Vice Presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) first entered popular culture selling a caricature of Appalachian culture to eager elite consumers on both the political right and left. His 2016 book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” spent a whopping 36 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, twice reaching the top of that list.
Vance did not grow up in Appalachia, but his story tells the first-person account of his extended family’s harrowing escape from Appalachian poverty and its “culture in crisis.”
My own story parallels that of Vance: I escaped a middle-class, suburban, southern California upbringing to settle in Pittsburgh, the largest city in Appalachia (or Appalachia-adjacent, depending on which map you consult). I now work as a political scientist and educator of Appalachian politics.
Unlike Vance, though, I regularly observe — and describe to my University of Pittsburgh students — an Appalachia resplendent with a rich, vibrant culture, constructed by people who are proud, industrious, talented and resilient to the many ways the outside world has exploited them.
“Hillbilly Elegy’s” publication in 2016 came just in time for the round of progressive elite navel-gazing that followed the election of President Donald Trump.
Vance, then in his anti-Trump era, embraced this interpretation of the book. The memoir sold the left side of the political spectrum an explanation of Trump voters as backward and bigoted hillbillies. And it sold the right side of the political spectrum on Trump voters as rebelling against backward and lazy hillbillies.
Demonizing poor rural Appalachians for votes and profit may be the last bastion of American bipartisanship. The only people who didn’t see any value in the narrative were the “hillbillies” themselves.
And even the word “hillbilly,” is, in Appalachian culture, equal parts a painful slur and a source of great pride. Due to such a dual existence, the word “hillbilly” is sacred. And then a Yale alumnus from middle-class suburban Cincinnati co-opted the word “hillbilly” and parlayed it into a bestseller, a film deal, then a political career.
Appalachians have a long history of witnessing elite outsiders extract their resources, from the coal underneath to their rich, dense forests all around, and now even their cultural narrative soul. No wonder a political science colleague at West Virginia University, Sam Workman, told The Associated Press that the book stands as “poverty porn.”
It can, I have learned, rub a true hillbilly the wrong way. This is, in part, what may have prompted Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) (and possible vice presidential candidate) to declare recently on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that, regardless of politics, Vance “ain’t from here.”
There’s nothing wrong with reading “Hillbilly Elegy,” but we need to keep in focus that it is the story of Vance’s perspective of Appalachian people, not the story of the people themselves. Vance’s book is his story and he, of course, has a right to tell it. But his work should not be marketed as a memoir of a “culture in crisis.”
Appalachia has a good many problems, but virtually all of those problems were foisted upon them by outsiders. Some of the same outsiders — both from the right and left — are now using Appalachia as a political cudgel rather than listening to and learning from its people and its stories.
The culture of Appalachia is just fine. In fact, it is teeming with hope and promise and incredible diversity.
Like Vance, I did not grow up in Appalachia, but its stories are mine as an American. And these Appalachian stories, as Appalachians themselves tell them, are not hard to find. You don’t need to rely on JD Vance, or myself, to tell them.
From novelist Silas House to filmmaker Ashley York to Appalshop, a nonprofit company that for over 50 years has supported Appalachian people telling Appalachian stories and beyond, there are myriad sources from which to learn, firsthand, about the diversity and beauty of Appalachian culture.
In fact, Appalachians themselves have responded in print to reclaim their culture from Vance’s distortion. Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll’s edited volume, “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,” or Elizabeth Catte’s “What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia,” are good places to start.
But Appalachians have been telling their stories for generations. The libraries are bursting.
Long before Hillbilly Elegy, bell hooks, who lived and died there so immodestly that she preferred to spell her name lower-case, wrote her beautiful Appalachian Elegy, a book of poems dedicated to Appalachia, which she calls her “native place.”
To hooks, Appalachians are not a “culture of crisis,” valuing only handouts and opioids. Rather, hooks’s Appalachian values are about “living with integrity,” being “a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.”
We owe it not only to Appalachian natives but also to ourselves to stop using Appalachia as a pawn in a political game. We need to get their story right and we need to let them tell it.
Kristin Kanthak is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where she regularly teaches courses on the politics of Appalachia.