Jeffrey Dean/AP Photo
JD Vance, then a newly declared candidate for U.S. Senate, holds a copy of his book “Hillbilly Elegy” while speaking with supporters after a rally on July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio.
Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance will square off against his opponent Tim Walz in a debate tonight.
We can be almost certain that Vance will be confronted again with his recent false claims about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating their neighbors’ pets, which is also an obvious racist smear aimed at fearmongering.
We can also safely assume Vance will be asked about his characterization of many Democrats as “childless cat ladies,” along with the rest of his long history of talking about women as though they are second-class citizens who should soon be relegated to some even lesser category.
However, we can be just as confident that Vance will likely not have to address one of the most telling and questionable aspects of his meteoric political rise: the fact that his best-selling 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which propelled him into fame and power, was premised entirely on classism and racial determinism.
That’s unfortunate, since Vance’s book and the ideas in it deserve more critical attention and interrogation. Vance’s central thesis is that white Appalachians are isolated and trapped in cycles of generational poverty largely because they react “to bad circumstances in the worst way possible” due to their “hillbilly culture,” which is in turn a product of their “Scots-Irish” ancestry.
“We pass that isolation down to our children,” Vance wrote. They stay poor because of their ancestral lineage, to put it only slightly differently.
In Vance’s telling, these are people—his people—for whom “poverty is the family tradition,” whose culture and, by implication, genetics, produces lazy, irresponsible people. It’s “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” he wrote. The conclusion is all but spelled out for the reader: These people’s poverty is their own fault. Nothing to do with, say, the decline of the coal industry, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, or a threadbare welfare state—you know, those pesky decisions about societal and economic structures that average working people have little to no influence over. In the context of Vance’s explanations and arguments, it seems almost foolish to suggest that Appalachians, and perhaps even poor people of other ancestry, could do better if they had higher salaries, better schools, or access to decent health care, for example.
Vance’s focus on white “hillbillies” obscures the fact that his analysis shares a core tenet of classic, textbook racism: the false belief that poverty among some racially defined groups is a matter of differences in innate capabilities and social behavior. Imagine how Vance’s theoretical framework might be regarded in application to other groups—if we replace Appalachian “hillbillies” with another racialized signifier, like “Deep South urban culture” or “Midwestern reservation life”; or swap out “Scots-Irish” with “Yoruba” ancestry, for example. Or imagine how it might be regarded in some circles if I wrote a book positing that white Appalachians are mired in poverty largely because they inherited certain cultural traits from their Scots-Irish ancestors.
Bob Hutton, an associate professor of history and Appalachian studies at West Virginia’s Glenville State University, wrote in October 2016 that Vance’s analysis at least “smacks of racial determinism, even if ‘culture’ replaces biology in his account.” Sarah Jones, a senior writer for New York magazine, described the book as “little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.”
Vance’s thesis is essentially a reprise of a number of discredited academic arguments, including several associated with racists.
“What’s really interesting about the main crux of the book is that it regurgitates the old Daniel Patrick Moynihan ‘culture of poverty’ argument. Moynihan applied it to urban African Americans, and in this case it’s being applied to factory-belt whites,” Hutton told me. “For some reason, people think it’s OK to impose that argument, which is very questionable to begin with, so long as it’s a white Kentuckian or Ohioan, rather than, say, people in Detroit or Newark—and that’s a kind of quiet racism.”
Indeed, Vance’s thesis is essentially a reprise of a number of discredited academic arguments, including several associated with racists, and otherwise relies on a series of myths and falsehoods.
Moynihan, for his part, was famously and widely criticized for relying on innately racist assumptions about Black families to undergird his “culture of poverty” theory.
Vance’s description of Scots-Irish culture relies on a book by Jim Webb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia; and a theory by the historians Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, called the “Celtic Thesis,” as Hutton pointed out in 2016.
Webb’s book was lambasted by Michael Newton, a leading U.S. authority on Scottish Gaelic heritage, who wrote that “Webb comes across as an apologist for the legacy of racism in the South.”
McDonald and McWhiney’s thesis, which claimed that white Southerners are a unique ethnic and cultural group because of their shared Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry, has been widely rejected. Wilma Dunaway, a sociologist and professor emerita at Virginia Tech, calls it the “ethnic homogeneity thesis,” and has written about how it erases and “silence[s] the history of a majority of the ethnic and racial groups that have peopled the region’s past,” including Black people present since the 18th century, and white European immigrants from an array of other ethnic backgrounds. Vance’s book also erases all nonwhites from the region, by simply assuming and speaking as though the term “Appalachian” itself can only refer exclusively to white folks.
“Appalachia has been multiracial for all of recorded history,” Hutton told me, noting that Black Americans have always lived in the region, though their numbers are greater in the Deep South. “It’s portrayed as an all-white space, but that’s simply a fiction.”
Both McDonald and McWhiney also “served as directors of the white nationalist League of the South, an organization that continues to embrace the ‘Celtic thesis,’” Hutton wrote in his 2016 essay. (That essay was included in an entire book that was a critical, regional response to the misconceptions and untruths in Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, featuring scholars and multigenerational residents, and published by the West Virginia University Press.)
Vance also cites Charles Murray, the notorious author of The Bell Curve, “and perhaps the most famous racial determinist in contemporary American public life,” John Thomason, an editor at Grist and former researcher for The Intercept, wrote in 2016. Murray is also perhaps the most famous modern purveyor of the discredited, racist theory that Black Americans are genetically predisposed to have lower average IQs. Vance and Murray discussed the ideas in Hillbilly Elegy in October 2016, including a gloss about their “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood.”
Vance has also said that his book’s “authorial godmother” was Amy Chua, his former Yale Law School professor who became famous for her arguments in an essay titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” and who has been criticized for her theories, which often reflect cultural racism (i.e., as opposed to scientific or biological racism). Indeed, one of the very first citations in Hillbilly Elegy is a quote from writer Razib Khan, who was dropped as a contributor to The New York Times in 2015, after his “history with racist, far-right online publications” was revealed, according to Thomason.
At a broader level, Vance’s arguments are weak because ethnicity, like race, is a social construct, rather than something inheritable or tied into one’s genetics and biology. Indeed, one of the better illustrations of that point is the very fact that Americans do not generally talk about the Scots-Irish, the Dutch, or the Slavic peoples, largely because, in our society, those groups have all been subsumed into “white.” Other countries have wildly different racial classification schemes, as did America itself in the past.
Vance has never really had to address these critiques, or observations, for a number of reasons. For one, viewing the world and people through a racialized lens is almost second nature for many Americans, right alongside regarding “whiteness” as nonracial—a baseline by which all other people and groups are compared. In other words, Vance’s theories probably make some intuitive sense to many of us, even though they don’t really hold water. Moreover, Vance of course self-identifies as a white Appalachian, and many of us tend to think that in-group members can’t discriminate or express racism against the group they belong to; or that when they do, it’s really just insight.
Hutton mentioned how people sometimes justify their own discrimination by pointing out that they can trace some part of their lineage to the group they’re maligning—remarks like “I can say that because I’m a quarter Japanese.” “Is it necessarily that much more acceptable just because you’re pissing out of the tent rather than pissing into it?” he said.
The political purpose of Murray’s crackpot “race science” is to attribute Black Americans’ poverty to innate inferiority, thereby negating even a conversation about equity, higher taxes on the rich, or better government services. Similarly, Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was embraced by both conservatives and liberals in part because he provided a facially nonracist spin on the same idea—“We’re not racist, you see, because we believe that poor white people are also inherently degenerate.”
In this way, Vance offered vindication to those who have demonized poor nonwhite people with the same false slanders he levels against his kin and his neighbors; or reassurance for those seeking to dissociate themselves from any responsibility for the systemic forces that do keep some people mired in poverty. It’s a pseudo-intellectual cover for classic, right-wing “bootstrap” politics—poverty is the fault of the poor, and government need not address it. Moreover, in any case, there will always be some deficient, and therefore poor, people, just as there will always be those of us that are special—like Vance himself, a Scots-Irish, Appalachian Harvard grad and multi-millionaire; and his political patron Peter Thiel, who is himself a billionaire.
Vance should really have to explain his position on these issues, especially in light of his recent comments about Haitians—not to mention his new position on the ticket alongside presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump frequently invokes the white supremacist notion of blood purity and talks about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our county”; he’s previously said that a Mexican judge cannot be fair to him because of the judge’s ethnicity; he suggested that an intelligence analyst’s job postings should be determined by her Korean ancestry; and he once responded to a Black journalist who asked about whether he would meet with Black members of Congress by asking, “Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?”
Vance, too, has falsely blamed Haitians for bringing contagious diseases into the country; and for an increase in murder, despite the fact that the Republican county prosecutor has said that he hasn’t seen even a single murder where a Haitian immigrant was the perpetrator in his 21 years in office.
The Washington Post reported last month that his lies about Haitians parallel century-old false claims about Chinese and other immigrants stealing and eating household pets, and that the “goal in spreading such stereotypes is to portray newcomers as unfit for American society or invoke disgust toward them.”
Vance’s book shows that these strains of racial determinism, and the plainly racist ideologies, are nothing new. If he wants to be vice president, he really should be asked for and should offer a full explanation of his views on those issues to the American people—perhaps in tonight’s debate, when he will be formally introduced to the whole country. But that’s probably hoping for far too much.
