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JD VANCE: ‘POORNOGRAPHER’  
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Lennard J. Davis
August 13, 2024
The Conversation
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_ JD Vance is no pauper − he’s a classic example of
‘poornography,’ in which the rich try to speak on behalf of the
poor _

JD Vance, by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

JD Vance has climbed to his current position as former President
Donald Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a
hillbilly, calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his
credentials to speak for the American working class.

“I grew up as a poor kid
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Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story
that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.”

Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016
memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy
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In that book, he claims his family carried an inheritance of “abuse,
alcoholism, poverty, and trauma.”

“Poor people,” he proclaimed in a 2016 interview
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with The American Conservative, are “my people.”

But there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to
Vance’s poverty credentials.

Vance did come from a troubled family. His mother was – like so many
Americans, whether they’re poor, middle class or rich – addicted
to painkillers [[link removed]].
In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic
relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect
explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact
that her parents were “hillbillies.”

The reality – one that Vance only subtly acknowledges in his memoir
– is that he is not poor. Nor is he a hillbilly. He grew up firmly
in Ohio’s middle class.

In my forthcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict
Those without It [[link removed]],” I detail
how Vance’s work is actually part of a genre I call
“poornography.” Created mainly by middle- and upper-class people
for like-minded readers, this long line of novels, films and plays can
end up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people.

Though these works are sometimes crafted with good intentions, they
tend to focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, crudeness and the supposed
laziness of poor people.

Peering at all the poor people

When you think about novels and films about the poor, you come upon
the great classics: Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist
[[link removed]],” Emile
Zola’s “Germinal [[link removed]],” James
Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
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Jack London’s “The People of the Abyss
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“The Grapes of Wrath
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Yet all these monuments to the suffering of the poor were written by
authors who were not poor. Most of them had little to no knowledge of
the lived experience of poor people. At best, they were reporters
whose source material was meager. At worst, they simply made things
up, recycling stereotypes about poverty.

For example, John Steinbeck had some contact with poor people as a
reporter. But as he wrote about migrant camps for “The Grapes of
Wrath,” he relied heavily on the notes of Sanora Babb
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– herself poor and formerly homeless – who traveled to migrant
camps throughout California for the Farm Security Administration.
Babb’s boss – a friend of Steinbeck’s – had secretly shown the
author her notes, without her permission
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Babb would go on to also write a novel based on her experiences, which
was bought by Random House. But the publishing house killed it after
“Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it wasn’t published until 2004,
when the author was 97 years old. That year, she told the Chicago
Tribune – correctly, I might add – that Steinbeck’s work
“isn’t as accurate as mine
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Then there’s London, whose “The People of the Abyss
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portrayal of the lives of the British poor. But London, who went
“undercover”
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craft a sordid account of England’s urban poor, nonetheless
maintained a comfortable apartment. He kept a stash of money sewed
into his ragged coat and conveniently escaped for a hot bath and a
good meal while pretending to pass as a pauper. The result is a book
laden with put-downs of the English working class, who are cast in
eugenicist terms
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degenerate race.

When you look at the books or films created by people who grew up
poor, the tone and focus often shift dramatically.

Instead of a fixation on the tawdry side of life, you see works that
explore the things that bind all people together: family, love,
politics, complex emotions and sensual memories.

You only have to open Richard Wright’s “Black Boy
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Agnes Smedley’s “Daughter of Earth
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Justin Torres’ “We the Animals
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protagonists’ appreciation of beauty and ability to experience
profound pleasure – yes, all while experiencing poverty.

Wright recalls how, as a child, he would play in the sewer, where he
would spend hours fashioning all manner of detritus into toys. The
young Smedley loves to stare through a hole in her roof to gaze at the
sky. And Mike Gold, author of “Jews Without Money
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paean to an empty, garbage-strewn lot in his neighborhood that doubled
as his beloved playground.

Hillbilly cosplay

Vance, on the other hand, fills his book with selections from the
greatest hits of “poornography” – violence, drugs, sex,
obscenity and filth.

But Vance himself was never actually impoverished
[[link removed]].
His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather,
grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in
Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in
Armco and had a lucrative pension.”

He falsely introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a
conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” Over the course of the
book, he confuses himself – and the reader – by variously saying
that he is middle class, working class and poor.

In order to justify his memoir as something more than a tale of a
drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he fashions a grand
theory that being a hillbilly does not have to be related to social
class – or even living in Appalachia.

To Vance, hillbilly-ness becomes kind of a cultural trait, tied to a
family history and identity, not class. His grandmother, he writes,
“had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty
– emotional if not financial – had followed her.”

Bootstraps redux

In developing his grand theory, Vance takes readers very close to the
now-debunked notion of a culture of poverty
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which the poor are responsible for their situation and their attitude
toward work is passed along from one generation to the next.

A dependence on government handouts, according to the theory,
undergirds this culture. Vance pines for an imagined glorious past of
his slice of America. His neighbors in Middletown had lost – thanks
to the welfare state – “the tie that bound them to their
neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always
inspired me.”

But Vance finds himself in a dilemma: Are these people simply lazy? Or
are they the victims of a system that encourages them to watch TV and
eat bad food as they collect welfare or disability checks?

Several times he refers to people who live on welfare as “never
[having] worked a paying job in his life.” He seems to fully buy
into the notion that people are poor because they are lazy
freeloaders.

He “solves” the problem with the age-old critique of poor people
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They got there because of “bad choices.” He mentions a friend who
although having a job that paid a steady income nevertheless quit it
because he didn’t like getting up early.

“His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s
made,” he writes, “and his life will improve only through better
decisions.”

No platform, no voice

And so the GOP’s young standard-bearer for the working classes
simply repeats the same bootstrap rhetoric
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that’s been peddled for decades.

But it’s not simply a question about believing a politician or not.
That would be a fool’s game.

Rather, the issue here is what I call “representation inequality,”
by which I mean that one identity group – in this case, poor people
– don’t get to represent themselves.

What has happened – whether it’s in politics or in publishing
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– is something called “elite capture
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those with cultural capital and power assume the right to speak for
and represent the powerless.

In so doing, dangerous stereotypes and tropes get developed with
serious political consequences. Just because you drink Diet Mountain
Dew
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doesn’t mean you do get to speak for those in the mountains.

Our political and educational system elbows out most poor people.
First-generation students
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– like myself, and like many of my students at the University of
Illinois in Chicago, where I teach – have a harder time staying in
school, have more food insecurity
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and homelessness, and will often not benefit
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from the normal boost education offers. They tend to have a much
harder time ascending the stratified ranks of culture and politics,
becoming the published authors and elected officials who might provide
representational equality.

As political scientist Nicholas Carnes points out in his 2018 book
“The Cash Ceiling
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only 2% of congressional lawmakers worked in manual labor, the service
industry or clerical jobs
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before getting involved in politics. So it’s no surprise that when
the wealthy want to pass certain laws, they’re much more likely to
get passed
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In July 2024, The New York Times reported that Vance’s Yale law
professor and author
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Amy Chua read an early version of what became “Hillbilly Elegy,”
one that was more geared to an academic audience and grounded in
political theory. She prodded Vance to change his manuscript
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telling him that “this grand theory [about America] is not
working.”

I would argue that his “grand theory” about the poor doesn’t
work, because the poor – unlike many other identity groups –
don’t have a platform to articulate and promote their own needs and
political vision
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Instead, we’re stuck with people like Vance, who offer bromides at
best and fatalistic narratives of doom at worst.[The Conversation]

Lennard J. Davis
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Distinguished Professor of English, Disability Studies and Medical
Education, _University of Illinois Chicago
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This article is republished from The Conversation
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the original article
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* JD Vance
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* Hillbilly Elegy
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