Take this hillbilly’s word for it: JD Vance doesn’t speak for us.

In his bestseller memoir, JD Vance uses a wide brush to paint Appalachians as lazy, ignorant and unwilling to try at life.

July 17, 2024, 3:53 PM EDT By Willie Carver, poet and writer

@RalphHightower: About that title. JD is as GPS-challenged as former governor, Mark Sanford, who went hiking the Appalachia Trail and ended up in Argentina, in the arms and bosoms of hig mistress.

JD “John Boy1” Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy” piqued the interest of America; however, it recycles a narrative America has relied on for a century to sleep soundly despite the everyday horrors of our society: Rich people do well because they are morally better than the poor.

Add some powerful embellishments to get a bestseller.

  • a firebrand “pistol packing lunatic” mamaw who protects at all costs
  • a rags-to-riches story in which Vance, a Marine, escapes the “worst of my cultural inheritance” (p. 253) of unsophisticated, drug-addicted, murderous hillbillies.

Add a dangerous lie, one relying on ugly stereotypes that harm real Appalachians in order to advance a political career. Former President Donald Trump announced Monday that Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, is his pick for his running mate.

Vance is not Appalachian. He was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, well outside any maps of the distinct geographical and cultural region. Trump picking this Rust Belt charlatan as his running mate Monday sparked a resounding and unifying rant among conservative and liberal hillbillies alike in my social media feed: We do not acknowledge him.

Why would we? Vance introduces his reader to Appalachia by immediately profiling the worst behaviors of each of his uncles, including a scene of grotesque violence. He calls Appalachians a “pessimistic bunch” living in a “hub of misery” (p. 4), and over and over again he uses a wide brush to paint Appalachians as lazy, ignorant and unwilling to try at life.

I am not alone.

Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll’s “Appalachian Reckoning,” a response to Vance’s bestseller, anthologizes more than 400 pages of responses from real Appalachians describing their lives in all the nuance they deserve.

But nuanced stories aren’t useful in politics.

Appalachia is simply a rhetorical device for Vance that he used to launch a political career. If your political goal is to blame the poor for their own problems, then using the regional ethnicity of your grandparents to present yourself as “authentic” can compel readers to believe your narrative or to feel good about having already believed it. After all, the narrative of the lazy hillbilly has existed for as long as rich folks outside of Appalachia needed an explanation for mountain poverty that doesn’t include blaming themselves.

The narrative of the lazy hillbilly has existed for as long as rich folks outside of Appalachia needed an explanation for mountain poverty that doesn’t include blaming themselves.

Did the poverty come from the rest of the country ignoring a region they thought had no resources?

Did the poverty come from outside coal companies not paying coal miners actual money for decades?

Why blame complex issues that implicate rich white folks when “lazy” is only two syllables?

Vance builds on this narrative, ignoring nuance and context, presenting supposed anecdote after supposed anecdote of cultural depravity and portraying himself as a hillbilly who survived and knows the answer to what ails Appalachia is political conservatism.

For Vance, issues of poverty, drug abuse and neglected children are “issues of family, faith, and culture.” (p. 238) He goes so far as to claim that these “problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else.” (p. 255)

That’s insulting. Individuals living in poverty did not invent opioids. Individuals living in poverty did not refuse to regulate opioids.

He puts the blame entirely on poor Americans, on mothers on food stamps and on fathers who are out of work, extending the roots of that blame directly to Appalachians and some inherent moral flaw. In convincing readers outside of Appalachia that they need the solution he is selling, he paints the Appalachian as the moral problem in America:

“If there is any temptation to judge these problems as the narrow concerns of backwoods hollers, a glimpse at my own life reveals that Jackson [Kentucky]’s plight has gone mainstream. Thanks to the massive migration from the poorer regions of Appalachia to places like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, hillbilly values spread widely along with hillbilly people.” (p. 20)

The dog whistle is pretty clear: The immoral hill folks are already in your area. Trust me, I escaped them. I know the answer to save you from them.

The “hillbilly” twist is a particularly clever political move because it allows poor white folks living in swing states (like those listed above) to draw a quick line of demarcation around themselves — hardworking but poor Americans — and the supposed immoral, lazy welfare queens and absent, violent hillbilly fathers spreading into their cities and towns.

Vance paints himself as having narrowly escaped “the deep anger and resentment” (p. 2) of those who raised him and laments the supposed white working class feeling that “our choices don’t matter.” (p. 176)

Wednesday morning, my sister, who has known overwhelming pain and difficulty, signed up for nursing classes at a community college. Last week, my nephew, a young man with everything stacked against him, asked me to meet him to talk about vocational school.

I see people making choices.

I see no anger.

Vance confuses frustration in a difficult system with anger and resentment; he misrepresents Appalachians acknowledging that the choices they have are few and far between and require great levels of personal sacrifice as their belief that the choices they make don’t matter. He sees the drowning person and decides they lack determination in swimming. He ignores those creating the flood.

Vance does identify one hillbilly trait that I will, at this moment, agree with: We can be distrustful of outsiders. I might add that I am most distrustful of outsiders pretending to be insiders and of outsiders with a political agenda.

This hillbilly does not trust JD Vance.

Willie Carver

Willie Carver is a gay hillbilly writer and poet from Eastern Kentucky. He is the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year and the author of “Gay Poems for Red States.”

  1. @RalphHightower: Since JD claims to be from Appalachia, give him the nickname, John Boy, from The Waltons. ↩