I'm from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn't represent us - he only represents himself

Neema Avashia

Back in 2016, I was an Appalachian expat living in Boston, feeling homesick and displaced like I do most of the time up here. I saw a book in the Harvard Coop with the word Hillbilly on the cover and jumped at it. No one up here knew that word, or if they did, they understood it as derogatory, while I understood it as home. Here home was, I thought, staring me in the face from the front table at a major bookstore.

I barely read 30 pages before I saw the book Hillbilly Elegy for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw JD Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed our region.

Here’s the thing: JD Vance doesn’t represent Appalachia. JD Vance only represents himself.

To the outside world, Vance is sure to appear far more Appalachian than I do. He is white, Christian, and has longstanding generational ties to the region. I, on the other hand, am south Asian, the child of Indian immigrants who settled in Appalachia in the 1970s, because work in the chemical industry brought them there, and left in the early 2000s, because work disappeared.

We do have this in common, though: both of us left Appalachia in pursuit of higher education, and have lived away for as long as we lived within the region. But while Vance uses the story of his upbringing to perpetuate a flat, stereotyped representation of Appalachia, my identity, that of my family and community, complicates the narrative in ways that are politically inconvenient.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/16/jd-vance-hillbilly-elegy-appalachia

This is what I've been trying to tell y'all! I lived there for 35 years and J.D. is no more a "hillbilly" than an elephant is. He's purenteed white trash and doesn't know anything about the REAL Appalachia. He wasn't even raised there. He was raised in Ohio, just across the WV line.