More on Hillbilly Elegy

 Yesterday’s post talked about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. That post dealt with what the book got right and how subsequent displays of Vance’s character – or lack thereof – make everything in it dubious. Today I’ll talk about things in the book that indicated to me he was talking though his hat even then.

Early in the book Vance notes that people use the terms hillbilly, redneck, and white trash interchangeably. I grew up at the northern tip of the Appalachian coal country Vance is from and can reasonably say he’s full of shit.

Hillbilly is self-descriptive, and Vance did a serviceable, if less than flattering, job of describing them as people from the hollers who hold firm to family, are distrustful of outsiders, hold grudges, actively resist change, and spend more time reading the Bible than observing its lessons.

A redneck is someone who typically is a manual laborer, as is indicated by the term redneck; their necks are sunburned from working outdoors, often in construction, landscaping, or some other physical task. Rednecks have their own undesirable qualities – quick to anger, too often ready to fight, drink too much beer, and a casual racism they do not themselves see – but they work, and are willing to find different work if the situation requires it. I grew up among rednecks and have a few of the qualities myself. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. That’s just how it is.

White trash are well described in Vance’s book. These are people who don’t work and expect someone else to take care of them. Calling someone “white trash” is the ultimate insult among rednecks.

Conflating the three archetypes does no one any favors. While there are similarities among hillbillies and redneck, the differences are profound. White trash are something completely different from both.

Vance wasn’t finished. Later in the book, after he’s talked about his formative years and gets into examining the problem hillbillies face, he starts to use the term interchangeable with working class whites.

I grew up working class white in a working class white neighborhood. I moved away 45 years ago, but I still proudly identify as such. Someone tries to conflate working class white with redneck, I’ll shake my head a little and give a tight smile, but I have no good argument against it. Given how Vance has described the hillbilly life in the first two hundred pages of the book, I take his making synonyms of hillbilly and working class white to be an insult.

Words matter, especially when used to communicate broad ideas. Vance has taken the warnings of Orwell and Huxley as instruction manuals to say whatever he wants in whatever manner he chooses to and decide for himself what those words mean. It’s a dangerous tactic, and we place ourselves in peril for letting him get away with it.