Cultural Critique

"When white poverty becomes politically salient it is clear that historical consciousness is at stake"

—Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

On March 2, 2017, the notorious policy entrepreneur Charles Murray gave a talk at Middlebury College. His presentation stirred much controversy, leading to a massive student protest that halted the event and ended with injuries. On August 7, 2017, NPR's Fresh Air featured an interview with J. D. Vance to discuss Hillbilly Elegy, his New York Times best-selling memoir about his life in Ohio, growing up with those he affectionately called "hillbillies." Both events index the mainstream interest and dialogue on the now mythic "white working class" prior to and in the wake of Donald Trump's election. Concern over this white working class has become ubiquitous, ranging from the public prominence of economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton's 2015 study (2015) of the growing number of "deaths of despair" among middle-aged, working-class white men to academic monographs like Arlie Hochschild's Stranger in Their Own Land and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash, to countless cover stories on the opiate/heroin crisis in magazines like Time and The New Yorker, to popular films like I, Tonya (2017) and Ladybird (2017), to the television reboot of Roseanne (2018), and even to the immensely popular podcast S-Town (2017). Indeed, Hillbilly Elegy is being adapted by Ron Howard into a film for Netflix in 2020.

If all sectors and mediums of US culture have been probing the questions about who this white working class is and what its problems may be, then what is particularly interesting about Murray and Vance [End Page 181] is the extent to which they answer these questions with the pernicious call to a culture of poverty.¹ Murray's bona fides on the matter need little explanation. He is best known for co-writing The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life with Richard J. Herrnstein. The book garnered much controversy as sections of it linked racial inequality to intelligence.² He later wrote Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, in which he identified a growing culture of poverty in white working-class communities resulting from increased US class divisions. Vance's credentials on the matter are far less well known, but, as Elizabeth Catte noted, his memoir is suffused with the idea, going so far as to cite Murray approvingly.³ Indeed, Murray and Vance spoke together on the problem of the white working class at an event held by the American Enterprise Institute. How is it, then, that Charles Murray aroused such instant ire from liberals and leftists alike while J. D. Vance gets invited to speak in liberal forums like Fresh Air and TED talks? How is it that their promulgation of the culture of poverty can receive such widely different receptions, at once roundly rejected as racist and lauded as thoughtful and earnest?

Of course, it is not entirely the case that Vance has been completely accepted as an unproblematic figure. As I will discuss later on, he was met with protests by activists during his panel at the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association annual meeting. Such an event challenges the easy explanation of Vance's rise and national reception as a simple matter of novelty (as opposed to Murray's long and infamous history in the US public sphere); instead, it pushes these questions toward considerations of the cultural politics of race, region, and nation.⁴

This essay pursues these questions and issues by examining perhaps an unlikely source—J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (Elegy) itself. Specifically, I argue that Elegy's narrative form comes to naturalize Vance's white-culture-of-poverty thesis for liberal audiences. Hillbilly Elegy is a quintessential bildungsroman.⁵ It follows J.D.'s development from an anger-filled and hopelessly lost child to a self-sufficient but psychically damaged adult through his movement in and out of Middletown, Ohio.⁶ In so doing, Elegy establishes and normalizes a white culture of poverty as both the catalyst for J.D.'s moral development and the...