![]() ![]() And it was, I believe, the 1997 Masters, where Tiger Woods won. And what happened is that we were watching a golf tournament. And I think I was very lucky to have that exposure to a woman who had lived the life she had but was able to think these thoughts. Though, I will say there was one really interesting experience I had with my grandma where I started to realize that there was some sort of kinship at least that she felt. There wasn't much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship. And we're both poor, but that's kind of it. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. VANCE: I never thought when I was a kid that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. Yet, I'm wondering if you and the people who you grew up with made that connection at all and felt any sense of identification with black people who were your class counterparts. Sure, there's differences, too, but there's a lot of things in common. GROSS: You know, reading your book, I get the impression that you think - and I think rightfully so - that there's a lot of similarities between what poor people who are white endure in America and what poor people who are black endure in America. And ultimately, as I write later in the book, that hope didn't really materialize. But it also means that, for them, the upward mobility that a lot of folks experienced right after World War II was their first real taste of economic optimism, and I think that's something that really gave them a lot of hope. I think part of that means they've grown up with a certain resentment at rich people. In a lot of ways, intergenerational poverty is something that they inherited and that they've lived with as part of a family tradition. So the point I'm trying to make, ultimately, is that these folks have been poor for a very long time. VANCE: Well, I guess, I'm not trying to say anything too explicit about race, but to note that poverty just goes back really, really far in the generational stories of these families. What are you saying about class and race with that statement? There's, you know, the line where you make a point of saying that your people were day laborers in the slave economy of the South. I call them neighbors, friends and family. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. Their ancestors were day laborers in the southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. To these folks, poverty's the family tradition. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. But to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. ![]() Sometimes these broad categories are useful. In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone's skin - black people, Asians, white privilege. J D VANCE: There is an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story. There's a paragraph from your new book that I want you to read. ![]() He has contributed to the National Review and is now a principal at a Silicon Valley investment firm. After attending Ohio State University, he went to Yale Law School where he initially felt completely out of place. Vance joined the Marines, which helped him afford college. Until the age of 12, he spent summers in Jackson, Ky., with his grandmother and great-grandmother. He grew up in a Rust Belt town in Ohio in a family from the hills of eastern Kentucky. He writes about the social isolation, poverty, drug use and the religious and political changes in his family and in greater Appalachia. Vance, is the author of the new best-seller "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis." He says the book is about what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. ![]()
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