1. Thread: Remembering J.D. Vance exists has pissed me off so I'm going to explain why his book on Appalachia is complete and utter garbage. This will be long so buckle up. In his book he claims spending his childhood summers in Appalachia prepared him to write his book as some

2. sort of authority on mountain people. What he actually did was learn from his mentor at Harvard to find an angle to write a memoir. Appalachia was his angle and his book dropped right around the 2016 election which meant he got to be the media spokesperson for us poor

3. violent Appalachians. Here's the thing, I am not a gatekeeper on who gets to call themselves Appalachian. There's no litmus test. But when you write a book like this, if your perspective is limited to spending a few vacations here as a child, what actually happens is

4. your conceptualization of the area isn't based on real life adult experiences of living here, it's based on what you think you know. Not what you've lived. And to make the narrative he's selling work with his limited perceptions, his book constantly falls back on old

5. tired, harmful stereotypes that have been detrimental to this area since the 1890s. What those stereotypes do is create an other. If mountain people are the other, it's easy to scapegoat them for society's problems. It's also easy for corporations to

6. justify worker mistreatment or taking away of land rights. So these aren't harmless stereotypes he's peddling. Vance also white washes the entirety of the area when in reality there has been immigration here for generations. In the early 20th century 1/4th of coal miners in

7. West Virginia were African American. Black coal miners fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain. West Virginia has more teen trans people per capita than any other state in the country. All this and generations of social, economic, and environmental activism

8. gets glossed over in his book. As someone who cares a lot about my community and this region, it hurts to think that so many people's perceptions of what it's really like here will be colored by this very narrow, not true to life narrative. Because lets face it, there are

9. VERY few true representations of this area in popular culture. So if we only get a few spokespeople, he sure as hell shouldn't be one of them. If someone is going to write the definitive book, at least let us speak for ourselves.