Wednesday, January 4 2016 // The Statement 
7B

and lack of mobility is at play in these 
communities, and it is not getting better. 
The cycle of poverty and devastation that 
many white Americans have been caught 
in is so large that it is affecting trends 
at a macro level. The New York Times, 
reporting on a study from 2015, found “The 
mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old 
with no more than a high school education 
increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people 
from 1999 to 2014.” That is astonishing, 
given that “every other age group … every 
other racial and ethnic group” saw an 
increase in life expectancy. That fear and 
anguish may come, as some have termed, 
from a fear in the decline of their social 
standing, but that cannot encompass the 
entire span of this crisis. Poor white people 
are dying, quite literally.

Elections are won and lost almost always 

on economic lines. Though certainly not a 
perfect indicator of economic position, 
college education or lack thereof can be 
used as a rough outline of economic trends. 
Economic discrepancies between college 
graduates and those who did not attend 
college are obvious. And so was their 
voting in the 2016 election.

The 
Pew 
Research 
Center 
found 

“Trump’s margin among whites without 
a college degree is the largest among any 
candidate in exit polls since 1980. Two-
thirds (67%) of non-college whites backed 
Trump, compared with just 28% who 
supported Clinton, resulting in a 39-point 
advantage for Trump among this group.” 
The New York Times’ breakdown of exit 
polls makes the economic distinction even 
clearer. Among those making less than 
$30,000 annually, there was a 16-percent 
increase in voting for the Republican Party 
candidate from 2012 — for Donald Trump. 
Among those making $30,000 to $49,999 
a year, that shift was 6 percent. And 
though the shift was greatest among white 
Americans, there was actually a shift from 
2012 among all minorities toward Donald 
Trump, rather than away from him. So 
while it’s certainly true that affluent white 
Americans helped to elect Trump in this 
election, as they have for most Republican 
candidates in recent history, that is not the 
entirety of the story.

The specter, the fear, that has led 

poor Americans in general to a totally 
inexperienced, once-reality-television-star 
candidate isn’t limited to just the Rust Belt 
and Appalachian regions. Driving home 
down Aris T Allen Boulevard in Annapolis, 
Md., with a friend about two years ago, 
a woman appeared in the middle of the 
highway on her hands and knees. We pulled 
over, called the police and waited as the 
woman pulled herself together and hobbled 
to our car. When she came knocking on our 
window, telling us everything was fine (her 
face showed that it was not) and that all she 
needed was a ride to the Kmart, the police 

showed up and took her in. While we were 
in shock, the police officer was not. This 
was a common occurrence, he told us, as 
drug addicts would commonly use behind 
the nearby Safeway and occasionally find 
themselves standing in the middle of the 
highway. The drug, of course, was heroin.

Just a month after that incident, five 

heroin overdose victims were found 
in Annapolis on a single day. Though 
Annapolis proper is a relatively affluent 
— with a median household annual 
income of $75,320 dollars — the suburban 
areas around it are not necessarily, and 
Edgewater, where my high school is 
located, was known for intense drug use 
among the “white trash,” as they were 
often called. As kids, we loved to tell 
stories about how our neighboring middle 
school, Central Middle School — which I 
also attended — had frequent visits from 
the police, armed with dogs to sniff lockers 
for drugs. I didn’t think of the broader 
implications at the time, but as teachers 
became increasingly worried about the 
state of the school, my parents decided 
to send my younger brother to a private 
middle school far from our home.

They had that luxury, but most did not. 

Later in my high-school years, I went back 
to my middle school to tutor, and I got a 
glimpse at some of the realities J.D. Vance 
mentions. Kids were frequently distracted 
by what was going on in their home life, 
just as Vance described. He couldn’t 
study trigonometry knowing his mom was 
drugged out on the couch, or screaming 
at a new boyfriend. I worry the same was 
happening with these kids.

To be clear, my county, Anne Arundel 

County, voted for Hillary Clinton in 
this election, though by a thin margin 
of 116,074 votes to 114,509 votes. But 
through a highly unscientific survey of 
the town’s many Trump-Pence signs, and 
knowing the ideology of most of my friends 
from Edgewater, I’d be willing to bet 
Edgewater and the other poorer, largely 
white neighborhoods of Anne Arundel 
County went for Donald Trump. And these 
problems, which push the poor into protest 
votes, as with Donald Trump, are not getting 
better. According to The Baltimore Sun, in 
2016 “The number of drug- and alcohol-
related overdose deaths in Maryland in the 
first half of the year jumped more than 50 
percent from the same period last year.” In 
Michigan, the problem is the same. Heroin 
and opioid deaths have multiplied 10 times 
since 1999.

Drug use is not the only problem that 

Vance highlights with broader implications.

Vance expresses childhood anger at his 

mother’s various boyfriends, coming and 
going through a revolving door. “I loathed 
living with these strangers,” he writes, and 
it affects him more than just emotionally. 
His grades suffer without a stable home, 

and years later he would come across the 
psychological term “adverse childhood 
events” to describe his upbringing.

The issue of fatherhood, which Vance 

speaks to in his own life, reveals another 
bias. The crisis of “Black fatherhood” is 
often written about and discussed, but 
the same is not always said about white 
fatherhood. The prevalence of bad, or 
simply non-existent fathers in Vance’s poor 
white community shows us that the issue is 
not limited to Black communities.

Subverting and affirming stereotypes 

is one of Vance’s strongest achievements 
in this memoir. While he only implies 
this about Black fatherhood, he tackles 
others with both bluntness and reserve. 
Though his grandmother Mamaw is by no 
means the pinnacle of gay activism, she 
is clear on the subject when speaking to 
Vance: “even if you did want to suck dicks, 
that would be okay. God would still love 
you.” This is not what we might typically 
expect from a poor, rural, Christian, white 
woman. It betrays a political complexity 
that defeats simple narrative. It also leads 
into 
another 
stereotype 
complication 

— their relationship with God. The 
general understanding is that poor white 
Americans love God just as much as they 
do processed foods. But while his family 
and others might always talk about Jesus, 
he cites studies showing that “active 
church attendance (in the Bible Belt) is 
actually quite low.” What that relationship 
to God means is also highly malleable. 
Mamaw uses Christianity as a reason for 
why Christians should love the LGBTQ 
community. Vance’s experience with his 
father’s church was far different, and he 
explains that at those services, he “heard 
more about the gay lobby and the war 
on Christmas than about any particular 
character trait a Christian should aspire 
to have.” These are hugely different 
relationships with God, and reveal poor 
white Christians are not a monolithic 
group with singular views.

To be sure, Vance does gloss over some 

of the ugliest faces of his community, and 
feels hypocritical about others. According 
to Vance, white voters in his region did not 
detest Barack Obama solely for his race, 
but because of what he represented as a 
rich, highly educated citizen in our society. 
While that might be true, and while that 
might be a reason Hillary Clinton failed to 
reach this group of people, he touches on 
evidence that makes that shoulder brush 
seem less credible. When his cousin Gail 
announced she was pregnant by a Black 
man as a teen, the family shunned her. 
Nearly everyone in this family had children 
in their teens. But none of them, it seems, 
were Black. Vance approaches this with 
just a half paragraph, and it feels like he 
could have given this a bit more weight, 
particularly in light of how briefly he 

touched on the racism toward Obama.

Further, when he focuses his lens to 

others in his own community and beyond 
his own personal experiences, he fails to 
give them the context that he gives his own 
family. We understand why he struggled 
and was distracted in school, and we know 
why those in his family might be inclined 
to violence or drug use. He even addresses 
why his family would go out of their way 
to get the most expensive Christmas gifts 
possible, simply putting on the guise of 
comfortableness to be happy. When those 
around him, though, use welfare for treats 
such as cigarettes or liquor, he is harsh, 
and likens it to a community-wide crisis of 
laziness.

Still, 
his 
observations 
are 
largely 

moving and eye-opening. One that feels 
especially relevant here on campus lies in 
the hypocrisy of wealthy liberals talking 
about equality, yet still looking down 
on those in a different class from them. 
When he goes out with a group of friends 
to a late-night chicken restaurant and 
they leave a huge mess for the workers, 
only one other student stays back to help 
him clean up, and that student also came 
from a poorer background. I’ve seen the 
same at restaurants all around Ann Arbor. 
There is the sense here that it is easy to 
talk about economic equality on a macro 
level, but equally easy to ignore it when 
it’s right in front of you, on a micro level. 
An investigation by the Daily in 2014 found 
that “In Fall 2011, 63 percent of incoming 
freshmen reported family incomes over 
$100,000,” nearly twice the median family 
income in the United States. 

Taking that further, what does this 

mean for something like post-Trump vigils 
on campus? Though there were plenty 
of wealthy white men who voted for the 
morals of a misogynist, it’s also clear that 
many who voted for Trump will never 
experience a level of economic comfort 
that many of the most openly anti-Trump 
students on our own campus might. What 
does it mean, then, if a white student on 
campus with a family income of more than 
$250,000 attends such a vigil, and then 
tweets something derogatory about the 
poorer ones (coming back to those hillbilly 
memes) of their own race? Are these not 
in themselves expressions of privilege? 
These are hard questions which, as with 
all hard questions, do not have simple 
answers. There is without a doubt a reason 
for these kinds of protests. We on campus 
must remain allies for those who feel 
voiceless; we must protect our immigrant 
populations, be watchful for racism and 
homophobia, and condemn sexism. But 
we must also be cautious about criticizing 
entire 
demographics, 
and 
especially 

cautious that we do not fall into the 
mistake of unintentional classism. We can, 
for a start, read “Hillbilly Elegy.”

