A Hillbilly and a Ghetto Girl Cross Paths, & Only One is Not Weird

J.D. Vance and his ride to the top on the backs of the working-class

America loves dreamers, strivers, and good stories. In the fall of 2016, I was bursting with excitement and anticipation. I had just written a memoir and was looking forward to its release. In the 1980s, I was raised by a single mother in and around Los Angeles, California. I overcame poverty to become the first person in my family to graduate high school, attend college, and earn a doctorate. I felt I had something to say.  

Born Bright was my attempt to crack open a world very few had ever visited and explain why some do - and others don’t - make it to the other side of the tracks. 

Little did I know a white guy from Ohio was writing his version of the same story. His name was J.D. Vance, and he was from Middletown, Ohio, where about 1 in 4 people live in poverty. Vance had overcome hardship, abuse, and neglect to graduate from Yale Law School. 

We were winners no matter which side of the aisle you occupy. For Democrats, we are proof that America is a place where you can make it if you try, regardless of where you start. For Republicans, our formative years support their claims that people are poor because of bad choices, laziness, and intergenerational pathologies, such as out-of-wedlock births, crime, or drug and alcohol abuse. 

 

He was a Hillbilly, and I was a Ghetto girl that had made good. 

Objectively, our two memoirs were doing the same work: telling the stories of our hardscrabble lives mired by poverty and low expectations and explaining from our perspectives why America had fallen short of its promise and left so many behind. 

I agreed with Vance: Working-class communities were enveloped by an oft-debilitating feeling that the system was rigged and the belief that to make it in America, you had to change who you were. Like Vance, I, too, changed my name when I arrived at college. Instead of using Chataquoa, my first name at birth, I used my middle name, Nicole, to align with the middle-class identity I was building. 

J.D. Vance and I, however, arrived at two very different conclusions on the causes of inequality in America. Vance blamed the people in his town, their laziness and shiftlessness, as he had put it, for their inability to get ahead or succeed. I blamed the systems and institutions that had failed poor people and communities in bulk. 

A Star Rises in the Wake of Trump’s 2016 Election Stunner 

The day following Trump’s unexpected 2016 Presidential win, I traveled to Spelman College in Atlanta for one of my first book tour talks. The room was nearly empty; there may have been four people present. We were discombobulated and thunderstruck about the election. What had just happened? 

Scrambling to explain Donald Trump’s rise and popularity, beltway and media pundits began to weave together a narrative of economic unrest and resentment among poor white people—they were upset, forsaken, and made to feel invisible by the educated, middle-class elite. Electing Trump was their retribution.

 Enter J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly explainer.

 In short order, Vance was able to exploit his upbringing and the people in his hometown to prop up the emerging narrative of economic populism and white rural resentment. The liberal and coastal elites, who didn’t know much about rural America, clamored to hear Vance speak, feigning to understand how they could have missed such a significant voting bloc. They never went to Ohio or elsewhere to see for themselves; they took Vance’s word for it.

Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir, became a New York Times bestseller, and Vance hit all of the “Big-Idea Get-Togethers,” TED, and the Aspen Ideas Festival, among them. As his popularity grew, so did the tales of his youth, growing more exaggerated with each telling. He continued to refer to himself as a cultural outcast in his talks, but he had indeed found his way into the winner’s circle, embraced by both liberals and conservatives. Much of what he said on the road went unchecked or unchallenged.

A Hard Right Turn and the Betrayal of Middletown

Vance’s hard right turn was predictable. It was the easiest and cheapest way to the top. Worn down by four years of Trump and the realization that his win was much more attributable to racism and xenophobia than economic marginalization, liberal sympathy for the cantankerous, disaffected segments of rural America waned. So did their infatuation with J.D. Vance. He didn’t take it well. 

By 2022, as Vance launched his senatorial bid in Ohio, he had found a new home: the MAGA Right of the conservative movement. To fit in with the weirdos and win Donald Trump's affection after once comparing him to Hitler, Vance’s positions and policy solutions have become more radical and incendiary. And on the 2024 Presidential campaign trail, he’s become the chief evangelist and explainer of white male grievance. In doing so, he has leaned into racist and sexist tropes and rhetoric that undermine his own family and life. 

J.D. Vance has lost the plot to his own story. What began as a story of a steel town boy made good has turned into a choose-your-own-adventure page-turner where no one truly knows how it will end, not even Vance. 

Growing up, I watched both The Cosby Show and Roseanne. Similar to most white people watching The Cosby Show, I had never seen a middle-class black family on television or in real life. It was not until I arrived on the steps of Howard University that I met middle-class Black people. 

Roseanne felt like my real life. I could relate to the Conners. Their working-class problems seemed like my own—not enough money to pay the monthly bills, lower-wage jobs, simple food, and plain clothes. I was Becky Conner, not Denise Huxtable, always wanting more than my family could afford. 

Like J.D. Vance, Roseanne’s turn as a Trump supporter in the reboot felt like a betrayal and unserious. Both came out of nowhere and only served to pander to a segment of the population unwilling to embrace the mosaic that America has become. And that’s a shame.  

Working-class people and families are more similar than they are different. I know this to be true, and so does Vance. He’s now afraid to admit it, which makes him just plain weird.  

What’s Nicole up to? Nicole is hard at work on her next book and Future Forward, a new project powered by the New York Women’s Foundation & Fondation CHANEL. iamcnicolemason.com | @cnicolemason