JD Vance Sold An Ugly Appalachian Fairytale; 'White Trash-Splainer' Reckoning from the Region

'JD Vance sold an ugly Appalachian fairytale. Americans bought it,' Daily Kos, July 18, 2024.

America loves a poor-kid-makes-it-big story—and J.D. Vance told a whopper. The then-venture capitalist’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” presented Vance as an impoverished Appalachian kid who escaped a violent childhood overshadowed by a drug-addicted mother, fled to an Ivy League university, and eventually found wealth among the coastal elite as a high-rolling investment banker.

And his success didn’t stop there. The book was so well received that it spawned a big Hollywood film. Refreshed by wealth and fame, Vance returned to his home state of Ohio and began a nonprofit organization to “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” Then he ran for Senate—and won. Then, less than two years later, Vance was selected to be Donald Trump’s new running mate after his previous vice president was mysteriously unavailable.

Only the story that Vance is telling has holes more than large enough to accommodate Trump’s private 757 jet. For starters, Vance isn’t from Appalachia. His book was riddled with broad negative stereotypes clearly written to appeal to exactly the cultural critics who welcomed its publication. And his nonprofit organization was a thinly veiled platform to launch Vance’s political career.

Most people are more than they seem at first glance. J.D. Vance is a whole lot less.

The Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” based on the novel “Erasure” by ​​Booker Prize-shortlisted author Percival Everett, tells the story of accomplished Black author Thelonious "Monk" Ellison. Frustrated by the market’s appetite for books that present Black culture only as a product of “da hood,” Ellison writes a fake autobiography titled “My Pafology?? satirizing those works with an extreme story of a man whose life consists only of drugs, violence, and the worst stereotypes of inner-city life... More + Comments,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/18/2255289/-JD-Vance-sold-an-ugly-Appalachian-fairytale-Americans-bought-it
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'Appalachian Reckoning, A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,' Appalachia Bare, Feb. 25, 2021,

People wondering what all the fuss is about concerning J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ron Howard’s screen adaptation of the book will find answers to that query in 'Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,' a series of essays by diverse voices about a variety of topics bringing Appalachia to the forefront of national attention in these politically explosive times. Editors Harkins and McCarroll announce the scope of their project, acknowledging that the shadow of Hillbilly Elegy hangs over their book:

.. Prominent “conservative intellectuals” spent plenty of political and economic capital guaranteeing that Vance’s Horatio Alger, “pull yourself up by the bootstrap,” message grew wings with the aid of expansive media attention. The agenda they pushed was one bottom-line statement that Vance makes in Hillbilly Elegy: “Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by corporations or governments, or anything else. We created them and only we can fix them.”

(One wonders whether Vance has heard of coal wars, gun thugs, and decades of ruthless industrial exploitation?)...
https://www.appalachiabare.com/appalachian-reckoning-a-region-responds-to-hillbilly-elegy/