A Sociological Response to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy

Before he made his foray into politics, JD Vance first garnered public attention for his book HillBilly Elegy (2016) which was a personal memoir of Vance's childhood wrapped in a damning cultural critique of impoverished, rural, Appalachian America. Vance's book release capitalized on the 2016 election after which everyone was looking for an explanation of the Trump win that they did not see coming.  However, in the haste to understand how so many working class and poor whites could support Trump, many readers failed to see the writing in between the lines in Vance's book.  

Vance's thesis is something like this: I made it out of rural poverty so anyone else can too if they try hard enough but they won't try hard enough because they are too lazy, addicted, and ignorant to try hard, but don't call them lazy, addicted, or ignorant because that will show that you are an elitist liberal.  Although his book was featured across the media and in book clubs and assigned for school readings, it never sat well with me. I have come to learn that it also didn't sit well with sociologists who study rural poverty and Appalachia.  Nor did it sit well with people actually from Appalachia.  Below is a selection of critiques of Vance's book. 

The most complete rebuttal to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is Appalachian Reckoning; A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. It is an anthology written by a number of social scientists including sociologists as well as other humanities scholars. Here is a summary from the publisher's website,

With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

Here is a partial table of contents:

Hillbilly Elitism by T. R. C. Hutton;

Social Capital by Jeff Mannp

Once Upon a Time in “Trumpalachia”: Hillbilly Elegy, Personal Choice, and the Blame Game by Dwight B. Billings

Stereotypes on the Syllabus: Exploring Hillbilly Elegy’s Use as an Instructional Text at Colleges and Universities by Elizabeth Catte

Benham, Kentucky, Coalminer / Wise County, Virginia, Landscape by Theresa Burriss

Panning for Gold: A Reflection of Life from Appalachia by Ricardo Nazario y Colón

Will the Real Hillbilly Please Stand Up? Urban Appalachian Migration and Culture Seen through the Lens of Hillbilly Elegy by Roger Guy

What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in Twenty-First-Century America by Lisa R. Pruitt

Prisons Are Not Innovation by Lou Murrey

Down and Out in Middletown and Jackson: Drugs, Dependency, and Decline in J. D. Vance’s Capitalist Realism by Travis Linnemann and Corina Medley

Here is an NY Times review of Appalachian Reckoning.

Additional critique of Hillbilly Elegy

From the New Republic, J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America; 
The bestselling author of "Hillbilly Elegy" has emerged as the liberal media's favorite white trash–splainer. But he is offering all the wrong lessons:

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

From Contexts (2019),

In Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, W. Carson Byrd conducts a theoretical case study of the book, which has achieved wide-reaching notoriety since its 2016 release. In particular, Byrd interrogates how Vance’s use of color-blind framing and White ignorance (the purposeful position of ignorance toward issues of racial inequality) makes his account palatable to Whites, despite targeting a segment of Whites.

Byrd argues that Vance’s book gained acceptance by presenting racial inequality as the natural result of blending genetic determinism and racial essentialism. Vance even adopts culture of poverty explanations for the position of Appalachian Whites that mimic those used to stereotype inner-city Blacks (since at least the Moynihan Report). Byrd also highlights that Vance explicitly asks readers to avoid using a racial lens as they interpret his story. Combined with its focus on micro-level explanations for pathological behaviors and inequality, Hillbilly Elegy effectively erases the racial makeup of Appalachia (making it seem White and homogenous), thus removing race from the equation to allow space for Vance (and readers) to retain their White ignorance.

Pointedly, Byrd warns that Vance’s color-blind accounts of the plight of Appalachian Whites paint both intraracial and interracial inequality as inevitable by sensationalizing and giving legitimacy to racist and biodeterminist explanations of inequality. Byrd is critical, too, of how rewarding this book and other accounts that are similarly dismissive about structural solutions could negatively impact efforts toward systematic analyses of and potential policy remedies for inequality.

From Arizona State Press,
REVIEW: THINKING ABOUT READING 'HILLBILLY ELEGY?' DON'T
The memoir depicting the Appalachian region pats negative stereotypes on the back,

The book blames or, depending on how you read it, thanks the region for electing President Donald Trump but does so without breaking down voter suppression in the region and the lack of broadband internet for researching candidates....it doesn't seem fair to me to make broad generalizations about any region, something the book does and almost prides itself on. By doing so, you cut off that community from having a voice, from defending itself against first impressions...."Hillbilly Elegy" isn't profound. The book asserts that because one person made it out of "broken" Appalachia, everyone should be able, and is expected, to do the same. Its primary argument is that poor people suffer because they don't know any better....The book fails to recognize the cultural diversity of Appalachia...in the case of "Hillbilly Elegy," research wasn't a priority...Stereotypes aren't the full picture, and there are so many other resources with research and a multitude of perspectives. Don't read Vance's memoir and don't watch the movie when it gets added to Netflix. If you're truly interested in reading about an Appalachian experience, reach for "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia" by Elizabeth Catte or "Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia" by Steven Stoll.

From The Nation (2024), How the Liberal Media Gave Us JD Vance