Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture

These chapters chiefly focus on Vance’s time in higher education, first at Ohio State University and then at Yale Law School. This solidifies Vance as a member of The Appalachian Diaspora. That Vance works three jobs while completing his undergraduate degree in two years is indicative in many ways of his hillbilly, working-class upbringing; contained in his fastidiousness is a financial shrewdness; contained in his pushing himself past his limits is a childhood rife with trauma, one that disallows the mind’s fight-or-flight mechanism to ever completely shut off.

The end of Chapter 11 contains a long meditation on patriotism, Obama, and white working-class malaise. This is a clear statement of Vance’s platform on the issue of Personal Versus Societal Responsibility for the Disenfranchised. Here, Vance identifies himself as “the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at” (189)—the Acela being the business-class train route on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, which extends from Washington, DC, to Boston—and goes on to state that patriotism for white working-class Americans has been a sort of second religion, one that many people in his community were losing.

Vance speculates that the reason so many in his community, and communities like his, have such a distrust of Obama (so much so that high percentages believe the falsities offered about his place of birth and religious affiliation), is because of aspects Obama’s otherness that have “nothing to do” with his skin color. By this, Vance means his wealth, his “foreign” professorial accent, his Ivy League credentials, his urban background, and, for some, his race. Also contained in this distrust, however, is that to see Obama as someone who overcame childhood adversity, who is trying to better all of America, works against the collective cynicism of white working-class America—a cynicism that provides as much self-identity as anything else. He counters this with an optimism that he feels for the first time in his life upon entering Yale.

Yale tests Vance’s ability to rise above his self-doubt, alienation, and feelings of inadequacy. To succeed in such an environment means being able to understand the rules of the social elite, and while Vance’s work ethic allows him to succeed in the classroom, dinner interviews and understanding which piece of cutlery is used with which dinner course are out of his wheelhouse. Helping him through this process is Usha, his love interest and future wife. Vance concludes Chapter 12 by offering a solution for the discomfort many working-class people feel in their attempts at upward mobility—journeys that often fail from feeling out of place to begin with: “One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong” (206). When Vance gets into Yale, he emphasizes that the scholarship package was extremely generous, and that, for most low-income students, elite Ivy League schools are the least expensive to attend because they offer comprehensive income-based financial aid. The problem, Vance insists, is that kids like him from low-income families don’t know this. In this case, the problem is more about opportunities for upward mobility not being well-known among those who can benefit from them most rather than elite institutions closing their doors to low-income students, but Vance does not address this contradiction in his argument.