Obviously, the idea that there aren’t structural barriers facing both the white and black poor is ridiculous.  Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a hard-noses willfulness: “never be like those a–holes who think the deck is stacked against them.”  In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman.  She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought against it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             J.D. Vance in an interview with Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, July 22, 2016

The dedication at the front of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis reads: For Mamaw and Papaw, my very own hillbilly terminators

Now a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate, Vance recognizes the need for hillbilly terminators like his Mamaw and Papaw in a culture that nutures, accepts, and–tragically–promotes victimhood. “Never be like those a-holes who think the deck is stacked against them,” his Mamaw admonished him. With the presidential election only days away, if it were possible–and Vance’s Mamaw were still living–I would run her campaign for President of the United States. Now she would be a remarkable first female president. Preach it, Mamaw, preach it.

Vance’s grandmother understood, all too well, the challenges facing her family. And yet, as matriach, she provided a faithful foundation for her family, grounding their love with fierce love and loyalty. She refused to see herself or her family as victims of a deck that was stacked against them. Through the years of what Vance called a “revolving door of father figures,” Mamaw was always there, opening her door and her heart to Vance, his sister, and others.

Still, in his memoir, Vance laments that he “hated the disruption,” “hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I’d begun to like them.” As a result, he reports that he and his sister never learned how men should treat women. He writes that his sister once confided “men will disappear at the drop of a hat. They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and its not that hard to make them go.”

As I read through Vance’s mother’s history of husbands and boyfriends who came and went, I could not help see the faces of countless students I have had over the course of my career. In one of the my senior high school classes, one of my students told me that he was dreading his graduation ceremony. When I asked why, he said, “If it rains, and we have to hold graduation in the gym, they will issue each student six tickets. Then, my mom and my dad–who are divorced–will fight over who gets the tickets. It will be an awful mess, and I just don’t want to deal with it.”

Like Vance, many of my students live in environments in which constant fighting, criticizing, screaming, and threatening are standard fare. Like Vance, these students split their time, their possessions, and their hearts between a mother and a father who may not even speak to each other. They leave their math book in their father’s car and report that they will not be able to get it for two weeks; they fail to finish their essay because they were left to cook, bathe, and watch over their siblings while their mother goes out with friends. This is their life, such that it is.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes, “We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed.” When he returned to his Ohio hometown, he talked with one of his high school teachers who admitted that “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

I can personally testify to teachers who have spent their careers trying to shepherd students who have been “raised by wolves.” There is no instructional strategy, no educational incentive, no amount of time or effort that can effectively erase the damage done by wolves. Don’t misunderstand me: I have endorsed and promoted strategies, incentives, and relationships in hopes of making a real difference in students’ lives. Undoubtedly, there is work to be done to improve our schools. What I truly appreciate about Vance’s memoir, however, is that he refuses to blame teachers and schools for the failure of many students to graduate, to pursue lives, educational opportunities, and careers beyond their communities and beyond the expectations of their working class poor families.

Honestly, I wish more politicians, educational “experts”, reporters, and citizens would take an honest look at the baggage that many kids bring with them to school. And then I wish they would spend a week, a month–better yet an entire semester–trying their hand at removing this baggage and turning these kids’ lives around. These individuals are those who have criticized teachers, have told them how to fix these students’ educational and personal problems, so I’d like to watch them at work. Walk a mile in teachers’ shoes. Walk a mile in social workers’ shoes. Even better, walk a mile in the shoes of the poor. Take up the mantle of their lives. Live within their barriers.

Vance writes:

If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

 A cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government? A movement that gains adherents by the day? Oh yeah. If the society, the government, the schools, the police, the employers are to blame, then how easy it becomes to claim victim status. How easy to turn outward when you might first turn inward. How convenient to quit because you are sick of waking up early, of being asked to put your cell phone away, of actually having to work.

Again, I am aware of the real limitations facing many of the working class poor, the hillbillies and rednecks. Over the years, however, I have questioned whether or not our entitlements are truly helping. Vance’s words ring true for me, for I have had countless students look me squarely in the face and refuse to work, refuse to even try. Even when they are physically in class, they are neither mentally nor emotionally there. And yet they expect to pass, to graduate with their peers, to essentially get something for nothing. Because, as they glibly remind us, we owe them. A lot.

Many of these students have never experienced the genuine joy and authentic sense of purpose found in meaningful work. My fear is that most never will. They are being entitled to depend on others, most of whom are middle class individuals who will work hard for their own children and for others’ children. They are learning and embracing helplessness. And they are becoming particularly good at this.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance elaborates on this helplessness:

Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life. From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness.

Learned willfulness. I like that. Imagine a society in which we committed our time and resources to promoting and teaching learned willfulness. I can imagine it, although I am painfully aware that many in our current culture would find such work discriminatory and altogether unfair. It is interesting that Vance identifies the mores of his grandparents, clearly members of the working poor, but members who held different values than other working class poor. He writes:

Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.

Depression era stories are peopled with individuals like Vance’s Mamaw and Papaw. My great grandparents, grandparents, and parents began their lives as working class poor. They were, as Vance writes, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. Certainly, there are individuals like this today. We just don’t hear much about them, for the stories of the consumerist, isolated, angry, and distrustful abound. They dominate the news and drive political, social, and educational policy.

In his interview with Rod Dreher, Vance said:

The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand. At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way. […] But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.

Perhaps we would all do well to compassionately and conscientiously find ways to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right rather than romanticizing and stereotyping them. It goes without saying that this would be much more difficult–emotionally, socially, educationally, and politically. It would be messier and more personal. And above all, it would require people of faith to seriously examine the “help” they provide and fail to provide.

In the Part 3 of The Sanctuary of Hillbilly, I will share J. D. Vance’s suggestions for “helping” the working class poor.

Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins.