I Know What His Mamaw Would Tell JD Vance About Hillbilly Values

JD Vance had a lot to say about immigrants at Tuesday night’s debate. They’re to blame, he suggested, for the high cost of housing, inaccessibility of childcare, and even fentanyl. Asked about Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportation, Vance pivoted quickly to blaming immigrants —for the opioid epidemic.

I lost my mother to this epidemic. In the early 2000s she was prescribed OxyContin during recovery from a surgery. We all know what happened: Purdue reps were trained to tell doctors that the medicine had an addiction rate that was less than 1%, and they could essentially prescribe as much as they wanted without risk to their patients. Pill farms popped up, the cash started flowing, and hundreds of thousands of Americans—my mother included—died. Nary an immigrant was to blame.

Sen. Vance could have suggested a real solution to the epidemic, having first-hand experience as the son of a recovering addict. Instead he blamed the immigrants, simply hoping that the problem solves itself.

I expected better from Vance. The story he has told about his grandparents’ lives is one that many immigrants could tell, so it would have been natural for him to empathize with them as well as with opioid victims.

In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes how Mamaw and Papaw migrated from Appalachian Kentucky to Ohio in search of work. They struggled with being cut off from their family, and visited home as frequently as they could. They found new communities among their fellow migrants, but clashed with the established Ohioans.

“Many of their new neighbors viewed them suspiciously. To the established middle class of white Ohioans, these hillbillies simply didn’t belong,” he wrote. “They had too many children, and they welcomed their extended families into their homes for too long. Mamaw’s brothers and sisters lived with her and Papaw for months as they tried to find good work outside of the hills.”

JD’s story really resonates with me, because I’ve lived part of it. I was born and raised in Coal City, West Virginia. Put simply, I’m a hillbilly. Growing up, I always felt my only choice was to get far away from West Virginia. Like Vance, I set my sights on the Ivy League.

I Grew Up in Appalachia. Vance Is a Hillbilly Phony COAL CITY CONFIDENTIAL

Caleb Miller, Mathew Murphy

When I got into Harvard, I was ecstatic, but also incredibly nervous. In the 2016 election, every single county in West Virginia went to Trump, while every single county in Massachusetts went to Hillary Clinton. You’d be hard pressed to find two places in America that are more different. I felt out of place.

Before I started, I worked on a program cleaning dorm rooms for some much-needed spending money. On the first day, I sat beside our crew’s leader. She told us to give our names, dorms, prospective majors, and pronouns. I had never heard of “pronouns” in this context and had no idea what to say, so I prayed that I wouldn’t have to go first and expose myself. Then I realized my hillbilly accent, which I’d grown up trying to drop, was showing, and so were my ways. We cleaned rooms; I said “rewm” when the others said “ruhm.” Drinking pop from the bottle at the dinner table? Impolite.

Mostly I hoped no one would ask me where I was from, because when you say “West Virginia”, the best case scenario is that people think of you as “one of the good ones”. The worst case scenario is that people assume you’re an inbred racist who doesn’t deserve to be here.

Around the same time I was stressing about my background, Hillbilly Elegy was taking America by storm. I related to its author, who was perplexed by the cutlery he saw when joining the Marines. For the first time, I thought, America was actually seeing Appalachians like me.

If you strip away the races and the places, Vance’s story and my story are almost identical to “traditional” immigrant stories. People who were down on their luck economically moved to a place of greater opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their family. We struggled with the new culture, desperately missed our families, and worked incredibly hard. In the end we found a new place to call home, and the life we feel we’ve deserved. JD Vance and I weren’t fleeing political or sexual violence when we moved, and we were spared the racism that always follows immigrants of color in America, but even he should be able to see the parallels.

How do we square this with the modern JD Vance? The man who pushes lies that Haitians are eating cats and dogs, touts securing the border as a universal panacea, and has a boss who will use the military to round up immigrants?

How would Mamaw have reacted if the government of Ohio had called in the military to round up hillbilly immigrants and send them back to Kentucky? How about if the government had said “Your kids can stay, but you have to leave.” What would Mamaw have said if some slimy politician had pushed a false story about Kentuckians eating Ohioans’ pets, and his followers responded by calling in bomb threats that made children fear for their lives at school?

Vance’s Mamaw passed away in 2005, so we can’t say for sure. But we do know what happened when Ohioans complained about her hillbilly neighbor keeping chickens in his yard and butchering them in plain sight, as was customary in Kentucky. The city didn’t force him out, but they did compel him to give up his chickens. Mamaw carried the grudge for the rest of her life, Vance boasted, saying “F–-ing zoning laws. They can kiss my ruby red a--hole.”

I think I know what she’d have said about JD’s plans for immigrants.

Caleb Miller was born and raised in Coal City, West Virginia. He graduated from Harvard and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.