The Myth of JD Vance's "Unique" Yale Experience in Hillbilly Elegy

 

This is a portrait of Elihu Yale and his intimates being served by an enslaved boy wearing a padlocked collar. I’m showing it to you because I want to talk about Yale Law School, and specifically its graduate JD Vance.

A funny thing about Vance's Hillbilly Elegy book: the man believes he had a unique experience, because he felt like an outsider when attending an Ivy League university. He didn't come from a background of wealth and prep schools and world travel. He was at a loss as to how to handle his cutlery when taken out to a fancy restaurant by a potential employer, because the place settings included a salad fork and dinner fork, a soup spoon and teaspoon, a steak knife and a butter knife. And when he went back to his hometown, he found he did not want to brag to strangers about going to Yale. If they were the kind of people who would disrespect him unless he shared that credential, then they weren't people he wanted to bootlick, and if they were ordinary locals from his home community, it would feed snobbish. So he wrote Hillbilly Elegy in part to share this supposedly unique insight.

Ha! That is an experience shared by a multitude. Does Vance think he was the first person to need a lot of financial aid to get an Ivy League education? As a public school kid depending on financial aid, I certainly had culture shock when I arrived at Yale, and found that two of my roommates had gone to elite prep schools. They wouldn't dream of biting into a peach or apple--they cut them up into slices with knives. I had been raised to be a member of the "clean plate club," regularly lectured that if I put any food on my plate, I'd better eat it all. They cut a few prime bites out of each item they put on their plates and left the rest, considering anything else gauche. When I saw a penny on the ground and picked it up, one of them chided, "Don't be a Jew." I said, "Ummm, you do know I'm Jewish, right?" "Oh, you know what I mean," was the eyerolled response.

Things could have been worse--in the mid-20th century, Yale made all its financial aid students live in one segregated residence hall, and they were given jobs as waiters in the dining halls of the other residential college buildings, required to serve their wealthy classmates.

And of course, that's not even mentioning the fact that Elihu Yale, after whom the college was named, was the former Governor-President of the East India Company in Madras (now Chennai), who made a great deal of money off of the slave trade. Most of the original trustees of Yale College possessed enslaved people. Enslaved people built the oldest Yale buildings. One of Yale’s residential colleges was named after Yale alumnus John C. Calhoun, who became vice president of the US, and later a central instigator of the Southern secession. Calhoun claimed that slavery benefitted enslaved people and that the US must protect the “minority rights” of enslavers.

If Vance felt weird attending Yale because he wasn’t born into wealth, imagine how weird it must have felt to be a Black student desegregating Yale College. Yale first admitted a "substantial" number of Black men to its College in 1964 (numbering  just 14 out of a class of 1200). It didn't admit women until 1969 (250 out of the 1200). At that time, there were a whopping 2 women with tenure on the faculty, whose number totalled 817. That can’t have been a comfortable experience. . .

I daresay a lot of people have experienced way more culture shock and alienation at Ivy League schools than Vance--who was a white dude who received extensive support and mentoring from sympathetic faculty and alumni. He received that support out of an authentic commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, let's be clear! So it is especially ripe that after leveraging that support to get a book contract, lucrative work, the patronage of Peter Thiel, and political power--much richer rewards than those reaped by most impoverished students who make it into the Ivy League--Vance should claim that it's conservative white men who are America's least advantaged and most disrespected demographic.

How much of that claim is cynical manipulation of his audience, and how much is him being high on his own supply, I can't say.

What I can say is that it makes no sense to equate "members of the wealthy white elite who went to prep schools and who issue Kareneque complaints about the service" with "Democrats," who are in fact a very diverse group, most of whom never attended elite prep schools.  This is the key sleight-of-hand behind MAGA populism: "Democrats are the high-culture snobs, your corporate overlords, the wealthy elite who disdain hardworking, salt-of-the-earth Republicans." It's taking resentment over class inequality, and transmuting it into culture war, with the end result that the rich get tax breaks, while instead of bettered economic power as employees, resentful white men get the bread and circuses of seeing immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and people of color and feminists get kicked in the face.

Not a new story! But JD Vance presents it as such.