Hillbillies, Donald Trump, and a Culture in Crisis
August 1, 2016 10:25 PM Subscribe
Rod Dreher interviews J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Vance, A Yale Law School graduate from a hardscrabble Appalachian background, writes about both the strengths and weaknesses of the white working class in his memoir, and how both poor individual choices and systemic problems serve to keep members of the white working class from thriving.
This book "does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates did for poor black people: put their plight into the national conversation. But his book is better than Coates’s book in at least one significant way: he ascribes moral agency to the white poor from which he comes. Many, though not all, of the wounds on poor white bodies are self-inflicted, and J.D. has the moral courage to face that hard fact."
This book "does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates did for poor black people: put their plight into the national conversation. But his book is better than Coates’s book in at least one significant way: he ascribes moral agency to the white poor from which he comes. Many, though not all, of the wounds on poor white bodies are self-inflicted, and J.D. has the moral courage to face that hard fact."
This post was deleted for the following reason: Heya, Trump stuff goes in the open election thread, and if this is instead more in depth about Appalachia, let's do that without the digs at Coates that will immediately derail the post. -- LobsterMitten
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