Hillbilly Elegy, Tribe, and White Working Class, Three Books About Community And Class... and Trauma

White Working Class:  Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, by Joan C. Williams, Harvard Business Review Press, 2017

If Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance  was a difficult emotional experience - the contrasts between hill country transplants migrating to a de-industrializing Ohio, along the way displaying the kind of ugly behavior "some people"  shrug off to "those people" - drunkenness, child abuse, spousal abuse, unemployment, indebtedness, and maybe even Conservative politics -  you're going to freak out at law professor William's White Working Class. Shockingly, for "some people" it plays into a nearly opposite perspective on white working class people. 

But these white working class people are the ones who politically made a difference in the last presidential race.  And they are the ones we want working and paying taxes.  To help end "class cluelessness" Williams answers common questions:

Why doesn't the working class get with it and go to college?

Why do they resent the government at the same time they take benefits from government programs?

Does white working class support of President Trump reflect racism and sexism?

As to the bigger issues, Williams gives readers a few jolts - the stats - as well as big questions to think about, for a few years...To begin, she states that class conflicts continue to drive American politics, as they have for over 40 years.  And as we saw in Hillbilly Elegy, the working class continues to have deep suspicion of "elites" - people who have attended college and hold professional jobs.  Would you agree with that statement? 

If we accept Williams' tenet that the white working class counts, now and in the next election cycle, then it follows that political operations will want to understand how to secure this voting block for their side, and Williams has answers for that question as well.  She says that promises of free college or universal basic income will not placate this class.  Instead, what the white working class really wants is jobs, and whoever figures out how to get them jobs, globalization and automation aside, is going to win.  Do you agree?

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com 

Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance, Harper 2016

This controversial best seller, now ranked #6 on Amazon, is painful.  One can only wonder what, aside from a good advance and huge readership, would have caused self-described hillbilly first-time author J.D. Vance to tell his family story, a long succession of betrayals, drug abuse, abandonment, violence, shame.  Hillbilly Elegy has become a spark point for political discussions - it's a Trump vs. us vs. them book, it's a poverty vs middle class, its a an American economics study, its a look into "those people" from the hollers of Kentucky drawn by the promise of jobs to the formerly industrial Midwest - this time Warren, Ohio - and then caught in the outflow of jobs as the work moved during the height of globalization to Mexico and the Far East.   Globalization was not designed to turn coal miners into hospital aides, but it certainly did not achieve any kind of US trade balance either.   

Or is Hillbilly Elegy something else?  Could it be, as the word elegy suggests, that it is an attempt by J.D. Vance to put the pain behind him and find a way forward, all the while carrying the pain inside him, mourning the loss forever of that remembered and once beautiful Kentucky home?  The book seems to be divided into two parts - the first his recital of remembered painful images and conversations - his MamMaw lighting grandfather on fire, his supplying a vial of clean urine for his drug-addicted mother's drug test, his near death ride with a mother hell bent on vehicular suicide. 

Part two seems to move past Marine Corps and Ohio State, plus Yale Law School, into a second life grounded with marriage, and some self-understanding of anger and trauma.  In fact, Vance gives us insight into the power of childhood trauma when he offers info on the ACE study and questionnaire.  The Adverse Childhood Events test asks questions that get at the kind and intensity of trauma experienced in childhood to produce a score, an indicator of future personality challenges.  In fact some experts say that a high ACE score is a predictor of adult diseases such as cancer and heart disease.  And that I think is the overall value of this difficult book; for Vance it may represent an author's desire to tell his story, out in the open and honestly, to the point of understanding it better.  

But for us, the readers outside his head, the book is open to different perspectives, one of which is that economic disruptions that create job loss and poverty, while they induce drug and alcohol abuse, crime, even murder, also somehow build resilience.  And that is the followup to the ACE test, an evaluation of countervailing factors - recilience -  that somehow brought Vance safely to adulthood.  He names them - a Marine officer who who intervened and prevented him from taking a high-interest car loan, a set of grandparents who actively nurtured his math talents, a girlfriend who hung in there.  We're hoping there may have been others as well.  

What Vance does with the big advance, the press interviews, the controversy, is hard to predict.  Perhaps he will turn his "I'm just a hillbilly" understated intelligence and energies to curing the problem that injured him so badly, the opioid abuse and alcohol addictions still rampant in abandoned working class communities.  Or maybe a movie, a follow-on to "Manchester by the Sea"?  I'd vote for the former; I certainly hope we don't get the latter.

Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger, Twelve 2016

Although the framework for Tribe is, from Sebastian Junger the author of The Perfect Storm (he's from Rockport and so we identify) and War, how community and belonging affect human life, because the book is a series of connected chapters -  essays almost -  readers may find themselves drawn to certain sections to which they can more easily relate.  We started out to read the book wondering how community and family bonds of say 25 years ago held people together.  But by the middle of the book, we were thinking that in a very short time in the US we have indeed seen weakening and in some areas the disappearance of these same ties.