Why JD Vance Dropped Into My Inbox

I once thought of JD Vance and me as coming from a similar place.

Not in terms of life experience, as my middle-class suburban childhood was quite different from Vance’s early years in rural poverty.

But something similar happened when we each wrote a book.

In 2000, I published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.” It got around for a while. I argued that even as racism’s power recedes, it can leave behind what psychologists call the victimization mind-set, which makes Black people feel that mainstream standards (including academic standards) are too high for us to achieve. I wrote not in condemnation but concern.

But quite a few people thought I wrote the book as a cudgel for conservative Republicans to take up against Black people. In the Bay Area, where I was teaching, for a while I was race traitor No. 1. Besides occasional insults on the street, local newspapers did nakedly biased profiles of me, laced with nasty comments by people like the writer Ishmael Reed (who as recently as last year had a character in one of his plays dissing me!). I heard endlessly that I must have been hoping to get rich by selling out to white conservatives.

Arguing from the middle means you get it from both ends. I am often a self-hating racist to the left, while the right often thinks I am a conservative in denial and lately diagnose me as suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And so shall it be, as I hold on tight where I sit.

Sixteen years later, Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” became a huge best seller by arguing that what ails poor Appalachians is the result of both structural factors such as deindustrialization and also cultural factors. Structural factors can cause the cultural ones, but the latter can take on a life of their own. He describes people who see themselves solely as victims of those larger forces, rather than doing what is within their power to improve their lives.

Vance came in for it in the same way that I did back in the day. Despite his efforts to thread the needle, more than a few Appalachians read the book as disrespectful, condescending and disloyal. Sarah Jones at The New Republic judged Vance’s main point to be simply “All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did.”