In 2016, before he got elected to the United States Senate, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, published a memoir exploring what he thought was wrong with working-class white culture. On the one hand, Hillbilly Elegy is a tale of economic instability, addiction, and cultural decline. On the other, it’s a classic story of American upward mobility wherein Vance shakes off his people’s pathologies in order to climb the social ladder. It’s a story that’s been told countless times by Americans who’ve climbed their way out of ghettos and barrios. Some authors blame the system. Others focus more on the self-destructive behaviors of those caught at the bottom. Vance tended toward the latter, so much so that The New York Times called it “tough love” while other critics accused him of “blaming the victim.” Meantime, more than one left-wing reviewer resented the fact that Vance painted a segment of the white population as pathological minorities. They evidently thought that he had crept onto their turf.
I read Hillbilly Elegy as part of my research into white people. While his memoir didn’t particularly impress me, I appreciated Vance’s choice of looking at his Appalachian roots through an ethnic, rather than a racial lens. His book put a human face on Trump’s politics of white grievance. The primary difference was that Vance emphasized the need for cultural renewal, while Trump is always hammering away on who is to blame.
For a generation now, newspapers have been beating the drums of demographic change as if they were looking forward to the day when whites become a minority. And here we are, if not numerically, then culturally. Frankly, I was already tired of the politics of grievance, but now we have a new minority eager to play. But, alas, grievance is the language America speaks, and whoever thinks violence is foreign to any aspect of life in America has never actually been to America.
Three years ago this week, I was on a research trip in Vance’s home state of Ohio when I stumbled on a sign marking the birthplace of the first white child in the state. The finding was made all the more unsettling given that I was in Gnadenhutten, where, in 1782, 160 Pennsylvania militiamen massacred 96 pacifist Christian Indians.
Vance called his bestseller an elegy. I called my book of essays on white people a tragedy. It’s time to take white anger seriously or it will burn us all up.
You can find Whiteness: An American Tragedy on Amazon.
