Opinion | Why JD Vance Dropped Into My Inbox

I once thought of JD Vance and me as coming from a similar place.

Not in terms of life experience, as my middle-class suburban childhood was quite different from Vance’s early years in rural poverty.

But something similar happened when we each wrote a book.

In 2000, I published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.” It got around for a while. I argued that even as racism’s power recedes, it can leave behind what psychologists call the victimization mind-set, which makes Black people feel that mainstream standards (including academic standards) are too high for us to achieve. I wrote not in condemnation but concern.

But quite a few people thought I wrote the book as a cudgel for conservative Republicans to take up against Black people. In the Bay Area, where I was teaching, for a while I was race traitor No. 1. Besides occasional insults on the street, local newspapers did nakedly biased profiles of me, laced with nasty comments by people like the writer Ishmael Reed (who as recently as last year had a character in one of his plays dissing me!). I heard endlessly that I must have been hoping to get rich by selling out to white conservatives.

Arguing from the middle means you get it from both ends. I am often a self-hating racist to the left, while the right often thinks I am a conservative in denial and lately diagnose me as suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And so shall it be, as I hold on tight where I sit.

Sixteen years later, Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” became a huge best seller by arguing that what ails poor Appalachians is the result of both structural factors such as deindustrialization and also cultural factors. Structural factors can cause the cultural ones, but the latter can take on a life of their own. He describes people who see themselves solely as victims of those larger forces, rather than doing what is within their power to improve their lives.

Vance came in for it in the same way that I did back in the day. Despite his efforts to thread the needle, more than a few Appalachians read the book as disrespectful, condescending and disloyal. Sarah Jones at The New Republic judged Vance’s main point to be simply “All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did.”

As it happens, in the wake of his book’s publication, Vance reached out to me. He saw me as a fellow traveler in terms of our perspective on the interaction of culture with larger forces. I was surprised to hear from him, having already read his book. We did a bit of friendly email, and I found him to be humble and compassionate. I assumed that his trajectory would involve walking the same kind of line I have tried to, exploring societal issues without being co-opted by the temptations of partisanship.

Instead, Vance has done exactly what my detractors had assumed I would, riding the book to fame and fortune provided by people with partisan and even hostile right-wing opinions. It’s sad and perplexing to watch a person with such potential to do good transparently selling out.

His recent CNN interview with Dana Bash — the one in which he said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do” — was typically dismaying. Vance was widely interpreted as admitting that the story about cat-eating Haitians is a hoax, but this is a misinterpretation. To openly say that he and Donald Trump have been lying, and to do it while the cameras were rolling, would have been self-destructive beyond any conception of sanity.

What Vance actually meant was rooted in sanity but, in that, just as appalling as admitting to the lie. He was insisting that the hoax — mean, ridiculous, and debunked — is true, feigning callous obtuseness on national television. “Dana, the evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened,” he said.

When Vance said he was willing to “create stories,” he did not mean “make things up.” He was referring, somewhat clumsily, to making a purportedly real issue a discussion topic in the media.

And that’s just it — Vance is distinctly uncrazy. He is smart and competent and has proved himself to be capable of sensitive, thoughtful engagement. I just don’t believe that someone like that could fall for the idea that Haitians are netting people’s Goldendoodles, saying grace over a dinner of puppy chops and saving the leftovers for sandwiches the next day. A similar buzzkill: reading Vance’s sputtery, hopelessly implausible case for the 2020 election being stolen, in his Times Opinion interview with Ross Douthat.

In our moment, legions of Americans are seeking to reconcile our differences and get past the prosecutorial, illiberal mind-set, the drama, fury and gridlock, that has proved to be so deleterious. Toward this end, I recommend a new book by the sociologist Ilana Redstone: “The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More — and How We Can Judge Others Less.” Vance wrote a book grappling with complexity and nuance, only to snuggle himself into exactly the smug, uncomprehending “certainty trap” Redstone describes.

I was genuinely perplexed all those years ago when people thought I wrote “Losing the Race” as a ploy to work the right wing and make a buck. An actual person writing a serious book about his society only to then take a path like that? I found it hard to imagine.

I no longer do.