T

he common explanation post-
11/8/2016 includes some kind 
of combination of the terms 

“white,” “angry,” “xenophobic” and “racist” 
— the list is familiar, and not entirely unfair. 
White Americans did, quite factually, vote 
for Donald Trump in resounding numbers 
in the general election. According to an 
exit poll conducted by Edison Research 
for the National Election Pool, 58 percent 
of white non-hispanic voters cast ballots 
for Trump, in comparison to 37 percent for 
his opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary 
Clinton. This is a reality.

But there are many faces to that reality, 

even if they’re not always distinguished 
clearly in coverage. That’s a mistake 
easy to see on social media outlets like 
Twitter, where 62 percent of adults get 
their news, according to a recent survey 
by Pew Research millenials. When many-
faceted political issues like the Trump 
election are simplified into 140 characters 
or highlighted videos, the result is rarely 
nuanced.

Match 
that 
with 
an 
ever-growing 

atmosphere of partisanship, and what 
we get is a this-or-that-side anger. There 
is no room for a middle; there is no 
conversation to be had. Right after the 
election, feeds were filled with variations 
of “fuck white people,” or some kind of 
derogatory meme of a poor white hillbilly 
or redneck. This anger is understandable 
given the rhetoric of the election. Many 
in our country feel explicitly targeted, and 
racism, xenophobia and white anger are all 
relevant contributing factors to this.

The problem is when our explanations 

refuse to accept another. On one side, 
there’s childish, haughty “I told you so” 
rhetoric from Trump’s supporters, which 
refuses to acknowledge those very real 
concerns of minorities in this country, 
equating it all to “whining,” a privileged 
term to use for many who have never felt 
targeted in the same way as minorities in 
this country do, especially now. The other, 
though, has created monolithic categories 
for where to direct its own anger: white 
Americans, the poor, the uneducated. 
When terms like “working-class” and 
“inequality” 
are 
introduced 
into 
the 

conversation, accusations of normalizing 
are thrown easily. Acknowledging one 

reality does not take away from another. 
We can understand that important social 
progress in our country — gay rights, racial 
equality, immigrant rights, etc. — is at risk, 
while still recognizing that there are issues 
beyond social discomfort at this progress 
that drove poor white Americans to the 
polls.

J.D. Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” 

released in June, tackles these forgotten 
(or simply eschewed) realities. His story is 
a painful and relevant one.

Raised partly in Rust Belt Middletown, 

Ohio, and partly in Appalachian Jackson, 
Kentucky, Vance’s family is by nature a 
kind of representation for problems of 
those regions. He describes his family as 
“Hillbilly Royalty” — that is not on account 
of their wealth, which is hardly existent, 
but because of how Vance’s ancestors were 
known as some of the hardest, most loyal 
people in the area. These words require 
clarification: Loyalty, to this group, means 
attacking a man with an electric saw who 
insults his mother, or forcing another 
to eat a pair of underpants for making a 
lewd comment about his sister. This is 
what Vance calls “Hillbilly Justice,” and 
it’s just the first introduction to a world 
whose regularities are miles different than 
many Americans’, especially the college-
educated. His people are not part of some 
mythically comfortable “middle class.”

Vance understands that the romanticizing 

of this kind of violence is indicative of 
deeper problems in the community. It 
creates a culture that its children nearly 
inevitably fall into. While Vance himself 
has by most measures largely escaped the 
fate of so many of his peers, he discusses 
how this kind of internalized violence 
remains: Driving down the road with his 
wife, he nearly exited his car after someone 
honked their horn at him, ready to fight. 
This isn’t what might first come to mind 
as Yale Law School graduate behavior. But 
it’s normal for the people of his upbringing, 
and emphasizes how this kind of behavior 
doesn’t just immediately disappear when 
financial problems are less apparent.

Context here is everything, and Vance 

does not put forth these kinds of “cultural” 
problems without giving at least some 
background for their existence. For one, 
there is the overwhelming sense in these 

pages that these are a stuck people. His 
grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, grew 
up in rural Kentucky, where poor white 
families would feud and fight for survival. 
When they left for the Rust Belt for a better 
future, their assumption was that things 
would be different. Vance makes it clear 
from the start that they would not be.

Those problems, which plagued rural 

Kentucky, were just as present, if not more 
so, in rural Ohio. As the companies that were 
once the beaming hope for these towns — 
Armco Steel, Champion Paper and Fiber, 
Procter and Gamble, and National Cash 
Register — began to size down, outsource 
and lose money, their manufacturing jobs 
began to leave. The work that was there for 
parents would not be there for their kids. 
That dream of upward mobility for those 
who left one impoverished, rural area for 

another was just that: a dream.

The rut these families find themselves in 

leads to explicit expressions of anger, like 
violence, but also more inward ones, such 
as drug use and addiction. The latter has 
been a growing epidemic in towns like the 
one Vance grew up in, as heroin and other 
kinds of opioids in particular have taken 
hold. This past summer 27 West Virginians 
overdosed in the city of Huntington 
within a four-hour span. When Vance’s 
own mother succumbed to this addiction, 
though after much other previous drug use 
and alcoholism, Vance recognizes this drug 
differently: “‘Heroin’ just has a certain ring 
to it; it’s like the Kentucky Derby of drugs,” 
he writes. Its specter is very real over these 
communities, and elicits a justifiable fear 
and anguish.

A 
combination 
of 
fear, 
frustration 

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 // The Statement
6B

by Matt Gallatin, 
Deputy Magazine Editor

Hillbilly Elegy, 
on Campus 
and in a Trump America

