{"id":103515,"date":"2016-10-10T12:52:38","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T16:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103515"},"modified":"2016-10-10T13:50:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T17:50:08","slug":"being-a-bumpkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/","title":{"rendered":"Being a Bumpkin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the cover of Hillbilly Elegy<\/i>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Scan the headlines and you\u2019ll find\u00a0that everyone\u2019s talking about how the white trash have made their presence felt. The white trash support Trump; the white trash\u00a0are losing ground<\/a>; the white trash\u00a0should be honored by the government for their hard work and sacrifices<\/a>; the white trash are continuing to\u00a0redirect their aggression at other racial minorities<\/a>\u00a0instead of the robber barons who exploit them.<\/p>\n

But who exactly are these people, these trashy whites who have found themselves, in the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills, \u201cwithout purpose in an epoch in which they are without power<\/a>?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thanks to a spate of newly released books on the topic, we readers can begin fumbling towards some preliminary answers. For those interested in a first-person account of white-trash living, there\u2019s J. D. Vance\u2019s\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em><\/a>, a spare and poignant look at impoverished rural Ohio and Kentucky. Nancy Isenberg\u2019s\u00a0White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America<\/em><\/a>\u00a0offers a concise and highly readable overview of the subject beginning with colonization and concluding with the Clintons. Carol Anderson\u2019s\u00a0White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide<\/em><\/a>\u00a0examines a series of events, ranging from Reconstruction to the election of Barack Obama, after which seeming gains for African Americans were quickly met by massive resistance from whites.<\/p>\n

Anderson\u2019s book provides one important clue for why white-trash identity has so violently reasserted itself. All around the country, nonwhite minorities have begun to\u00a0vocalize their discontent<\/a>, in the process winning at least\u00a0symbolic concessions<\/a>\u00a0from white authority figures. \u201cThe trigger for white rage,\u201d Anderson writes, \u201cis black advancement.\u201d This explanation, while correct, offers only part of the answer. A white-trash reaction, insofar as it can be understood at all, requires some understanding of the various social, economic, and cultural factors that have intersected to create the white trash.<\/p>\n

One source of information is from first-person accounts,\u00a0usually authored by people who have since escaped the squalid conditions<\/a>\u00a0they are now endeavoring to document. J. D. Vance works in this venerable tradition, even as he now stands apart from it as a Yale Law School\u2013educated winner of the class wars. Such contemporary navel-gazing assertions of white-trash identity, as by Vance when he discusses his ascent from southern Ohio misery in\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>, may accomplish something rather pernicious: while ostensibly accurate\u2014the poverty and privation Vance experienced and describes in precise lawyerly detail is real\u2014such recognition elides the critical point that\u00a0being white means not being black<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This core concept, explored years earlier in books such as Edmund Morgan\u2019s\u00a0American Slavery, American Freedom<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and David Roediger\u2019s\u00a0The Wages of Whiteness<\/em><\/a>, is deliberately omitted from Vance\u2019s\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>,\u00a0and it\u2019s not emphasized in Isenberg\u2019s\u00a0White Trash<\/em>. This is understandable from a narrative sense; the authors have specific ideas they wish to explore, and Isenberg\u2019s account in particular would become muddied if every chapter concluded with some peroration about how, notwithstanding what she had just written, African Americans have had it worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Situating white trash in the racial hierarchy is one thing\u2014many scholars have already done that, to great effect\u2014and offering a provisional explanation of who they are is another. This is where Isenberg\u2019s new book is particularly handy, since it offers such a firm rebuke to the foundational myth of America as a \u201cclassless\u201d society. In an account spanning four centuries, Isenberg uses the writing of elites like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to dispel the notion that ours was a society that refrained from drawing social distinctions (and while this notion has been\u00a0dispelled many times before<\/a>, it never hurts to say it again, in a different register).<\/p>\n

Over and over, Isenberg explains, those seventeenth century \u201cwaste people\u201d today labeled white trash were forced into defensive positions, driven to the poorest-performing farms on the most distant frontiers, away from interactions with social superiors who at times speculate they may be genetically distinct from these pitiful wretches. In the past two decades, many among the white trash\u2014still on the defensive, as ever\u2014have been motivated to support reactionary political causes. The writer Thomas Frank argues in\u00a0What\u2019s the Matter With Kansas?<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that these individuals are voting against their economic interests, but Isenberg provides compelling evidence that they might be attempting to preserve things more important to them: their reputations and their way of life, such as they are. (Elliott Gorn\u2019s work on\u00a0nineteenth century rough-and-tumble fighting<\/a>\u00a0among poor whites also noted that honor alone impelled these violent conflicts, which often ended only with the\u00a0gouging of an eyeball from its socket<\/a>.) Today, as some among the white trash throw their support behind Donald Trump\u2019s wall-building, xenophobic presidential campaign, it remains an open question as to whether most of them fantasize about inflicting grievous hurt on others or if they merely wish to be heard.<\/p>\n

It was against this backdrop of white-trash mobilization that I attended graduate school, my late-2000s Ph.D. cohort consisting mostly of white Americans and Europeans, as well as a few nonwhites whose\u00a0quiet struggles bulk even larger in retrospect<\/a>. Perhaps once upon a time, during my brief libertarian undergraduate phase, I\u00a0might have characterized my upbringing<\/a>\u00a0as Vance does his: an unstinting immersion in rural benightedness, backwardness, domestic violence, and outright criminality that ceased only when I pulled up my pants, tucked in my shirt, and started making good grades.<\/p>\n

Vance\u2019s mother had repeated brushes with the law, leading to his placement with his grandparents;\u00a0the same thing happened to me<\/a>\u00a0after a grand jury indicted one of my parents in an embarrassingly public trial.\u00a0Pain is subjective and the psychic toll of abuse cannot be quantified, but going solely by Vance\u2019s own disclosures, my brother and I endured far more controlled beatings and outright thrashings in a single week than he did over the course of an entire childhood\u2014but what do such \u201cwho had it worse?\u201d contests matter when that treatment had no discernible impact on my life save instilling a certain knee-jerk skittishness I\u2019ve never been fully able to conceal?<\/p>\n

And perhaps in graduate school I might have expressed confusion, even consternation, at the odd folkways and mores of the educated upper class, as Vance does regarding interactions with fellow students and potential employers while attending Yale Law School. I might have briefly thought, as Holly Genovese observes in her recent essay \u201cCoding \u2018White Trash\u2019 in Academia<\/a>,\u201d that \u201cmy differences\u2014in public education and cultural knowledge\u2014couldn\u2019t be undone,\u201d with the result being \u201can in-betweenness, a lack of belonging.\u201d Or, as California-born bumpkin turned Harvard philosopher\u00a0Josiah Royce<\/a>\u00a0put it a century earlier, \u201cI was never a person cultivated in any aesthetic sense, and I remain more barbarous as to such matters than can easily be suspected.\u201d<\/p>\n

My father, whose Job-like childhood hardships amid the West Virginia coalfields somehow beggared mine or Vance\u2019s, would have laughed at such navel-gazing. Having first escaped from poverty on a college football scholarship and later become the owner of a franchise car dealership, he was fond of remarking how \u201canything is possible in this country for a white man.\u201d He said this because he was an unrepentant if unmindful racist, like many other whites of his generation who hailed from rural Appalachia, but the point stands. Anything is indeed at least theoretically possible in the United States\u00a0for a white man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is not meant to diminish the stories of Vance, Genovese, or myself. However, once\u00a0our accents flattened<\/a>\u00a0and we learned which forks to use at the dinner table, our odds of total assimilation increased dramatically. That is David Roediger\u2019s central assertion in\u00a0The Wages of Whiteness<\/em>: during the course of our existence as American whites, a category created as the ancestral habits and languages of\u00a0our immigrant forebears<\/a>\u00a0fell away and left behind only a white skin, we could avail ourselves of certain inherent ideological advantages even if we lacked pecuniary ones.<\/p>\n

Instead of grappling with the complexities of this realization, Vance instead uses the latter half of\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>\u00a0to retrace the steps he took, beginning with enlistment in the Marine Corps after a turbulent high school experience, to escape the doomed area where so many of his unfortunate acquaintances still reside. This comes as a disappointment, given the skillful way he sketches his \u201chillbilly royalty\u201d relatives (some of his ancestors participated in the legendary backwoods\u00a0Hatfield-McCoy feud<\/a>) and their dysfunctional yet strangely admirable existences. His Ohio is a world I knew all too well but lacked the confidence to ever consider exploring, because what would such an exploration even look like? Vance, I hoped, might have what it takes to untangle this Gordian knot of identity.<\/p>\n

But this was not to be. Instead of ambivalence and ambiguity, we are eventually treated to some garden-variety libertarian moralizing, with Vance positing that merit\u2014and merit alone!\u2014as the way out of the morass of poverty and indolence that characterizes white -rash life. For a lawyer with a thorough grounding in argumentation, perhaps this path was unavoidable: the simplest answer, whether presented to a jury or judge, is typically the winning one. But in a vast postindustrial society where every participant in the market-capitalist marathon is given a staggered start based on his or her race, gender identity, sexual identity, or economic class, advancement by\u00a0merit<\/a>\u00a0is not so much an answer as a beguiling illusion to those who commence the race in more advantaged positions. Some start on third base and proceed blithely through life convinced they hit a triple, while others, Vance among them, advance from first to second on a throwing error yet believe effort alone helped them swat a ground-rule double.<\/p>\n

From there, it is an easy enough thing to blame those who lag behind, as Vance does when urging that poor whites must change their ways if they wish to attend Yale Law School, hang out with\u00a0Peter Thiel<\/a>, and write think pieces for the\u00a0National Review<\/em>. There is something gratifying, I suppose, about identifying the \u201cwhite trash\u201d and then sharing with others how you worked overtime to distance yourself from their scummy world. \u201cPity no more would be \/ If we did not make somebody Poor,\u201d\u00a0observed the poet and social radical William Blake<\/a>, \u201cAnd mercy no more could be \/ If all were as happy as we.\u201d The real benefit of urging less fortunate peers to pull up their pants and tuck in their shirts has more to do with rationalizing one\u2019s own success in an unequal society than with genuinely uplifting the multitudes. After all, without constantly reminding yourself that you got wherever you are by dint of your own exertions, how could you sleep at night?<\/p>\n

And many us can\u2019t sleep at night, my late father included.\u00a0He died two years ago, at the age of seventy-four, but had a nervous breakdown at an automobile-dealers\u2019 convention two decades prior to that. He described the experience as a religious vision, an encounter in his hotel room with a calming \u201cwhite light\u201d that explained to him he would never have to work again\u2014and he never did. I hated him for this decision to abandon his businesses, because it bankrupted our family and destroyed my very high quality of living, and it was only in recent years,\u00a0over the course of thousands of e-mails<\/a>\u00a0sent to me while I was in graduate school, that he bothered to explain why.<\/p>\n

Apparently, after thirty years spent \u201cchasing a buck\u201d while pretending to be something he wasn\u2019t, he was emotionally exhausted. He had done many of the things that J. D. Vance recommended, from changing the way he dressed to curing himself of his many harmful drug addictions, but at heart he remained a \u201cscumbag\u201d who wanted to relocate to Glacier National Park and live out his final years completely hidden from view. For years he had woken up to night terrors of being abused by his \u201cwhoreo of an old man,\u201d a sociopathic\u00a0ex-submariner<\/a>\u00a0who brutalized him and his sister but took special pleasure in torturing the stray dogs and cats my father would secretly adopt as pets. Even as he succeeded at sports and business, my father could never shake these early childhood associations. He was prone to reckless and at times criminal behavior, behavior he admitted he greatly preferred to \u201cdoing the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, if you had called my father white trash, or a more region-specific insult like \u201chunky<\/a>,\u201d his thirty-year-old self would have retaliated by administering the beating of a lifetime.\u00a0He was no \u201cdumb coal patch hunky\u201d\u2014far from it.\u00a0Like Vance, he was on a fast track to joining the elite, or at least whatever vision of the elite he entertained at the time.\u00a0He owned a bar, two airplanes, and several car lots; he was a businessman, someone who acted like a \u201cwhite man\u201d instead of \u201cwhite trash.\u201d\u00a0But by the end of his life, he had embraced his origins and admitted without shame that \u201cyou can\u2019t change who you are\u201d and that the truly rich, whom he had come to detest, had no use for try-hard parvenus.<\/p>\n

That was far too pat; it seemed to me that he was simply a man who had never sorted out his complex identities, in part because he never had a forum for discussing them in a serious way. The question, as yet unaddressed by Vance or anybody else, hangs in the air:\u00a0if the white trash cannot speak candidly of themselves\u2014if they are only ever spoken\u00a0of\u00a0<\/em>by elites, as Isenberg recounts\u2014how might they hope to speak truth to power?<\/p>\n

In a world that increasingly comprises\u00a0plutocrats and proles, the classes and the masses, the 1 percent and the rest, the need for yet another multifaceted critique from below remains urgent.<\/p>\n

Oliver Bateman<\/a>\u00a0is a historian and journalist who lives in Pittsburgh.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity. Scan the headlines and you\u2019ll find\u00a0that everyone\u2019s talking about how the white trash have made their presence felt. The white trash support Trump; the white trash\u00a0are losing ground; the white trash\u00a0should be honored by the government for their hard work and sacrifices; the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1034,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[6451,25045,25049,25051,2823,25055,19381,25053,25056,8226,25044,25046,25048,8952,25047,25057,25050,12443,187,17303,25052,14689,25054,25043,4035],"class_list":["post-103515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-benjamin-franklin","tag-bumpkins","tag-c-wright-mills","tag-carol-anderson","tag-class","tag-david-roediger","tag-donald-trump","tag-edmund-morgan","tag-elliot-gorn","tag-family","tag-hicks","tag-hillbillies","tag-hillbilly-elegy","tag-identity","tag-j-d-vance","tag-josiah-royce","tag-nancy-isenberg","tag-peter-thiel","tag-poverty","tag-race","tag-sociology","tag-thomas-frank","tag-white-rage","tag-white-trash","tag-william-blake"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBeing a Bumpkin: Untangling White-Trash Identity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Oliver Bateman on three new books about white trash.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Being a Bumpkin by Oliver Lee Bateman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 10, 2016 \u2013 Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity.Scan the headlines and you\u2019ll find\u00a0that everyone\u2019s talking about how the white\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-10-10T16:52:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-10-10T17:50:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-1.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"675\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Oliver Lee Bateman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Oliver Lee Bateman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"12 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Oliver Lee Bateman\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/cc866ffcb9e685c482d46989fd59fcc9\"},\"headline\":\"Being a Bumpkin\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-10-10T16:52:38+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-10-10T17:50:08+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/\"},\"wordCount\":2362,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/10\/being-a-bumpkin\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/hillbillyelegy.jpeg\",\"keywords\":[\"Benjamin Franklin\",\"bumpkins\",\"C. 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