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Showing posts from February, 2017

Hillbillies and Cultural Capital

Every time I open Amazon and Audible they recommend J.D. Vance's dumb book Hillbilly Elegy , and it reminds me to make a point I failed to mention in my previous post on it. This is about his story about attending a private function while he was attending Yale Law School, and his social anxiety at trying to navigate the weird norms of the upper class. It's a great microcosm of the book's jarring contrast between fairly well-done memoir and idiotic political interpretation thereof. He relates going to some kind of Yale-sponsored dinner, and at one point having to hide in the bathroom to call his girlfriend and ask why there were four different kinds of forks, and just what in God's name he's supposed to do with each one. It's funny, charming, and relatable. Yet later he includes this sort of thing as part of the list of hillbilly cultural deficiencies. If these poor white people would drop their brash and unsophisticated fork practices, they might be able to