The Mythic Whiteness of Hillbilly Elegy
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
The problem is the article is poorly written to boot. What I get from the article is
1. The author self-identified as from a hillbilly culture. Ignores the fact that hillbilly is a pejorative term right up there with the N-word in certain circles and certain circumstances. Wayland-Smith seems unaware of this.
2. Wayland-Smith proceeds to describe negative stereotypes of mountain folk life as though it is the totality of their experience. Note: her current connections with the culture are through “social media contact with family and old acquaintances”. As with all the finest social anthropologists.
Her connection with the culture is now pixels on a screen and, in the finest “old man rants at cloud” tradition, rants on and on. I take it she doesn’t like hill culture much but, then again, few people with hyphenated last names do.
3. Wayland-Smith then equates hill culture with Trump supporters. Her political position can be best extrapolated from the phrase “Trump’s most egregious racist dog whistles”. I’m guessing she thinks this connection to 47% of the voting public is a bad thing.
4. I’m also guessing the movie’s hillbilly character is placed in a more positive light than she would like, and she finds that...deplorable. (I hate it when perfectly good words get stolen by the Zeitgeist) So she rants against the movie as a whole...except for people whose vitriol would jeopardize her upper-class aspirations (Amy Adams, a true hottie BTW).
I have absolutely no idea who this article is written for, or why.
When I got a pop-up requesting support for the site, I think milk went up my nose.
Garden-variety politics and ideological battle pieces are not so welcome, but not because they're non-technical. It's because they're not driven primarily by intellectual interest, i.e. curiosity, and lead to flamewars rather than curious conversation.