Before We Were White - Podcast

02/08/2024

Hillbilly Face

It is no coincidence that "Hillbilly Face" co-existed for decades alongside Blackface. To explain why, we need to step back in time...

America's earliest cultural foundations always involved a delicate tightrope walk between the forces of God (Puritans, Massachusetts Bay Colony) and Mammon (speculators, Virginia Colony).

This delineation was of course not entirely clear-cut. Puritans loved making money, and most speculators were Christians. It's more a question of emphasis.

As eastern North America began to fill-up with colonists during the 1600s and 1700s, these parallel forces of "God and Mammon" began to rub up against one another, becoming more and more deeply entwined.

Most Christians in the USA today are unaware that the Puritans believed in "predestination". That is to say, they believed that God had already decided at the time of His Creation how every single person's life would unfold.

Puritans walked through the world wondering whether they had been chosen for salvation or damnation, constantly looking for signs of their place in the universal schema.

This is a difficult concept for us today. Professing faith in God and Jesus while "doing good" in the world were of themselves no guarantee of a heavenly reward.

Why "do good" at all, then?

Because to do evil was seen as a "sign" that a person had been "pre-selected" for damnation.

"Doing good" was a way of being extra careful to show all the outward "signs" of "pre-selection" for salvation.

It might sound strange now, but it was a bit like trying to "call God's bluff". By modeling "Godliness" in their daily life, a person hoped they were acting-out their "pre-destination".

This is part of what drove much of the American Christian work ethic. To be successful or wealthy was a sign of Divine Providence - in other words, God was giving a sign to His favored or "saved" people through His beneficence.

Such a view of the world is of course endlessly capable of an internal self-justification for just about anything.

Every event which falls favorably for a person can be characterised as a sign of "God's Providence".

Even land theft. Slavery. Or massacres.

It is this mindset which can re-construe wickedness as the "Hand of God" in action.

The three most abused groups of people in North American history have always been:

1) the enslaved or formerly enslaved

2) indigenous peoples

3) "white trash", aka Rednecks, Hillbillies, Melungeons, et al

Each of these three groups displayed characteristics which certain types of Christians could conveniently point to as a sign of God's disfavor.

People are enslaved because God has placed "The Mark of Cain" upon them.

People's land is taken from them because they are non-believers, and it is God's "Manifest Destiny" being revealed.

People are poor because God has pre-destined it to be so.

And if God himself has shown disfavor for certain people, then why shouldn't humans do the same?

*****

Most think that the history of Blackface is only a story of "white people" blacking-up, and mocking African Americans.

The story is far more complicated.

For a start, what many fail to notice, is how regularly the "Hillbilly" is also present as a stock character.

Hillbillies or "white trash" have traditionally been so far down the American pecking order that even the children of poor Italian immigrants - people like Michael James Gubitosi, better-known as the actor Robert Blake - could make their start in show business in the 1930s as part of a dance troupe called "The Three Little Hillbillies".

People of the American heartland who grew up in the 60s and 70s watching variety shows like "Hee Haw", probably never stopped to think that this show was a late, and somewhat more "proto-woke" version of Blackface/Hillbilly face.

Regular guest Minnie Pearl's character was pulled straight from the age of minstrelsy.

But set aside for the moment all the non-Black, non-Hillbilly people participating in Blackface/Hillbilly face.

It seems extraordinary to this writer that no one has seemed to notice just how many Blackface minstrel shows were comprised of and performed by people from "non-white" backgrounds, including Black Americans and people from mixed-ethnic backgrounds such as the Appalachian Melungeons.

Much in the way Black Americans began to reclaim words of insult over the past decades, and much in the way LGBT people have recently reclaimed the word "q***r", it seems that Black, Hillbilly, and mixed peoples began to reclaim minstrelsy in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Again, it is no coincidence that "Hillbilly Face" has co-existed for decades alongside Blackface.

The marginalised underclasses of the world have been doing this since time immemorial - using their streetwise or insider ethnic status to transcend and leverage the lower caste social identity placed on them.

They then bend it back on the middle and upper classes, by selling a "product" to gormless outsiders who are willing to pay for an "ethnic experience".

People like Jason Aldean and J. D. Vance are STILL performing Hillbilly Face. And what makes it triple-twist funny, is that they and others like them don't even seem to realize it.

Image: Members of the mixed-ethnic Scott Family String Band (left and bottom); Minnie Pearl (top right)

01/08/2024

Seemed apt while working on a podcast episode about the history of religion in Europe and the USA...

31/07/2024

Figuring out how to frame this post and what tone to adopt was taking ages, so let's just go for casual conversational...

For two months I've been pulling-up some of the most extraordinary reading for the current three-part podcast:

"New, Improved, and Super-Sanctified"

I take the trust of my supporters and Patrons seriously, and for my own download metrics it really helps to get two episodes out in the same calendar month.

But alas! I need maybe 4 or 5 more days to ship the next episode, as I pay the price for six nights spent in crowded theatres and lounges during our local Jazz Project/Festival (my 18-year-old son plays drums).

Feckin' Covid.

The amount of work and research involved in putting together the pieces on J. D. Vance also ate into podcast production time, but I sincerely believe that along with other bloggers like Terra Vance - Marked Melungeon, we have helped expose the Veep pick as the spooky (dare I say "weird") shyster which he is.

This year of all years, I believe this work is of the utmost importance.

Now the bright side. We've brought in 1,600 new readers over the past two weeks, and we're just shy of the 5,000 mark now.

Our podcast crossed the 40,000 downloads threshold this morning (excluding YouTube figures).

We had only a tenth of that number this time last year.

Covid or not, I'm grinning like the cat that got the cream...

Thank every one of you, especially the Patrons who allow me to get on with things, even if we are not as regular as bigger outfits.

Love and peace (and a big turn-out this November from any cat ladies out there).

29/07/2024

American History 109 (or 283?)

"Mr. Potts, a Master of Arts, well practised in Chirurgerie and Physique, and expert also in distillinge of waters."

In 1623, Dr. John Potts, holder of a masters degree from Oxford University in England, prepared a poison to be served in wine to the Powhatan delegation to peace talks in Virginia Colony.

Apologists for the wrongs of English colonisers will say that this act of duplicity was in retaliation for Powhatan attacks on English colonists - without mentioning that Powhatan attacks were themselves in response to the violent raiding and theft of Powhatan winter food stores by English colonists at Jamestown.

Although wealthy himself, Dr. John Potts was later convicted of cattle theft from his own fellow colonists.

Some female colonists at Jamestown who were captured alive in raids by the Powhatan were later ransomed back by Dr. Potts.

So a decent enough rogue our Dr. Potts. Right?

Not so fast. Dr. Potts only ransomed-back the wives of his own indentured servants who had perished in Powhatan raids, so that these traumatised women could work-off their dead husbands' "debts".

One hostage later petitioned for her release from "slavery" stating that her subjugation and indenture by Dr. Potts:

"...differeth not from her slavery with the Indians."

29/07/2024

Continuum...

Our local once-a-year jazz project wrapped-up last night.

When considering what the USA has given the world, you'll usually hear things like Hollywood, rock & roll, cheeseburgers, or democracy.

I'm not here to defend the merits or legitimacy of those claims.

But jazz.

As jazz legend Art Blakey once remarked "Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life".

In centuries to come, when the USA is but another in a long line of defunct empires, I hope the world will still be playing some form of jazz.

At the end of last night, a very friendly and elderly lady was passing among the tables in the lobby, handing-out a survey form. By its questions, this survey was clearly intended to gather the data required to show the value of this music festival to the local community and economy when applying for government funding.

The section of the survey asking questions of ethnicity was a somewhat heavy-handed attempt to collect data showing how music encourages the positive aspects of "multi-culturalism".

Those being surveyed were asked to circle their "ethnicity". This is the only question I refused to answer on the questionnaire, because as I've written a hundred times here and elsewhere, "white" is not an ethnicity.

The idea that I would be lumped into a group including people from Poland, Spain, Michigan, New Zealand, Canada, Florida, South Africa, or Finland for "diversity" figures was rankling in the extreme.

And I imagine that those of darker complexion would find it annoying if various peoples from Madagascar, California, Nigeria, the UK, Brazil, Senegal, South Carolina, Jamaica, or Kenya were collectively described as being from the same ethnic group.

This placing of "race" above culture and actual ethnicity is why I got home and put-up yesterday's post, inviting people to pretend for a moment that "race" actually exists in the American sense.

Many readers described the man in one of the pictures correctly - by POPULATION GROUP, rather than "race".

Most readers were honest, and said that in the USA, the people in both photos would probably be simply described as "Black".

The boy on the left is from the Batek tribe of Malaysia. The man on the right is a central Pacific Marshall Islander (where Bikini Atoll saw the USA conducting atomic tests during the last century).

If our identity were determined by genetics alone, both of these people are more closely related to many Europeans and indigenous Americans than to most Africans (Africa being the most genetically diverse region on Earth).

But of course our identities are far more complex than a collection of inherited genes.

The colossal Olmec heads of eastern Mexico show facial characteristics which most Americans would associate with Africa, yet they were sculpted thousands of years before West Africans began their forced migration to the Americas. In other words, the genes which can be expressed as certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) are present IN EVERY POPULATION IN THE WORLD, including the European population.

If either of the people shown in yesterday's post were to immigrate to the USA, their unique histories and identities would soon be subsumed within ridiculously arbitrary "race" categories.

I am not here to explain anything to American people of color, who know only too well that the "Black experience" is very real, even if actual "race" is not.

But spreading a wider understanding of how population genetics actually works is one small part of dismantling race-based social and political structures.

Image: Olmec head made in Mexico sometime between 1000 and 1500 BCE

28/07/2024

In the USA, skin color and phenotype (physical appearance) have been used for over 400 years as indicators of "race".

Even worse than this, "race" is then used as a proxy for "ethnicity".

But "White" is not an ethnicity. And "Black" is not an ethnicity.

These "colors" are social caste categories which have become normalised as ethnic identities.

It would be intriguing to see how followers of this page would describe the people in these photos to someone, if that person asked you to say what "race" these people are.

Explanation to follow...

27/07/2024

Politics in the USA has been run under a two-party system over the past century.

It is easy to forget that without combined state and corporate-funded violence and corporate media propaganda, the USA might still have a Socialist or Social Democratic Party.

And no, we're not talking about Communism or Soviet-style collectivism. We're talking about a party which would have developed along the lines of modern European social democratic parties - such as those in Scandinavian countries which enjoy taxpayer-funded universal healthcare, third level education free at point of delivery, paid vacations, maternity/paternity and sick leave, etc.

In 1912, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs of Indiana garnered 6 percent of the popular vote - that's nearly a million Americans.

In fact, the increasing popularity of socialist policies at the time probably forced other candidates like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt to throw a few token bones to socialist ideas (such as the standard eight hour workday).

The mass unemployment caused by the 1929 stock market crash gave new impetus to groups affiliated with the Socialist Party - groups such as the Workers Alliances.

In Appalachia, mining companies abandoned many of the "company towns" they had built, leaving the inhabitants literally stranded - often penniless, cold, and hungry.

It is worth remembering that the great Wall Street crash came just 8 years after the largest armed uprising in American history outside the Civil War - the Battle of Blair Mountain, in which attempts to unionise the coalfields of SW West Virginia led to a five-day pitched battle between over 10,000 coal miners and around 3000 company-backed strikebreakers and law enforcement officers which left between 50 and 100 miners dead.

The uprising was eventually suppressed by the intervention of 27,000 members of the army/National Guard.

Most mountain folks weren't out-and-out socialists in the commonly understood political sense.

They were just very clear-eyed about who was community, and who was the enemy.

They most certainly were NOT friends of unimpeded capitalism, coal barons, and Big Business.

It would take decades of concerted and constant anti-socialist indoctrination to mostly erase this proud history of cross-ethnic solidarity and mountain activism from the general consciousness, eventually allowing modern venture capitalists like J. D. Vance to make his ridiculous proclamations of having an affinity with "hillbilly culture".

Images:

Workers Alliance meeting, Scott's Run, WV [1937]

Woman trying to dig out refuse coal from snow to heat her home, Scott's Run, WV [1937]

Gun emplacement at Battle of Blair Mountain, Logan County, WV [1921]

26/07/2024

Most online sources will say that "Melungeons" are a "tri-racial" people of Appalachia.

This is inaccurate for a couple of reasons:

1) Humans cannot be divided into "races"

2) Melungeons are not simply a tripartite mix of indigenous, African, and European peoples. Some Melungeon lineages also include Sephardic Jewish, Romani, Malagasi, Majorcan, South Asian, and other "brown peoples".

Why does J. D. Vance's Melungeon ancestry matter?

Because he claims to be "Scots-Irish", and consorts with people spreading White Christian Nationalist poison.

Please share the hell out of this to keep White Nationalism out of The Oval Office.

23/07/2024

This page has been busy this week preparing a new podcast episode while writing about J. D. Vance and his misrepresentation of his ethnic background.

I thought enough had been said. But what is this all about?

In 2013, while both were attending the elite Yale Law School, J. D. Vance and his future wife Usha Chilukuri jointly organized a discussion group focusing on "social decline in white America".

Really? A child of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, India with a degree in early modern history develops a particular interest in "white social decline"? What does "white decline" even mean?

A year later, Usha Vance began work as a clerk under then DC circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh, a later Trump appointee to the Supreme Court.

Four years later she clerked for conservative Supreme Court justice John Roberts.

And here's where it quickly goes from fishy to super rancid-smelling...

Three years ago, Usha Vance contributed to the election campaign of Blake Masters, who was running for a US senate seat for the state of Arizona.

In a small blessing for US democracy, he lost. Why a blessing? Because 37-year-old Mr. Masters is an open and avowed fan of the white supremacist "philosopher" Sam Francis, who died nearly 20 years ago. You may have heard versions of Francis' "thinking" tied-up with white-fright ideas like "The Great Replacement Theory".

Masters has also worked for and received millions of dollars in backing from Peter Thiel, the creepy multi-billionaire puppet-master behind the financial and political rise of J. D. Vance, the ultimate fake "man of the people".

Now. Either Usha Vance has had her mind poisoned by a conniving coterie of wealthy white supremacist "Libertarians", or she is so eager to join the ranks of western financial and political elites that she is blind to the hideous hypocrisy of her decisions, much like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman in the UK.

Either way, there are some seriously ugly forces at work in America right now.

PS. Before We Were White will continue to highlight political issues directly rooted in concepts of "racial supremacy", which is America's unresolved original sin. The words and terms used in this post will ensure its visibility is throttled, unless it is shared. Hint, hint.

21/07/2024

It's Sunday.

Biden has bowed-out.

I have no idea what the future holds.

A big welcome and thank you to the 100's of new followers this week.

When a page/blog/podcast is dedicated to combating class inequity, racism, nationalist mythology and fake history, things can feel so very heavy at times.

Laughter and music are as necessary to life as water and air.

Gonna be scarce for the next few days in order to get out the next podcast episode: "New, Improved, and Super-Sanctified - Part 2".

An extra massive thanks to our Patrons and donors. I have a suspicion that the folks who regularly put their hands in their pockets to keep this thing going are not billionaires, so this support is a powerful act of social solidarity.

The only thing I can do to pay back this generosity is to keep researching, keep writing.

21/07/2024

20/07/2024

While we're on the subject...

The image shown is the family tree of J. D. Vance, Trump's pick as GOP running mate in this November's election.

I'll explain the funny little map symbols at the end of this shortish piece...

Aside from being Trump's new poodle, J. D. Vance is the author of the notorious New York Times bestseller "Hillbilly Elegy" published by Harper about 8 years ago, which was made into a film, and has re-entered the bestseller lists this week.

This book is a political manifesto thinly disguised as a memoir, and was lapped-up like milk and nectar by the urban chattering classes, who believed they had found their "man on the inside", someone able to explain why an entire segment of American "white folks" seemed so singularly unable to lever their "white privilege" in economic terms. Even worse, while suffering the same economic conditions historically endured only by Black and indigenous Americans, they seemed to insist on voting for conservative political candidates.

How could this be?

In his book, Vance claimed to be a "hillbilly" descended from "Scots-Irish" people, before proceeding to punch-down hard from his position as a venture capitalist supported by pseudo-Libertarian billionaires like Peter Thiel. Vance essentially blamed 20th century Appalachian poverty on an inherited and unadapting "Scots-Irish" culture, and more recently, on a resigned and work-shy, "let's live on food stamps" mindset.

Vance's knowledge of the economic and ethnic history of Appalachia is not just limited - it is flat-out wrong.

In fact, his knowledge of HIS OWN ANCESTRY is even less informed - but that doesn't stop him from developing an entire sociological thesis based on what looks like a quick Google search of his surname origins.

Southern Appalachia has been one of the most ethnically mixed places in the USA since the 1770s, and almost no one with deep roots there can legitimately claim that "Scots-Irish" forms the greater part of their genetic inheritance. This is a fact which can be backed-up with hard data, whatever the faceless editors of Wikipedia pages, and propagandists for a "white" history of Appalachia might claim.

========================

People with a far better grasp of history than J. D. Vance seem to have absorbed the ideas of writers like David Hackett Fischer (author of Albion's Seed) and used these ideas as a springboard for the construction of an imaginary "Scots-Irish" identity. Fischer is a serious historian, but his vision of who first settled the American frontier has some serious blind spots.

Here's how it works:

Pick a remote ancestor from your family tree with the ethnic identity you prefer. Vance has ancestors who have been in America for centuries, so he has 16 second great grandparents who were born in America during the 1800s. Let's ignore the fact that NOT ONE of these 16 second great-grandparents can be proven to descend from Ulster folk - aka the "Scots-Irish".

Ignore the fact that even if Vance had one second great-grandparent with a great-grandparent from Northern Ireland, this one single remote ancestor would still represent only a miniscule percentage of his overall genetic inheritance.

Of course "genetic inheritance" is only a tiny part of who we are. Our cultural environment has far, far more to do with our identity.

In Vance's case, he would like to believe he is "Scots-Irish" both by blood and culture - perhaps because in the imagination of many insecure "white" American males, such a background speaks to their idealised, "white" Christian nationalist aspirations and preferred virtues.

Fighting for honor? Scots-Irish. Stubborn and independent? Scots-Irish. Clannish? Mistrustful of government? Loyal to a fault? Why, those are "Scots-Irish" things, of course.

I'll stop right there, and let you read quotes which Vance included and seemed to endorse in his book "Hillbilly Elegy":

“In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else. This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits - an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country - but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

This sort of palpable nonsense is problematic and dangerous on multiple levels.

Number 1, Appalachia is NOT primarily Scots-Irish, and Vance certainly isn't primarily "Scots-Irish" by genetic or even cultural inheritance. Not even close. How do I know this? By spending twenty years tracing the ethnic roots of heartland America. Vance is a distant cousin on multiple lines, and I happen to be aware of who "his people" really were, because they are "my people".

Number 2, the persistence of certain cultural traits in 21st century Appalachia has nothing to do with any continuity of a "Scots-Irish" subculture from the 1700s. Every single trait Vance sees as "Scots-Irish" might equally apply to Appalachians of Welsh, German, English, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, Jewish, Romani, or indeed, Cherokee, Shawnee, or African ancestry. One might quite rightly speak of "Appalachian" or "Mountain" culture, but this culture is the product of DIVERSITY and centuries of inter-ethnic mixing.

There actually IS one aspect of "Scots-Irish culture" seen in America which might be described as especially "Ulster Protestant", but self-identified "Scots-Irish" people rarely mention it.
This would be a familiarity with the actual mechanics of colonialism, and how to use violence to maintain economic supremacy over a disenfranchised indigenous population...the "Scots-Irish" did it first in Ulster, and many did it later on the Appalachian frontier. Read up on "The Paxton Boys" for an introduction to this subject.

Number 3, this elevation of traits supposedly unique to the "Scots-Irish" is just another, more subtle face of an older American belief in race and race eugenics. Instead of attributing certain local traits and behaviors to the complex cultural environment created during the violence of the frontier era, people like Vance just call it innate "Scots-Irishness".

This is all a bit reminiscent of those old newspaper horoscopes which were always intentionally vague - so people could always find a way to relate the words to their own circumstances...

Instead of looking at Appalachia's past and current problems through the lens of racism, reliance on hunting and subsistence farming, bad economic policies, poor infrastructure, corporate pillage of resources, and revivalist religion creating a legacy of poor education going back to frontier times, let's just call it "Scots-Irish hillbilly culture".

In other words, Vance and other charlatans like him - even when using the word "culture" instead of "race"- actually want to believe that certain things are exclusive to certain groups. That certain things are "in their blood".

This sort of fake history, this cherry-picking of ancestors, this claiming of "true American values" as being mainly synonymous with only certain groups, this, this, bu****it quite frankly- it goes to the very heart of the current social and ideological divisions seen in the USA. The center can no longer hold.

Half of America wants to grow-up and confront the past with open eyes in order to move forward in a fact-based reality.

The other half wants to drag everyone into a world based on a conjured reality - a world of propaganda and historical whitewashing, a world of jingoism, blind nationalism, and Christian faith.

This is why politicians are banning books. This is why American history teachers are being put under pressure with new restrictive legislation, why Florida's current governor now endorses new history books claiming that African-American slaves actually benefitted from enslavement in certain ways.

White Christian Nationalists want to "own" American history, and by extension, they can then "own" American identity itself.

And when the facts don't match their fake identity, they will simply lie, or attack the person laughing at The Emperor's New Clothes.

After all, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past", as George Orwell warned in his famous novel, "1984".

========================

I've given so much time to Vance's claims of so-called "Scots-Irish" ancestry because many, many people who claim this identity in Appalachia are fully as multi-ethnic as anyone else there.

And this includes people like J. D. Vance, who is happy to embrace a scant, possibly non-existent ethnic component of his "white" ancestry to suit an ideological political narrative, while ignoring his closer ties to the mixed-ethnic "Carmel Indians" of Ohio and other brown people of Eastern Kentucky like the Melungeons.

This does a great, a serious disservice, to the complexity and fascinating real history of the region - and an even worse disservice to truth.

It is White Christian Nationalist propaganda worthy of anything spoken by German National Socialists about "pure A***n" people back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Never, ever, become a book-burner. But after you've read "Hillbilly Elegy", make sure to place it firmly in the "fiction" section of your book collection.

About the symbols in the Vance pedigree.

The modern national flags are only meant to give a general indication of the predominant ancestry on each line. But even the people behind, say, an English flag will be mixed to some degree.

You will note the complete absence of any flag indicating Ulster or "Scots-Irish" ancestry.

The little circular "Before We Were White" logo indicates lines with "Melungeon" or what I call "Old Mix American" people - meaning people of non-Northern or Central European background:

Indigenous American, sub-Saharan African, Malagasi, South Asian Indian, North African, Spanish, Portuguese, Sephardic or Ashkenazi Jewish, Romani, and others.

The fact that J. D. Vance is not "Scots-Irish", and has innumerable "non-white" ancestors is not important in and of itself.

What matters profoundly is the attempt by Vance and the GOP to rewrite history in an effort to make it match a White Christian Nationalist ideology.

Whether Vance or Trump believe this stuff is beside the point.

They will use it to mobilise a section of the American people large enough to bring down democracy.

15/07/2024

Updated edit of a previously published article (due to today's news).

Feel free to share widely.

___________________________

J D Vance and Misbegotten Memoirs

In the USA, having a publicly accepted and respected “self identity” is a privilege often enjoyed only by those people with access to the levers of power.

Property. Money. Education. Social connections. Weapons. The right skin color.

A man called J. D. Vance (his own name the product of a carefully selected identity) wrote a book about eight years ago at the ripe old age of 32 called Hillbilly Elegy, in which he purported to explain the source of many Appalachian social problems. A successful venture capitalist, he offered his advice for “bootstrap” solutions to these problems.

J. D. Vance went big on “poor white people”, because that is how he chooses to perceive his so-called “hillbilly” identity.

In his book, he speaks of his “Scots-Irish” roots and “Scots-Irish” cultural traditions, and the trans-generational effect he believes the culture of these people had on the creation of an Appalachian or Hillbilly "mentality”.

"The Scots-Irish are born fighters, blah blah, blah..."

"The Scots-Irish don't like Big Government, blah, blah, blah..."

His book received endless blurbs and praise from the urban “intelligentsia” press, eager to find an easily digestible answer or simple reason for rural Appalachian poverty and voting habits.

For “voting habits”, read “Republican or Trump voters”.

Four years after publication, director Ron Howard made a film based on Vance's carefully curated memoir. For "carefully curated", feel free to insert the words "self-serving", or "ideologically driven". Although boasting some decent acting, the film falls down for blindly accepting Vance's unschooled sociological hypothesis and retro-fitted recounting of events.

*****

Vance brags about his own bootstrapping attitude, and how he had the get-up-and-go to get-up-and-leave his childhood community.

And how did he escape? Saving money while working at Walmart? Selling lemonade? No. He did what exactly a million other underclass kids do every decade. He joined the US military.

The US military industrial complex is so deeply embedded in American culture that "the services" are virtually beyond criticism. Even American lefties won't touch the subject.

The military is on our sporting fields. In our high schools.

"Thank you for your service" has become a dead mantra, utterly detached from the real world meaning and consequences of American militarism.

US presidents start wars in places like Iraq at the drop of a hat, making billions for insider cronies while killing half a million people.

Back on US soil it's called "protecting our freedoms".

"Thank you for your service."

It has never occurred to gung-ho capitalist Vance that the US military is socialised, just like police or fire departments. US taxpayers footed the bill which allowed Vance to escape his hometown via the military.

Vance would rail against such taxpayers funding universal health care or third level education, but these taxpayers are fully expected to fund a vast military.

What about all the young men and women of the Rust Belt who believed the Iraq War was immoral, and wanted no part in offering their "service"? Where is a taxpayer-funded leg-up in the world for these citizens?

This writer is convinced that the very reason healthcare and third level education are not publicly funded in America, is to ensure a steady stream of youngsters for whom the military is their only hope of accessing further education and any chance of a better future.

I should know. I was one of these kids, joining the army on my 17th birthday. Don't thank me for my service.


*****


Mr. Vance is wrong, utterly wrong, about the historical causes of Appalachian poverty.

Even more than this, Mr. Vance misrepresents his own cultural roots, whether by design or ignorance.

His roots are to be found far more among the mixed-ethnic communities of Ohio, including among the people known as "Carmel Indians".

Groups like the "Carmel Indians" (or the somewhat better known "Melungeons") are an integral part of the ethnic fabric of underclass America, largely forgotten by mainstream history.

Much of the transgenerational poverty of Appalachian people stems not from something innate to their culture and genes, but from the fact that many families started off as a mixed-ethnic underclass in the not-so-distant past, partaking of all the disadvantages which that entailed.

Note that Vance uses his mother's maiden name; and while some Appalachian Vances can trace their roots directly to Ulster, our friend J.D. is not one of them. His mother's Vance line fades into the undocumented mists of early 1700s Buncombe County, NC and Russell County, Virginia, where an ancestor was hanged for the murder of Lewis Horton, a son-in-law.

It is hard to know whether these people were Vances, German Wentzes, or indeed Scottish "Vauses" due to a colonial era transcription error.

It is in fact quite possible that they were of non-European background altogether. These Vances might well have come from an African, Jewish, Shawnee, or Romani background, or indeed from any of the other peoples who commonly borrowed their surname from "white" settlers.

What IS certain (barring out-of-wedlock shenanigans) is that J.D. Vance is descended from Bowmans, Crafts, Gabbards, Creeches, Salyers, Taulbees, Bakers, Hensleys, Rudds, Blantons, Hounshells, Howards, Hammonds, Bollings, Sizemores, Lovelys, Workmans, and others. He is profoundly mixed-ethnic, and of predominantly German stock (including "Black Dutch"), with some English, Dutch, Melungeon, and almost certainly some indigenous American and African ancestry.

He's about as "Scots-Irish" as an enchilada.

The ultimate foundational myth of Appalachia revolves around a predominantly “Scots-Irish” identity.

An identity designed to meet all of the right criteria. Non-British, Protestant, rebellious, and “white”.

A blanket, often dog whistling identity, if you will - and in Vance's case, an outright fake identity.

This is the US senator falling-in behind the fake reality being propagated by his master this election year. If Trump wins a second term, this reprehensible, shapeshifting opportunist will be a breath away from the most powerful political office in the world.

A man on record as saying he would support the suspension of The Constitution.

A man who made a public name for himself by throwing his long-suffering community under the bus, blaming their poverty on "genes" and an imaginary Scots-Irish culture, instead of blaming rampant capitalism and bad governance.

A man fake in every way, ready to bring some very real and very ugly stuff to a town near you.

©2024 Brian Halpin - Before We Were White Podcast