Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway,” he writes.ĭomestic life is a chaotic mess of failed relationships, drug abuse, and self-sabotage. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. “And when the dust clears-when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity-there’s nothing left over. Vance comes from “a world of truly irrational behavior.” His family, friends, and neighbors spend their way into poverty. It can include “an almost religious faith” in hard work and the American dream yet he describes his town as one “where 30 percent of the young men work less than twenty hours a week, and not a single person aware of his own laziness.” But no one wants to talk about the fact that so many of them are raised by wolves.'” The characterization is unkind, but Vance is unsparing in his analysis of the people he loves and the culture they have created. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. Watching an episode of The West Wing on television, Vance is struck that “in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. “That it had resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia-he was writing about black people in the inner cities.” Ditto Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, “another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies-which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state,” he notes. If the connective tissue between the urban poor and downwardly mobile working-class whites is lost on pundits and policy makers, the same isn’t true of Vance, who describes being deeply struck by William Julius Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged. “I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly,” Vance writes. Still, the more apt comparison might be to Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s 2003 book about two young women caught up in a suffocating web of destructive relationships, teen pregnancy, drugs, crime, and general dysfunction in the South Bronx. Vance emerges as something of an emissary to elite America from Fishtown, the fictional composite of lower-class white America that Charles Murray described in his 2012 book Coming Apart. This growing segment of American society is marked not just by economic poverty, but also by social and cultural poverty: the decay of bedrock institutions like marriage and organized religion, as well as the erosion of cohesive social standards like the two-parent family. Poverty is a “family tradition” among Vance’s people, white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who were once “day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.” It reminds us of the roles that institutions play (and fail to play) in the lives of our young people, and further suggests that education reform cannot be an exclusively race-based movement if its goal is to arrest generational poverty. The book should also be required reading among those of us in education policy. Writing in the American Conservative, Rod Dreher aptly notes that the book “does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.” The surprising best seller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has become something of a cause célèbre on the grounds that it explains the appeal of Donald Trump to the white underclass (from which author J.D.
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