DWill wrote:On p. 191, he denies that the alienation that his people feel from Barack Obama has anything to do with race; rather he says it relates to Obama's elite education and ascent to the high upper class. He says Middletowners are susceptible to the lies spread about Obama's birthplace and his religion, but apparently he doesn't consider these attitudes to be influenced by bigotry. Many would assert otherwise.
Yep. We know that West Virginians, the archetypal hillbilly culture, were the most likely to make their choice based on perceptions of race (see the last chapters of Coates' book). Vance may have been mercifully spared that stuff, or may have wanted to skip over it for some reason.
DWill wrote:At one point he writes, "I've worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends" (p. 206). His father told him he'd need to be either black or a liberal to get into Yale Law.
That's the kind of exaggeration that the counterculture of ignorance thrives on. He did get in. In fact, it might well be that he was an "affirmative action" admission, but he got some mentoring (from the woman he eventually married) and he figured out how to succeed in the new world he had entered.
I was quite touched by his stories of making the cultural crossing. I had somewhat similar experiences myself, and had to keep my social antennas up from college right through to my job in the government in my upper 30s. If his point is partly that signs of social class act as barriers to mobility, that matches with tons of research. What is maybe most interesting is that the barriers are often internal - a person sensitive to all the stuff they don't know about "elite culture" can be discouraged and give up.
And of course narratives like "you'd have to be black or liberal to get admitted" can easily be a cover for that kind of shame. I have to think a lot of the Trumpist/Tea Party reaction to "elites" is wounded pride. And of course people like Hannity and Roger Ailes know how to play that like a fiddle.
DWill wrote:Could it be that it wasn't so much when Vance wrote the book, that it was latent before the election campaign, and came to the fore when Donald Trump used it to vault over his rivals and claim the nomination?
There's a lot of evidence that Trump's challenging of "political correctness" brought out latent racism. Plenty of people who would never call anyone a nigger are still offended by feeling that someone is policing their views. If they privately feel that good jobs should be kept for men, or that Black Lives Matter and Affirmative Action is a shield for bad people to get away with stuff, or just have bought into the myths about thugs and Muslims, they hate the feeling of being shushed by more respectable folks.
The new BLM response to that viewpoint is to argue for "anti-racism", and I do think that has potential for improving the dialogue. The idea is that all of us have been infused with implicit racism (including black Americans) and that if we aren't actively fighting it, we are contributing to perpetuating the problem. But that is still too theoretical and abstract to actually move those who are feeling wounded pride. If anything it could easily turn into just a new political correctness: just a smoother excuse for judging people "deplorable".