A Mountaineer’s Prayer

I am tired of talking about J.D. Vance. And I’m not one for introspection (just ask my husband). But as a daughter of Appalachia and a professor of anthropology at a public university, J.D. Vance’s claim to represent Appalachia and his threats to attack our nation’s universities and their professors, who he’s labeled “the enemy,” are personal for me. Echoing other Appalachia-raised writers who have recently weighed in, I say to J.D. Vance: you are a hillbilly phony (Caleb Miller). You don’t represent us (Neema Avashia). And you can keep your “elegy” (Ivy Brashear) because hillbillies don’t need one (Meredith McCarroll). Your Hillbilly Elegy is a political platform disguised as a memoir, and I call bullshit. More

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I am tired of talking about J.D. Vance. And I’m not one for introspection (just ask my husband). But as a daughter of Appalachia and a professor of anthropology at a public university, J.D. Vance’s claim to represent Appalachia and his threats to attack our nation’s universities and their professors, who he’s labeled “the enemy,” are personal for me. Echoing other Appalachia-raised writers who have recently weighed in, I say to J.D. Vance: you are a hillbilly phony (Caleb Miller). You don’t represent us (Neema Avashia). And you can keep your “elegy” (Ivy Brashear) because hillbillies don’t need one (Meredith McCarroll). Your Hillbilly Elegy is a political platform disguised as a memoir, and I call bullshit.

I grew up on a mountainside in Jefferson, North Carolina. That’s in Ashe County (the Christmas tree capital of the country), in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian Highlands. My parents were public school teachers, first generation college students who met in the 1960s at Appalachian State Teachers College (now Appalachian State University). My mother, June, was one of seven children, born in Mitchell County, NC. Her fondest childhood memory was when the bookmobile came to the homestead. She would hide in a tree all day long with a stack of books. Her least favorite childhood memory was having to carry the hog’s head in a bucket up the road to Aunt Hattie for making hog’s head cheese. Mom’s father was an underemployed tinkerer and mica miner who died of silicosis when I was three years old (that’s a lung disease caused by breathing in tiny bits of silica). Mom’s mom, who we called Grandmommy, served hot lunches in a public-school cafeteria and sewed jeans at a Wrangler factory in Spruce Pine. Years of hoisting and sewing heavy denim left her with debilitating arthritis and a twisted back. After retiring, Grandmommy handstitched a quilt for every grown child and grandchild in the family. Some of us got two or three. She must have made at least 30.

Like other families, our social life centered around the local church. Ours was Baptist. We often went to church three times a week—two services on Sunday, and a Wednesday evening event. My dad David taught Sunday school, served as a deacon, and sang in the choir. My sister and I sang in the children’s choir and did service projects through “Girls in Action.” Mom coordinated potlucks, picnics, and trips for the youth, and did overseas outreach as head of the Women’s Missionary Union. We got, and gave, a lot of social support at church. It was our community. My sister and I were in Brownies and Girl Scouts, and I was in 4-H. We were always busy.

I went to Lansing Elementary and Northwest Ashe High School. The mascot for both of these rural mountain schools was the “Mountaineer,” in some pictures a proud explorer in the mold of Daniel Boone or Lewis and Clark, in others a hayseed, a hick, a clodhopper, a country bumpkin—in other words, a hillbilly. (I secretly wondered if the original mascot wasn’t Old Reece, the kindly bearded man with long grey hair who lived—and eventually died–in a cave near the high school).

We were lucky to grow up with two teachers for parents: in our household reading and learning was fun and homework was non-negotiable. At school our third-grade classroom had a termite problem. Our fourth-grade teacher had bad temper. (He was arrested on a meth charge thirty years later in the TV series “Southern Justice.”) But we got an excellent education at those small rural schools. When Mrs. Caviness had us read Chaucer in the original Old English, we were proud to recognize some of our own mountain dialect in the Old English. Our tough English vocabulary tests every Friday prepared us for the SAT. We went to statewide band competitions because Ashe County schools had strong music programs. The young former Peace Corps volunteer who taught French managed to equip us with a surprising amount of it.

My high school classmates, many of whom still live in Ashe and the surrounding Appalachian counties or slightly down-state, have jobs in agriculture, education, engineering, health care, social work, manufacturing, law enforcement, real estate, the arts, tourism, the service industry, and more. They went to universities like App State, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State, or took classes at Wilkes Community College. Thanks to scholarships and federal loans, I went to Wake Forest University, a full two hours away in Winston-Salem (an eternity back then). Some amazing faculty members became my mentors, like Dr. William (“Billy”) Hamilton, who was like a second father. With their encouragement I studied abroad in Moscow, embarked on graduate studies, and eventually became a professor.

Our community had its problems—quite a few kids had food instability; some experienced domestic violence, addiction, and mental health crises themselves or in their families. One of our classmates died by suicide not long after graduation. But these challenges were not “special” to Appalachia. And almost all of us benefitted from supports like excellent teachers, arts programs in schools, community churches and other organizations, and public assistance like subsidized meals at school.

Appalachia is in my bones, and I don’t recognize myself or my community in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. But I would never offer my own history, my own little story, as representative of the Appalachian experience. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what J.D. Vance does in his book.

Vance tracks his rags to riches journey from Middletown, Ohio, to Yale Law School (with summers in Jackson, Kentucky which, unlike Middletown, is actually in Appalachia). He bounces from one living situation to another with a substance-using mother and her string of “flavor of the month” boyfriends, all under the watchful eye of MaMaw and PaPaw, with whom he also lived intermittently. Vance describes an environment of domestic violence and substance use, but also of fierce love for family and country. He “made it” not because of his environment but in spite of it. His Appalachia—the “hillbilly culture” he escaped—is one of backwardness, bad choices, and lack of initiative. The characters in Elegy are vivid and relatable, especially MaMaw, the salty family matriarch, who cusses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney. Vance credits MaMaw with keeping him on the straight and mostly narrow. (In his recent RNC speech, Vance proudly claimed that after her death, he found 19 loaded handguns in MaMaw’s house.)

Vance is a good writer. He tells his story well.

But that’s just it. Hillbilly Elegy is one man’s story, the story of a man who technically didn’t even grow up in Appalachia. Vance grew up in an Ohio town in the Rust Belt, a town to which a lot of people from Appalachia—including Vance’s grandparents—had moved. His grandparents were products of the so-called “hillbilly highway,” the migration of tens of thousands of Appalachian families to towns and cities in the Midwest and elsewhere for work.

So, Vance’s very claim to be a “hillbilly” from Appalachia is not clear cut. As Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear recently said, “J.D. Vance ain’t from here.”

Even if Vance did qualify as Appalachian, he certainly does not speak for all of Appalachia. He uses anecdotes from his own life to paint a vast swath of the United States in broad brushstrokes. Appalachia spans 206,000 square miles and comprises 423 counties across 13 states. He overlooks Appalachia’s rich diversity and her 26.4 million residents, instead offering his own experiences as representative of “hillbilly culture.” His statement that “the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive” (p. 4) is breathtaking in its dismissal of the tapestry of topographies, linguistic traditions, racial and ethnic identities, livelihoods, and cultural traditions that make up Appalachia.

By contrast, Roger May captures Appalachia’s unique beauty and diversity in his “Looking at Appalachia” project, a crowdsourced website of nearly 600 photographs taken by Appalachians from New York to Mississippi. As Meredith McCarroll describes in The Bitter Southerner,

Scrolling through the website, you see Appalachia. Mechanics, farmers, poets, tattoo artists, preachers, and builders. Mountains under descending fog, mountains with their tops blasted off, mountains covered in snow. Car lots and tobacco barns and trailer parks and factories. Schools and rivers and kudzu and train tracks. Dancers and soldiers and barbers and loafers. Laughter and pride and sorrow and regret. You see Appalachia and know that it is also America.

An image of “Stikes Holler” in Warrensville shows a cascade of vintage cabins and barns where my classmates, the Stikes, used to live, and maybe still do. I rode past Stikes Holler every day going to school for 12 years. Stikes Holler is an iconic image of hillbilly poverty. It exists, and it is real. But it is only one tiny sliver of Appalachia, not representative of the region as a whole. Nothing is.

In dedicating his elegy to “hillbillies,” a term associated with whiteness, Vance already discounts the experiences of anyone in Appalachia who is not white. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission, one-fifth of the population of Appalachia are people of color (Blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color), as are over a third of the population of Southern Appalachia. Appalachia includes three federally recognized and five state recognized Native American Tribal Communities. Another Appalachian writer, Neema Avashia, reminds us that immigrants “provide essential labor in Appalachia in healthcare, agriculture and service industries.” And what of the migrant laborers from Mexico, Central and South America, and elsewhere who help keep many agricultural industries in Appalachia afloat? Many of these people are unlikely to show up in any census, but they, too, are Appalachia.

Appalachia is much more economically diverse than Vance acknowledges. Poverty is most acute in the Central and North Central Appalachian regions, especially eastern Kentucky, southeast Ohio, southcentral West Virginia, and Appalachian Mississippi. But many Appalachian counties have economies positively designated as “transitional” or “competitive.” Reading Elegy, one might think the main employment in Appalachia is still mining and manufacturing. In fact, employment in resource-extractive (mining) and goods-producing sectors (manufacturing) have declined over the past decades, and the service-producing sector now accounts for more than 75% of the Appalachian region’s employment. Reading Elegy, it would be easy to think that few hillbillies have steady jobs. In fact, 95.7% of Appalachia’s labor force is employed, which is slightly higher than the U.S. rate.

Vance also ignores decades of insightful scholarship about Appalachia and Appalachian migrants. In his 261 pages purporting to explain Appalachia, Vance cites only 14 published sources (fewer than I’ve use here!), perpetuating centuries-old stereotypes. As Ivy Brashear observes in the Bitter Southerner, Vance “continues the long tradition of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic region and a group of people characterized only by laziness and violence and dislike of anyone or anything different.” Worse, Vance offers “policy recommendations” based on these limited observations. (To wit: child and family services should employ a more expansive definition of “family;” and too many government supports are aimed towards getting people to college.)

And what is the story Vance tells about those poor, white, working-class hillbillies? He identifies a “decay of culture” that perpetuates poverty in Appalachian families, and he diagnoses hillbillies with “learned helplessness.” “There was something almost spiritual about the cynicism of the community,” Vance writes (p. 188). Elegy constantly calls out the pessimism of working-class whites, implying that just having a better attitude would solve people’s problems. While acknowledging their ever-shrinking job market as manufacturing jobs move overseas, Vance warns,

…this book is about something else:  what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. (p. 7)

In short, Elegy blames the region’s problems on Appalachian people’s pessimism and bad choices. He spends little time considering structural forces—changing economies, environmental disasters left by unchecked extractive industries, lack of quality health care, and generational trauma—that keep some Appalachian people poor and disadvantaged. Vance mocks people on public assistance, assuring the reader that white people can be “welfare queens,” too. Food stamp recipients are people who show little interest in honest work. Addiction treatment and 12-step programs are a joke because addiction is not a disease, just a lack of will power.

The “culture of poverty” narrative driving the book is a version of the “bootstrap” narrative, which writer Alissa Quart describes as “the claim that all success is the result of an individual’s gifts and efforts, and anyone who tries hard can make it.” Bootstrapping is a powerful idea. We’d like to believe that hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance are all we need to attain the American Dream, a dream most often measured in money and material wealth. The bootstrapping narrative locks us into a vision of success calculated in terms of social mobility and financial wealth, not healthy relationships, physical, emotional, and spiritual health, and other measures of well-being.

In Elegy, Vance is the quintessential self-made man. And this is where Vance’s book reveals itself as more political platform roadmap and less “memoir.” To Vance, problems like poverty are personal and “cultural,” not structural and political. Lacking faith in public institutions, Vance thinks government assistance makes things worse. In his self-tale, he rose through sheer grit and determination—and a little help from ferocious MaMaw. The message: if only hillbillies believe in themselves, choose the right friends, and don’t succumb to “learned helplessness,” they, too, can succeed.

Rugged individualism is supposedly a cornerstone of American democracy. It’s a compelling idea that ignores the personal, community, and government supports that enable survival and make success possible for those who need a boost, things like school lunch programs, church picnics, community health clinics, Medicaid, school trips, little free libraries (and bookmobiles!), housing assistance, food pantries, neighborly attention, sports, arts and music programs in schools, Meals on Wheels, public libraries, exceptional teachers, Pell grants and other need-based scholarships, and more. Many of these assists surely played a role in Vance’s life, but admitting this would render his bootstrap narrative impotent.

The bootstrap narrative is often coupled with a call to cut public programs. To his credit, as an Ohio state senator, Vance has broken with the Republican party on some public assistance issues, healthcare in particular. He supported maintaining government investment in Medicare and social security, and strong government interventions to improve healthcare systems. We should all keep an eye on whether he will revert to the familiar bootstrap narrative or do the right thing and such support public programs.

Still, in one of the most poignant moments in Elegy, Vance comes to the wrong conclusion. When he and other law students are interviewed for summer internships with top-shelf law firms, we see him awkward at a fancy recruitment dinner: he can’t pronounce sauvignon blanc, so he orders the easier-to-say chardonnay. He doesn’t know what all the cutlery is for, so he calls his girlfriend. Feeling out of place, he reflects on how the game is rigged, how players from more elite backgrounds start the game with more knowledge and tools, with a head start. And he realizes that as an Ivy League law student he, too, is privileged. Yale Law opened a door for him that many aspiring lawyers could never hope to enter.

Here is Vance’s chance to think about relative privilege: how access to generational wealth, social capital (networks), and cultural capital (know-how, familiarity with the rules of the game) advantage certain members of society and disadvantage others. He could reflect on the negative effects of generational trauma, which he experienced as the grandson of a violent alcoholic and the son of a verbally and physically abusive user of drugs who bounced him from home to home. Here’s Vance’s chance to ponder structural ways to level the playing field, to give more people from more diverse backgrounds a seat at that fancy law-firm recruitment dining table. Or, to move the event both literally and figuratively to a less posh, more inclusive space where everyone could focus on substance and the exchange of ideas rather than which fork to use. In other words, Vance might consider ways to give more people a leg up so they can access the game and master its rules OR entertain the possibility of changing the rules altogether.

Instead, Vance responds as a rugged individualist: learn the rules quickly, play hard, and propel yourself to the top, supposedly on willpower and perseverance alone. As West Virginia-born Ivy League graduate Caleb Miller wrote in his recent critique of Vance, “He wants you to believe that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he wants you to look away as he pulls up the ladder behind him.” Vance has no plan to level the playing field, only a plan for himself—the supposedly self-made man—to work harder, jump higher, and scale those socioeconomic ladders to the top, solo.

It is a shame that Vance ignores the value of community supports, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, to ensure fair play in education, employment, and public service. DEI is fundamentally about creating spaces that value a range of backgrounds, viewpoints, and strengths so that everyone can contribute their unique talents (diversity). DEI is about people with diverse experiences coming together around a table to cooperate and learn from each other—it helps us understand and bridge cultural and other differences (inclusion). And DEI entails noticing and addressing the structural barriers and inequities that some people experience simply because of their location in the social stratum (equity).

Eboo Patel for the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that Vance presents a terrific argument for DEI when he describes a successful Yale seminar comprised of diverse law students:

We called ourselves the island of misfit toys … a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the super-smart daughter of Indian immigrants, a Black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil-rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others. (pp. 200-201)

They “became a kind of family for me” (p. 200), Vance recalls. Yet instead of reflecting on his own experiences of feeling excluded as a “hillbilly” in various settings—and his positive counter-experience in the “misfits’” seminar—to consider the benefits of inclusion programs, Vance, now as a Vice Presidential candidate, is coming after DEI programs at US universities. He recently tweeted that “DEI is racism, pure and simple.”

DEI is not racism; it is not about “hiring on race.” Diversity and inclusion are big-tent concepts that include not only race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and gender, but also socioeconomic status. Being poor, coming from a single-parent home, growing up in non-traditional housing arrangements—all that is diversity, too. The GI Bill that served predominately white veterans (including “hillbillies”) and programs for first generation college students (many of them economically underserved whites) are examples of equity and inclusion. Perhaps Vance is weaponizing DEI because he cannot see the ways in which a class-disadvantaged kid like him (if not a hillbilly) might have benefitted from DEI. Let’s be clear: in a country where the majority of poor people are white, DEI helps white people, too.

Targeting DEI is just one of Vance’s attacks on the nation’s universities. A college education has for centuries afforded many Americans (marginalized “hillbillies” and others) a path for upward social mobility, even as it is not the only route. Having already benefitted from opportunities at two of the country’s great universities, one public (Ohio State), Vance now wants to pull the rug out: “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” he said in 2022. In a 30-minute speech he declared, “The Universities are the Enemy.”

As a public university professor with 21 years of experience teaching, mentoring, and caring about the next generation of America’s leaders, I am concerned about J.D. Vance’s planned assault on higher education and on DEI. Equity and inclusion are essential practices for navigating the world. As a microcosm of the world, universities are learning grounds for the life practices and processes that reflect the world in which we live. DEI is about raising up a big tent and bringing everyone into the conversation. It is about bridging differences, finding common ground, and identifying complementary strengths, so that all boats rise. It is about learning when to speak, when to listen, when to lend a hand, and when to ask for help. And it is about providing those with less access to knowledge and networks—those who don’t possess the kind of cultural and social capital that is valued by society—opportunities to play on a level playing field or to change the rules for the greater good.

And so I offer my mountaineer’s prayer: that people will look beyond J.D. Vance’s skewed portrait of Appalachia to appreciate the unique beauty and challenge of the region’s past, present, and future. That folks will see through the myth of bootstrapping and do the hard work needed to support one another as we navigate the election cycle, climate change, health care crises, and the so-called culture wars. And that universities will remain big tent spaces where freedom of speech and assembly, critical thinking, and diversity, equity and inclusion thrive.

I am grateful to Carmen Henne-Ochoa and Kate Wiegele for their contributions to this article and its arguments.

Additional Sources and Notes.

William J. Barber II, with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (Liveright, 2024).

Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins, eds. Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virginia University Press, 2019).

Alissa Quart, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream (Ecco, 2023).

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