seeing that they - unlike Vance - were born, raised and still live there.
Check out this guy's essay from 2017:
https://www.jwilkey.com/post/my-mother-wasn-t-trash
Judging from the emails I have received in the past few days, a good many people are interested in the way their own communities and stories are playing out right now to a national audience. They realize that people are listening, it seems, but are unsure that their voices are actually being heard. At least a fourth of the folks who have reached out since I published "Blessed are the White Trash" have asked how I feel about J. D. Vance's bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. This book has, for many Americans, become their primary source of information about Appalachian culture and poverty. The short answer is that I disagree with both Vance's conclusions and his methodology. As I told a group of my students recently, I am heartbroken that Hillbilly Elegy will likely be the most popular and important book about Appalachia in a generation.
Vance writes: "I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better" (256). While this is not blatant victim-blaming, it comes close. This line of reasoning promotes the individualistic philosophy so prominent among those on the political right in the US. It sounds like it came directly from the pen of Ayn Rand. It calls for a bootstraps-up set of solutions for people who lack boots. It calls on poor people to fix their own problems by changing their culture. Vance calls it a "culture in crisis." What his book lacks, however, is the important historical and economic context that explains how Appalachia came to be impoverished. While he is critical of Appalachian culture, he doesn't bother to find out how it came to be as it is.
For generations, first with timber and coal and later with tourism, Appalachia has served as a sort of internal colony for the rest of the United States. People with no desire to live here came to pillage and plunder. They cheated Appalachian people out of their land and their resources, their dignity and their humanity. In central Appalachia, coal companies engaged in ruthless and ethically bankrupt tactics like using the broad form deed. They moved people into coal camps where they paid them poorly and forced them to buy everything from the overpriced company store. They were compelled to work and remain silent or become homeless. In southern Appalachia, timber barons came for the lumber. They clear-cut the mountains and left environmental and economic devastation in their wake. In both instances, Appalachian people were transformed from independent farmers and craftspeople into laborers treated like nothing more than replaceable parts. They were deprived of their resources, and the profit most certainly didn't flow back into their communities. Today, all that remains in much of Appalachia are minimum wage service jobs. In the more touristy parts of the region, the people whose ancestors once thrived in these mountains now serve sweet tea and fried chicken to the vacationing descendants of those whose communities and wealth were built in part with the resources extracted from Appalachia.
In the United States, our approach to solving Appalachian poverty doesn't differ substantially from our approach to solving African poverty. In both cases, outsiders came in to exploit resources and left generations of poverty in their wake. While the process was substantially more extreme, racist, and violent in Africa, in both cases conservative political leaders think those left behind economically should just make better decisions and stop being poor. That approach will not work in either instance. Neither will sending food and secondhand clothing. And don't even get me started on the idiotic and theologically-flawed thinking that leads fundamentalist Christians to think they can solve poverty by evangelizing the poor folk.
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