HillBilly Elegy

In the summer of 2016, I came across a lot of things. I slightly regret, however, that I didn’t come across J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, when it first came out in the summer – the book, I believe, was published somewhere around June. An excerpt of Vance’s memoir also came out in an article around the same time. It wasn’t until very recently that I came across an excerpt of Vance’s memoir. I am just eight months late to the party – no big deal. Unlike the previous memoir I’ve read, there was no mention of any dogs in this book. In the excerpt, Vance reflects on his life as a poor kid from Ohio; although I am not from Ohio, I am probably as poor as he is – and maybe that’s why he speaks my language and why I was drawn to it.

To cut things short, Vance describes his journey from living in a rural community in Ohio where domestic strife was common among many families, including his own, to attending Ohio State University and eventually Yale Law School, where he becomes an anomaly. (The law school has a dog – a greyhound, to be exact – in its coat of arm!) Vance felt out of place at the law school because of the kind of perception people have towards a particular lifestyle – Vance’s lifestyle as a white working class male. One of the fascinating moments in the excerpt takes place when Vance recalls overhearing a conversation from a Yale professor that the law school should only accept students from elite schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and not from big schools like Ohio State University. This scene shows the kind of attitude and perception that separates the East from the Midwest, in which the latter is ignored and becomes outsiders in the political world. Just like the time when Vance invited his law school classmates to a family restaurant called “Cracker Barrel,” the restaurant was considered fine dining to Vance and his grandmother, but was a place of “greasy public health crisis” to Vance’s law school friends.

Vance suggests that there is a lack of understanding between the world consisted of the upper middle class and the world consisted of the white lower working class in the Midwest region. This lack, I feel, may explain why a large number of the Midwest population shifts from favoring the Democrats to favoring Republican as well as Mr. T, because the Midwest population feels they have largely been ignored by the Democrats – just like that Yale professor who suggested that the law school shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious schools. The white lower working class world, according to Vance, is in a crisis and it is not to be ignored; instead, we need to understand it. I hope my interpretation of book’s theme so far hasn’t been misleading because I have only read an excerpt of the first chapter. Vance, at the very end of the excerpt, writes that, “One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong.”

While I like what Vance is proposing, I’m very curious to see how such “opening” is to be done – and maybe this is my call to really read the book over the summer break. In any case, I hope this book not only gives me a glimpse into the other side of the black box -into the lifestyle white working-class families lead – but teach me also more about having empathy towards certain groups of people – something, I think, our country could use a little at such time.

– Jason

P.S. If you would like to read the excerpt, you can read it here.