JD Vance and I share Appalachian roots. He’s just the latest to exploit the region for personal profit. - The Boston Globe (2024)

As many were reeling from the 2016 presidential election, JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” published earlier that year, emerged as a way to understand Trump’s victory via a working class memoir from Appalachia. And for me, as an Appalachian expatriate living in New England, “Hillbilly Elegy” became inescapable. Liberal and well-meaning colleagues told me that they had read the book; many told me that they understood where I was from having read it. “Hillbilly Elegy” is selling again as Americans seek to understand the vice presidential nominee; his first success was not when the book was released but when Trump was elected and Vance’s book was seen as an answer from Appalachia. Many Appalachians take issue with his claim to the region given that he was raised in Middletown, Ohio — which is not Appalachian — and only visited family in eastern Kentucky.

I was a 24-year-old living in Boston when I realized what it meant to be Appalachian. Five generations of my family had called western North Carolina home, and I had nothing but pride in calling myself a mountain girl. It didn’t take me long to realize that my feelings about Appalachia were not widely shared in the city. I spent a little time trying to explain where I was from and what that meant. But the shadow of stereotype darkened the light I tried to shine when I talked about home, and before long I stopped saying where I was from. All along, though, I held on to my love for Appalachia like a secret — their loss if they don’t know the labor history of the term redneck or if they take hillbilly to be a slur. I knew then that Appalachia was a complex and beautiful place worth loving.

Like any empathetic reader, I found Vance’s personal story touching. The character of his Mamaw resonated with me. I was sad for this boy whose mother battled addiction, creating instability and insecurity for JD. But about halfway through the book, I started cringing as it felt like he was writing something other than a personal memoir. As I read closely to confirm that he was, in fact, claiming that hillbillies are somehow inherently lazy and prone to violence, I was baffled. When I realized he was citing eugenicist Charles Murray, I was worried. By the time that I had finished the book, I was shaking mad. Vance was manipulating readers into thinking that his point of view was somehow representative. He was convincing people that Appalachians are all the same — poor, lazy, and deserving of their poverty.

Vance was simply the latest to peddle the same old stereotypes of a people in order to justify taking from them. With Amy Chua in one ear and Peter Thiel in the other, this young Yale lawyer leaned into a particular boot-straps narrative not to help anyone understand Appalachia and not to offer a sociology of mountaineers or a history of the region. Vance wrote his memoir to launch his political career. He used his Mamaw’s generosity, his mother’s struggles, and his teacher’s encouragement as plot points in a story about getting out. He climbed the ladder and pulled it up behind him, blaming those left behind.

What I found in those pages was familiar, not because Vance’s experience mirrored mine, but because Vance was using the same stereotypes I had studied as I learned how the region had been exploited. From 19th-century local color pieces that ran in Harper’s Magazine to reality shows like “Buckwild,” Appalachia has been portrayed as a place filled with ignorant and backward people who belong to another time. Yesterday’s people. Its land and people have been seen as deserving of exploitation. Take the beauty, strip the value, and prosper individually. First it was timber. Later it was coal. Now it is identity. Vance tapped a vein and extracted an identity that allows him to be of the people while he blames the people for their challenges.

In 2018, I gathered writers, scholars, and photographers to be a part of “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.” The point of the book wasn’t to attack Vance, but to complicate the monolithic narrative that he was peddling about a 13-state region that spans from Alabama to New York. Let’s create a chorus of voices, my co-editor Anthony Harkins and I said. Let’s pass the mic so that no one can misperceive his as the only perspective. We felt the need to do this because of Vance’s move from “I” to “we” in his “memoir of a family and a culture in crisis.” Rather than telling his own story, he was claiming the right to tell our story … something most people from this broad and diverse region would know better than to try.

As Vance continued his climb to power, some were shocked by his change of heart about certain leaders, or by his erratic positions that don’t seem to align with clear policies. Those of us who have been paying attention to him since he used us for his early launch onto the political scene are not surprised. Those of us who grew up in towns where the factory left, who had a teacher who believed in us, and who had extended family who helped care for us, see Vance taking without looking back. Those of us who have felt the resonance of the opioid crisis, who come from places that Purdue Pharma targeted, who have seen the empty storefronts of Main Street, see Vance pruning his experience into something shaped like a hero’s journey. Vance has had so many opportunities to hear the push-back, to listen to his neighbors, to tell a more accurate story … or at least a more personal and less representative story. Part of a long history of people taking from the region for their own benefit, he continues to look down on the places and people that lifted him up.

Meredith McCarroll is author of “Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film” and co-editor of “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.”