste one’s money on drugs and alcohol and tattoos and piercings and make up and the latest tech gadgets. As long as people just live off welfare and don’t work, they’re going to stay poor.
I guess that’s a main difference between democrats and republicans: democrats want government to solve their problems. Republicans tell you to solve your own problems. In the socialist system (which more democrats claim to align themselves with), the only people who get rich are government. With Republicans, business owners get rich. The democrat system sees the poor as powerless victims that someone else needs to save. Republicans say, save yourself. Most rich people started out with humble beginnings, but they succeeded because of capitalism, not because of government handouts.
“Vance’s fix, the usual neoliberal fix, is fix thyself” (41).
I mostly agree with Vance, because you can’t just wait around for someone else to solve your problems. Of course you can try voting for the change you want. But don’t hold your breath for that working out. If you want to succeed, you have to try to solve your own problems. Because that’s the only thing the individual can control: self.
What if Vance had waited for government to fix his poverty instead of going to college? Then he would have stayed poor. In a way, government DID help, by giving him financial aid in order to pay for his college. This option is available to all poor people. But it’s still up to the individual to apply and try hard in school.
“Wendy Brown refers to this ideology as a new ‘normative order of reason, a new governing rationality’ that constantly cajoles all persons, not just the poor, to police, reinvent, and perfect themselves, to be adept and flexible enough to make the right personal choices that hopefully will protect them against harsh and unpredictable vicissitudes of economic turmoil they can’t control” (45). What’s wrong with that?
“They are annoyed by critique” (46). Isn’t everyone?
Left-leaning writers blame “the decline of unions and with it their potential to divert voters from socially divisive issues” for why Hillary Clinton lost the election, among other things (48). Nobody should influence someone else’s vote, no matter what side they’re on.
The least popular subject for college reading programs is LGBT issues (63). I’m sure that will change soon. And like the other subjects colleges force their students to read, they will “endorse or affirm” rather than open a discussion or debate about it (69). And if anyone complains about that, they’ll be labeled a homo/transphobe.
“The transformation of Hillbilly Elegy from memoir to educational text makes it difficult to critique or debate” (70).
Gary Houchens, a professor of education administration for Western Kentucky University, believes that “government should reorganize tax policy and federal assistance programs to incentivize marriage to break the cycle of poverty within economically disadvantaged families” (71-72). Ha! As if forcing people to get married would take them out of poverty?! Marriage costs money! So does divorce! Although it’s statistically more likely for the poor to come from unmarried families, marriage is just a symptom of something else: stability and responsibility. It is those traits which are negatively correlated with poverty, but those traits can’t be forced on people.
“Although [Caudill, author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands] shared with them the burden of living in a coal-exploited region and the environmental consequences that followed, he had a comfortable life, a good education, a middle class profession, and a stable family, and he exhibited resentment toward those lacking the same” (76). Doesn’t this imply that the majority of those in the region are poor, uneducated, etc.? Yet the writers in this book seem to want us to believe otherwise.
“...particularly after the War on Poverty failed to lift Appalachians out of poverty as intended” (76). Why do the authors imply that the individuals can’t help themselves out of poverty but must rely on government to help? The government already tried to help, and look how that turned out.
On p.86, Roger Guy criticizes Vance for saying “Mamaw came from a family that would shoot at you rather than argue with you” because it’s consistent with stereotypes of hillbillies. But Vance was not making the claim that HILLBILLIES would rather shoot at you than argue with you. He was only talking about his own grandmother! Haven’t people the right to speak honestly about their own family without it being taken as evidence for some group as a whole? Vance is not the problem. The problem is people who generalize and stereotype based on one example.
“The lower class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of the future, it is something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen TO him, he does not MAKE them happen. . . . He works only as he must to stay alive and drifts from one unskilled job to another.” - Edward Banfield (97). Roger Guy says this is consistent with Vance’s opinion of hillbillies. But it’s also consistent with liberals who blame all the hillbillies’ problems on outside influences rather on the individuals. In the liberal opinion, the individual cannot MAKE anything happen, only the government can; the poor hillbillies had things happen TO them; they are not to be held responsible for their own situations.
The violence and impulsivity of hillbillies “has less to do with hillbilly values than the social conditions and influences in which any new urban migrant group find themselves” (100). What about Asian Americans? They started out poor when they migrated to America, but they worked hard and made themselves successful. Even after the Japanese were taken from their homes and put in internment camps, they still managed to be successful afterward!
“What Vance does not talk about is his privilege—male, whiteish, and urbanish” (107). Those things had nothing to do with why he succeeded. If he had any privileges at all, it was him having a grandmother in his life who instilled a hard work ethic into him. Colleges already have plenty of males and whites attending; it’s not like Yale chose him because of his sex or race. It’s actually MINORITIES who have the privilege applying to colleges, because of affirmative action—except Asians, of course, who colleges purposely don’t want to accept too many of because there are so many smart ones.
“He also does not talk about the role of the state as a positive force that facilitated his upward trajectory to the Ivy League and beyond” (107). Actually he did. He said that because he was poor, he could qualify for scholarships/grants which made it cheaper to go to Yale than to go to a non-Ivy League school. So his poverty was a privilege. And the precious government programs that these liberal writers love so much is something that helped Vance get into Yale for cheap. The writers say the government should do more to help these people out of poverty, but these programs already exist to help the poor. Vance succeeded, so the other poor people could do similarly if they applied themselves.
“Progressive folks (among whom I count myself) would vigorously protest Vance’s tough-love stance if he were writing about poor people of color, calling them lazy and criticizing them for ‘bad choices.’ Most progressives seem unfazed, however, that Vance’s assessments and policy proposals throw low-income whites under the proverbial bus” (108). That’s because people think it’s okay to criticize whites because then they won’t get called racist. But it IS racist to be okay with criticizing one race but not another. Any race can be lazy and make bad choices, and to be blind to that just because you don’t want to insult POC is stupid, biased, and RACIST.
“Now, post-Yale Law School, he enjoys at least some modicum of white privilege” (110). No, he has privilege now because he worked hard to get to and through Yale. And now he has the privilege of putting Yale on his resume, which opens a lot of doors, as well as the networking he discussed in the book. His elevated status now has nothing to do with being white.
“Except for his frequent use of ‘white’ to modify ‘working class’ (about fifty times throughout the book), Vance writes as if race is not relevant to his analysis” (112). Because it’s not. He’s talking about hillbillies. And as some have pointed out, there ARE non-white hillbillies. He is talking about people from a certain geographic region who are mainly BUT NOT SOLELY white. The area they’re from has more to do with who they are than their race.
P. 113-114: Two of Vance’s “messages about race might be summarized thusly: white people don’t equally enjoy the fruits of ‘white skin’ or whiteness more generally, and not every bad thing that happens to a Black person is entirely racially motivated. I agree with these points.” Really, you do? “And they find some support in recent scholarship.” It’s laughable that people think they need some peer reviewed study to tell them what is common sense.
This book was a collection of essays or poems that criticize or respond to Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I can understand that some Appalachians would be offended that Vance’s description of hillbillies aligns with stereotypes that are not true of every person in the area. But this book itself is hypocritical, because for instance, it criticizes even Vance’s title of his book for saying “a culture in crisis” as if his experience speaks for the entire Appalachian culture, while this book is titled “a region responds” as if this book contains a well balanced mix of the region’s voices. The reality is that this book only seems to have voices from the liberal middle or upper class, people who (like Vance) used to be from Appalachia but left and were educated in expensive universities. Why not interview some Appalachians who were NOT college educated and who still live in the area? You could give them a copy of Vance’s book to have them read it if they haven’t read it yet, and then ask afterwards what they thought.
Many readers of that book apparently read it to gain insight into why Appalachians voted for Trump. But his memoir didn’t really explain it. This book does a better job at answering that question.
The first half of the book is all negative criticism of Hillbilly Elegy. The authors of these essays are just offended that there is anything at all negative said about hillbillies. About halfway through the book on page 171, the essays start to get more positive of Elegy. I liked these latter essays more because I tended to agree with them. So, going in order of the essays as they were laid out in this book, I will give my own criticism:
“What is culture other than a set of modes or habits that are subject to human choice and change over time” (29)?
I would define culture as the social norms of a society. I wouldn’t say they are much of human choice, or that they change much over time. Culture is usually used as a way to excuse “the way things are” in a society, that it’s unchangeable and people inside and outside of it just have to put up with it.
Dwight Billings says Hillbilly Elegy is “an advertisement for capitalist neoliberalism and personal choice. I did not choose to write about this book; it chose me” (38).
I’m a firm believer in personal choice. The memoir does not have its own will, so there is no factual way that it can choose you to write about it. Someone may have asked you to write about it, but that would be a person, not the book. And ultimately you still chose to comply.
In Vance’s opinion, the problem of Appalachian poverty “boils down simply to the bad personal choices individuals make in the face of economic decline—not to the corporate capitalist economy that creates immense profits by casting off much of its workforce or the failure of governments to respond to this ongoing crisis” (40).
Poverty has been a problem across the world for centuries. When government tries to fix it, it’s usually in the form of socialism and communism which just becomes corrupt and fails. I think government could help some poverty by banning outsourcing. But handing out free money to the poor is not a good solution, because it’s just a temporary fix and doesn’t motivate people to work for their own money. Just because corporations in Appalachia took their business elsewhere doesn’t mean the people living there should throw up their hands in defeat and stop trying to get another job. There are still personal choices when it comes to finance. One can choose to move out of the blighted area for a better life. One can choose to not waste one’s money on drugs and alcohol and tattoos and piercings and make up and the latest tech gadgets. As long as people just live off welfare and don’t work, they’re going to stay poor.
I guess that’s a main difference between democrats and republicans: democrats want government to solve their problems. Republicans tell you to solve your own problems. In the socialist system (which more democrats claim to align themselves with), the only people who get rich are government. With Republicans, business owners get rich. The democrat system sees the poor as powerless victims that someone else needs to save. Republicans say, save yourself. Most rich people started out with humble beginnings, but they succeeded because of capitalism, not because of government handouts.
“Vance’s fix, the usual neoliberal fix, is fix thyself” (41).
I mostly agree with Vance, because you can’t just wait around for someone else to solve your problems. Of course you can try voting for the change you want. But don’t hold your breath for that working out. If you want to succeed, you have to try to solve your own problems. Because that’s the only thing the individual can control: self.
What if Vance had waited for government to fix his poverty instead of going to college? Then he would have stayed poor. In a way, government DID help, by giving him financial aid in order to pay for his college. This option is available to all poor people. But it’s still up to the individual to apply and try hard in school.
“Wendy Brown refers to this ideology as a new ‘normative order of reason, a new governing rationality’ that constantly cajoles all persons, not just the poor, to police, reinvent, and perfect themselves, to be adept and flexible enough to make the right personal choices that hopefully will protect them against harsh and unpredictable vicissitudes of economic turmoil they can’t control” (45). What’s wrong with that?
“They are annoyed by critique” (46). Isn’t everyone?
Left-leaning writers blame “the decline of unions and with it their potential to divert voters from socially divisive issues” for why Hillary Clinton lost the election, among other things (48). Nobody should influence someone else’s vote, no matter what side they’re on.
The least popular subject for college reading programs is LGBT issues (63). I’m sure that will change soon. And like the other subjects colleges force their students to read, they will “endorse or affirm” rather than open a discussion or debate about it (69). And if anyone complains about that, they’ll be labeled a homo/transphobe.
“The transformation of Hillbilly Elegy from memoir to educational text makes it difficult to critique or debate” (70).
Gary Houchens, a professor of education administration for Western Kentucky University, believes that “government should reorganize tax policy and federal assistance programs to incentivize marriage to break the cycle of poverty within economically disadvantaged families” (71-72). Ha! As if forcing people to get married would take them out of poverty?! Marriage costs money! So does divorce! Although it’s statistically more likely for the poor to come from unmarried families, marriage is just a symptom of something else: stability and responsibility. It is those traits which are negatively correlated with poverty, but those traits can’t be forced on people.
“Although [Caudill, author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands] shared with them the burden of living in a coal-exploited region and the environmental consequences that followed, he had a comfortable life, a good education, a middle class profession, and a stable family, and he exhibited resentment toward those lacking the same” (76). Doesn’t this imply that the majority of those in the region are poor, uneducated, etc.? Yet the writers in this book seem to want us to believe otherwise.
“...particularly after the War on Poverty failed to lift Appalachians out of poverty as intended” (76). Why do the authors imply that the individuals can’t help themselves out of poverty but must rely on government to help? The government already tried to help, and look how that turned out.
On p.86, Roger Guy criticizes Vance for saying “Mamaw came from a family that would shoot at you rather than argue with you” because it’s consistent with stereotypes of hillbillies. But Vance was not making the claim that HILLBILLIES would rather shoot at you than argue with you. He was only talking about his own grandmother! Haven’t people the right to speak honestly about their own family without it being taken as evidence for some group as a whole? Vance is not the problem. The problem is people who generalize and stereotype based on one example.
“The lower class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of the future, it is something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen TO him, he does not MAKE them happen. . . . He works only as he must to stay alive and drifts from one unskilled job to another.” - Edward Banfield (97). Roger Guy says this is consistent with Vance’s opinion of hillbillies. But it’s also consistent with liberals who blame all the hillbillies’ problems on outside influences rather on the individuals. In the liberal opinion, the individual cannot MAKE anything happen, only the government can; the poor hillbillies had things happen TO them; they are not to be held responsible for their own situations.
The violence and impulsivity of hillbillies “has less to do with hillbilly values than the social conditions and influences in which any new urban migrant group find themselves” (100). What about Asian Americans? They started out poor when they migrated to America, but they worked hard and made themselves successful. Even after the Japanese were taken from their homes and put in internment camps, they still managed to be successful afterward!
“What Vance does not talk about is his privilege—male, whiteish, and urbanish” (107). Those things had nothing to do with why he succeeded. If he had any privileges at all, it was him having a grandmother in his life who instilled a hard work ethic into him. Colleges already have plenty of males and whites attending; it’s not like Yale chose him because of his sex or race. It’s actually MINORITIES who have the privilege applying to colleges, because of affirmative action—except Asians, of course, who colleges purposely don’t want to accept too many of because there are so many smart ones.
“He also does not talk about the role of the state as a positive force that facilitated his upward trajectory to the Ivy League and beyond” (107). Actually he did. He said that because he was poor, he could qualify for scholarships/grants which made it cheaper to go to Yale than to go to a non-Ivy League school. So his poverty was a privilege. And the precious government programs that these liberal writers love so much is something that helped Vance get into Yale for cheap. The writers say the government should do more to help these people out of poverty, but these programs already exist to help the poor. Vance succeeded, so the other poor people could do similarly if they applied themselves.
“Progressive folks (among whom I count myself) would vigorously protest Vance’s tough-love stance if he were writing about poor people of color, calling them lazy and criticizing them for ‘bad choices.’ Most progressives seem unfazed, however, that Vance’s assessments and policy proposals throw low-income whites under the proverbial bus” (108). That’s because people think it’s okay to criticize whites because then they won’t get called racist. But it IS racist to be okay with criticizing one race but not another. Any race can be lazy and make bad choices, and to be blind to that just because you don’t want to insult POC is stupid, biased, and RACIST.
“Now, post-Yale Law School, he enjoys at least some modicum of white privilege” (110). No, he has privilege now because he worked hard to get to and through Yale. And now he has the privilege of putting Yale on his resume, which opens a lot of doors, as well as the networking he discussed in the book. His elevated status now has nothing to do with being white.
“Except for his frequent use of ‘white’ to modify ‘working class’ (about fifty times throughout the book), Vance writes as if race is not relevant to his analysis” (112). Because it’s not. He’s talking about hillbillies. And as some have pointed out, there ARE non-white hillbillies. He is talking about people from a certain geographic region who are mainly BUT NOT SOLELY white. The area they’re from has more to do with who they are than their race.
P. 113-114: Two of Vance’s “messages about race might be summarized thusly: white people don’t equally enjoy the fruits of ‘white skin’ or whiteness more generally, and not every bad thing that happens to a Black person is entirely racially motivated. I agree with these points.” Really, you do? “And they find some support in recent scholarship.” It’s laughable that people think they need some peer reviewed study to tell them what is common sense.
I liked Hillbilly Elegy but I was under no illusions while reading it that it wasn't written by a white, conservative male. Apparently, Hillbilly's success has made some people worry that everyone who read it will forget that there is white privilege, that life as a male has a lot of advantages and that the system is so stacked for the rich/well off that almost no one else, aside from (figurative) lottery winners, ever is successful.
Maybe since I pretty much fit the correct categories it is easier to see and always in my mind.
Maybe since I pretty much fit the correct categories it is easier to see and always in my mind.
Having read Hillbilly Elegy, I'm glad I read this too. It's good to see both sides and both titles make valid points. I think that if you read one, it's a good idea to read the other one- to get the differing perspectives.
When Hillbilly Elegy came out, it landed like a thunderclap, perhaps because it was released during the 2016 election and was perceived as an explanation of the inexplicable popularity of Donald Trump. I put it on hold at the library, but before I read it, I listened to a few interviews with him on television and canceled my hold on the book. It was clear he was just one more advocate for abandoning the poor, only this pathologizing the white working class of Appalachia based solely on his own family experience. Nonetheless, the stereotypes in Vance’s book have proven popular and enduring, so I was very interested in reading Appalachian Reckoning, a collection of responses to the book, from academic rebuttals and personal essays to poetry and photography.
From the Protestant Work Ethic to the Prosperity Gospel, the god everyone worships is wealth and the greatest sin is poverty. America’s civic religion is Horation Algerism. This makes it very profitable to comfort the comfortable by telling them they need not feel compassion for those who struggle because it’s their own fault, their bad choices, their addiction to drugs, their failure to get a good job, and their cultural poverty. We hear it again with every generation and Vance hit a sweet spot just in time. We who are on the left and right can have smug contempt for Trump voters because they are uneducated, racist, lazy, hillbillies on opioids. According to R. C. Hutton points out “the book is aimed not at that underclass (few books are), but rather at 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 white folks’ inherent vices.” Yup.
Appalachian Reckoning restores the variety, vitality, and value of the people of Appalachia. The book includes several poems and photos and personal essays recounting the richness of that culture. The people of Appalachia are not culturally deficient. How much of our cultural heritage is sourced in those mountains? These are people who dared strike against the coal barons, whose Peabody coal strike is memorialized in song and film, and whose culture has fostered the Foxfire Magazine and book series (My parents had all the books.) Country music would not exist without its Appalachian origins.
I recommend reading Appalachian Reckoning in small bites rather than all at once because a collection of articles and essays critiquing one book naturally becomes a bit repetitive. How many ways can you say that Hillbilly Elegy works as a memoir, but as sociology, it fails? Nonetheless, I hope every person who read the original book would read this rebuttal because this book sees the humanity and complexity of a region and does not do the disservice of telling people whose jobs have been erased, whose land and rivers have been poisoned, and who are in despair that they problems they have are because they are weak, lazy, and ignorant.
Appalachian Reckoning will be released on March 1st. I received a copy of Appalachian Reckoning from the publisher through NetGalley.
Appalachian Reckoning at West Virginia University Press
Anthony Harkins faculty page
Meredith McCarroll Chronicle Vitae
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/9781946684806/
From the Protestant Work Ethic to the Prosperity Gospel, the god everyone worships is wealth and the greatest sin is poverty. America’s civic religion is Horation Algerism. This makes it very profitable to comfort the comfortable by telling them they need not feel compassion for those who struggle because it’s their own fault, their bad choices, their addiction to drugs, their failure to get a good job, and their cultural poverty. We hear it again with every generation and Vance hit a sweet spot just in time. We who are on the left and right can have smug contempt for Trump voters because they are uneducated, racist, lazy, hillbillies on opioids. According to R. C. Hutton points out “the book is aimed not at that underclass (few books are), but rather at 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 white folks’ inherent vices.” Yup.
Appalachian Reckoning restores the variety, vitality, and value of the people of Appalachia. The book includes several poems and photos and personal essays recounting the richness of that culture. The people of Appalachia are not culturally deficient. How much of our cultural heritage is sourced in those mountains? These are people who dared strike against the coal barons, whose Peabody coal strike is memorialized in song and film, and whose culture has fostered the Foxfire Magazine and book series (My parents had all the books.) Country music would not exist without its Appalachian origins.
I recommend reading Appalachian Reckoning in small bites rather than all at once because a collection of articles and essays critiquing one book naturally becomes a bit repetitive. How many ways can you say that Hillbilly Elegy works as a memoir, but as sociology, it fails? Nonetheless, I hope every person who read the original book would read this rebuttal because this book sees the humanity and complexity of a region and does not do the disservice of telling people whose jobs have been erased, whose land and rivers have been poisoned, and who are in despair that they problems they have are because they are weak, lazy, and ignorant.
Appalachian Reckoning will be released on March 1st. I received a copy of Appalachian Reckoning from the publisher through NetGalley.
Appalachian Reckoning at West Virginia University Press
Anthony Harkins faculty page
Meredith McCarroll Chronicle Vitae
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/9781946684806/
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced