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.
My friends with generational ties to Appalachia experienced the book much as I did. They felt misrepresented. Misunderstood. Scapegoated for the result of the 2016 election. Many wrote pieces in direct response. Elizabeth Catte’s What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia is an absolute must-read in this regard.
But up here in Boston? People were lapping up Hillbilly Elegy. Theoretically liberal, educated people brought the book up in conversation, claiming his story helped them understand more about where I was from.
It absolutely didn’t.
People like me and my family – immigrants who neighbor and labor alongside white working-class Appalachians – don’t exist in Vance’s narrative. Black folks don’t exist in his narrative. Queer folks don’t exist in his narrative. And in his campaign rhetoric, we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problems; never as one of its sources of strength.
Folks outside Appalachia devoured Hillbilly Elegy because it reinforced what they already believed about us: that we were lazy, homogenous, and to blame for the unemployment, addiction and environmental disasters that plagued us. Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where “people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work”, allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.
Harper gladly published, and continues to profit off, his memoir. Major publishing outlets issued rave reviews. The book sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks and Ron Howard subsequently made it into a Netflix movie. (More profits, in case you missed them.) Vance quickly became a go-to for legacy media, appearing on CNN as the Rust belt explainer, and talking on NPR as the Appalachian expert, when in fact he was in no position to do either.
Vance’s narrative, and the people and institutions who championed it, who profited off it, are why he is Trump’s pick for vice-president. His candidacy rests on the platform that they created for him.
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Vance has only been in office since 2023. He’s not being chosen because of his legislative acumen. He’s got none to speak of.
He’s also not being chosen because of his ardent support of Trump. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and went so far as to write an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said “Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office”.
So what then, is the basis for Trump’s choice of Vance? Is it to court Appalachian votes? Or to court voters who believe the stereotypes about Appalachians? Or to appease those who profit off Appalachia’s resources while exploiting its people (looking at you, extractive industries and big pharma)?
A person who truly represented Appalachian people wouldn’t take money from the same big pharma lobby that left West Virginia with the highest opioid overdose rate in the country. They wouldn’t deny climate change in the face of catastrophic flooding that eastern Kentucky still hasn’t recovered from two years out. They wouldn’t stoke fear of immigrants, who provide essential labor in Appalachia in healthcare, agriculture and service industries. They wouldn’t sow division through culture wars in a region where solidarity is desperately needed.
My Appalachian friends and I are tired of being reduced to stereotypes. We are tired of the single-source, corporate-funded narrative that is propagated about us. Appalachia deserves a more complicated narrative, and better representation, than a Trump-Vance presidency offers us.
Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press.
This article was amended on 16 July 2024 to correct that Vance has been in office since 2023, not 2022. He was elected in 2022 and sworn into office in 2023.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
