Hillbilly Elegy My A**, Part II

Betsy Rader's editorial (which was my entire blog from yesterday, see below) in the Washington Post still does a better job constructing a concise response, but reading her commentary spurred me to write as well and here are my thoughts on JD Vance and Hillbilly Elegy.

As memoir, I read the first two-thirds of this as a warm and engaging personal story, a welcome lens into a world other than my own, filled with shocking observations about routinely accepted violence and lawlessness, as well as deeply embedded hypocrisies made the more shocking when the author takes these for granted as ‘just the way it is.’

As information we can use to help us better understand politics today, however, I read this as far less valuable or valuable in different ways than the book’s praise suggests.

It is valuable, particularly for those who did not grow up as he did, to get a glimpse inside another world, because it is nearly always a good thing to learn to appreciate and honor alternative and competing perspectives. And this is one perspective that is rarely honored and hardly appreciated by those who do not share the experiences. Though I do not think this perspective is uniquely unappreciated and disrespected, it is certainly neither appreciated nor respected.

At the same time, the transition from one’s personal story to the political significance of one’s personal story amplifies the inevitably blind spots any person brings to the telling of our own life story. Sometimes this tendency strikes me as merely quaint or sentimental, even without consequence. Like when he explains, as if it should be heard as a major revelation, the difference between Hollow and Holler. Cute boarding on the not believable.

At other times, however, this memoir amplifies political messages that are only one of many possible interpretations of the observations the author reports, and it does so as if these were the only possible interpretations, as if these were ‘just common sense.’

The author, for instance, tries to have it both ways on the tired trope about working class families valuing hard work. In describing his family in Jackson he praises them for cherishing this value and his description of the family is one where their behaviors are largely (but not entirely) consistent with that value. In describing his family in Middletown, however, the gap between the claim to value hard work and their behavior is too large to overlook.

When the author describes the decline of Main Street in Middletown, he write this as his analysis of why Main Street had transformed from the ‘pride of Middletown’ into a ‘place you avoid after dark.’

“This change is a symptom of a new economic reality: rising residential segregation. The number of working-class whites in high-poverty neighborhoods is growing. In 1970, 25 percent of white children lived in a neighborhood with poverty rates above 10 percent. In 2000, that number was 40 percent. It’s almost certainly even higher today. As a 2011 Brookings Institute study found. ‘compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005-09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance.’ In other words, bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs (51-2).”

First, it is difficult for me to believe that residential segregation is worse in 2011 than it was in 1970 or 1950 Middletown. (See the work of Douglas Massey and others). Massey writes in “Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Conditions in U.S. Metropolitan Areas” that the period just before the one examined in Hillbilly Elegy was marked by dramatic increases in segregation for blacks, who unlike other ethnic groups have not moved from the initial segregation associated with being a new arrival to gradual assimilation.

“Blacks, in contrast, traditionally experienced severe prejudice and discrimination in urban housing markets. As they moved into urban areas from 1900 to 1960, therefore, their segregation indices rose to unprecedented heights, compared with earlier times and groups. By mid-century, segregation indices exceeded 60 virtually everywhere; and in the largest Black communities they often reached 80 or more.

Such high indices of residential segregation imply a restriction of opportunity for Blacks compared with other groups. Discriminatory barriers in urban housing markets mean individual Black citizens are less able to capitalize on their hard-won attainments and achieve desirable residential locations. Compared with Whites of similar social status, Blacks tend to live in systematically disadvantaged neighborhoods, even within suburbs.”

This is how we usually talk about segregation—linking unjustifiable (because it is on the basis of race) geographic isolation to the restriction of opportunity.

This seems to be what Vance means by segregation, but he is leaving off the part about it being on the basis of race. He seems to want to say that whites working class families are now trapped, like black families have been for decades, in places defined by their lack of opportunity.

But if they are now trapped in ways that make them more like others, ways that result in them living in more racially and economically diverse neighborhoods—this is not an increase in segregation in the way we usually talk about it, as racial segregation.

It is an increase in the group of Americans who are denied opportunity; it adds white workers to the pre-existing group of non-white workers who are geographically cut off from living wage jobs…and it does this through racial integration (in high poverty areas) not through segregation.

Vance seems to want to argue whites who are now trapped geographically are in a similarly unjustifiable isolation from opportunity, and are thus more segregated. But if the data on race in Massey and elsewhere (including the data provided by Vance in this section of his book) is accurate, it is inaccurate to call this an increase in racial segregation. It is inaccurate to call this a racial phenomenon, other than as race and class intersect.

Second, following that initial claim, the author’s own data is evidence of more integration (not more segregation). Although he confuses the analysis by conflating race and class. He points out that in 1970 nearly all white children lived in high poverty areas and by 2000 that had grown to 40%. Since he claims to be analyzing residential segregation, he appears to be saying that as more whites moved into the poorer neighborhoods that previously had very few whites, this is evidence of more segregation.

His evidence shows a move from a set of neighborhoods where whites were segregated into only wealthy areas to a set of neighborhoods where whites are now in poor areas as well. This should be seen as integration, not segregation.

“The number of working-class whites in high-poverty neighborhoods is growing.” The author is clearly saying that this is not a good thing for white working-class Americans; but that does not make neighborhood integration evidence of ‘rising residential segregation.’

Bad neighborhoods spreading from the urban ghettos to the suburbs is not evidence of ‘rising residential segregation,’ unless the author means rising white segregation from their previously exclusive occupation of the wealthiest neighborhoods.

At one point, Vance concludes that ‘despite his environment’ it was his family that made the difference, in particular his grandparents. But the final third of the book celebrates his story as rugged individualism.

At another time, Vance does a rather bizarre dance around education policy, building on his recollection of watching a West Wing episode (126), somehow suggesting (again) that it is ‘all about how your raised,’ by repeating a teachers comment that it is not about the need to invest in public schools, because so many kids are being ‘raise by wolves.’ Yet the final third of the book celebrates his rugged individualist success story as hinging on his (free) education.

At one point, after describing deep and multilayered dysfunction, violence, criminality, drug use, and fatherlessness in his family, Vance concludes he made it ‘because of how he was raised,’ referring to his grandparents stepping in after his parents abandoned him.

This is one theme that runs through the book: impressive candor about the dysfunction and criminality of his own family combined with assertions that he made it ‘because of how he was raised.’

Of course, he is overlooking that others in his family did not make after being raised in the same family.

And he conflates the fortunate accident that two otherwise irresponsible grandparents just happened to spend time with him on his homework with the trope that ‘it is how you are raised,’ leaving out all the other parts of his upbringing that resulted in catastrophe for others in his family.

Worse, this heavy reliance on an unthoughtful sound bite about ‘how one is raised’ provides the foundation for another layer of blindness, beyond the normal blindness we all have about ourselves and our families.

When our analysis turns to others, not in our family and unlike us, this choice to build one’s self image on the rock of ‘it is how you are raised’ results in, perhaps even amplifies, a tendency to conclude that the failures of these others (like the failure of others within our own family, but once we are looking outward we forget this part) is a result of ‘how they were raised.’

That is, it is their fault and the fault of how their families and communities, and people like them (so unlike us) choose to live: they are poor and jobless because they are lazy, fatherless, violent, drug-using families (though this is precisely how Vance describes his own family).

The final third of the book, when he focuses on his law school days, is even less self-aware (and is far less valuable as an insight into another’s world) that the first two thirds. On the whole, this book that is used today to justify (1) blaming the poor for being poor and (2) exonerating white Trump supporters for supporting an ignorant bigot is not worth reading, contributes to further diminishing our public discourse, and strikes me as misleading by design.