I'm from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn't represent us - he only represents himself

[Jilly_in_VA]

Neema Avashia

Back in 2016, I was an Appalachian expat living in Boston, feeling homesick and displaced like I do most of the time up here. I saw a book in the Harvard Coop with the word Hillbilly on the cover and jumped at it. No one up here knew that word, or if they did, they understood it as derogatory, while I understood it as home. Here home was, I thought, staring me in the face from the front table at a major bookstore.

I barely read 30 pages before I saw the book Hillbilly Elegy for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw JD Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed our region.

Here’s the thing: JD Vance doesn’t represent Appalachia. JD Vance only represents himself.

To the outside world, Vance is sure to appear far more Appalachian than I do. He is white, Christian, and has longstanding generational ties to the region. I, on the other hand, am south Asian, the child of Indian immigrants who settled in Appalachia in the 1970s, because work in the chemical industry brought them there, and left in the early 2000s, because work disappeared.

We do have this in common, though: both of us left Appalachia in pursuit of higher education, and have lived away for as long as we lived within the region. But while Vance uses the story of his upbringing to perpetuate a flat, stereotyped representation of Appalachia, my identity, that of my family and community, complicates the narrative in ways that are politically inconvenient.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/16/jd-vance-hillbilly-elegy-appalachia

This is what I've been trying to tell y'all! I lived there for 35 years and J.D. is no more a "hillbilly" than an elephant is. He's purenteed white trash and doesn't know anything about the REAL Appalachia. He wasn't even raised there. He was raised in Ohio, just across the WV line.

[overleft]

1. Being from the mountains of Virginia, I have to totally agree with you.

[jimfields33]

2. It's a autobiography of his life.

That’s how his life in Appalachia was like. I’m sure there are many different experiences there. I never read the book or saw the movie. They did an article on him saying, “ that was my life.”

[Jilly_in_VA]

3. But he's not from Appalachia

He's from Ohio. across the river from it. Some of his people may have been, but HE isn't. He's just white trash. Trailer trash, if you will.

[Igel]

5. Amusingly, he grew up in Butler County.

The Ohio Butler County, not the Pennsylvania Butler County.

[walkingman]

4. He reminds me of Sarah Palin in a lot of ways. None of us get to choose

our families, but if his Hillbilly Elegy is anywhere near accurate, he has clearly abandoned the lessons he must have learned growing up. A wife of immigrants (same as Trump), would seem to make someone have at least a touch of empathy for people wanting to make their lives better than theirs....his family being helped by social programs...and then after acknowledging Trump as a possible next Hitler.....it just doesn't compute.

These folks (the GOP) have no core values. They are like chameleons, changing depending on what is good for them.