


This column could be about one Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Now although it could be, in a way it is. It’s about a clone of Thomas in the person of one J. D. Vance, the Republican Party’s choice for vice president, and author of the book “Hillbilly Elegy?”
Now setting aside the differences between the two – age and race among them – the commonalities between the two are striking; the most obvious of which is that they both hold law degrees from Yale, and both have benefited immensely from cozying up to billionaires.
And while I’m at it, let me throw in affirmative action programs that, given their improvised backgrounds, best explains how they both got into college and a law school as prestigious – and expensive – as Yale.
So with this week’s news, I retrieved my copy of “Hillbilly Elegy.” It didn’t take me long to flip through the book’s pages to reconstruct my recollection of what the book was about. In it, Vance wrote, “I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Irish descent who have no college degree. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family. However, he blamed the woes of rural America on the poor decision-making skills of “druggies” and (white) “welfare queens.” More on his book further down.
Now the suspicion here is that Vance had Clarence Thomas’ 2007 “My Grandfather’s Son” memoir nearby as a template when writing “Hillbilly Elegy” given their shared hardscrabble upbringing.
But first to J. D. Vance 2024, yes, the same J.D. Vance who badmouthed then presidential candidate Trump as racist, dangerous, reprehensible, an idiot and “America’s Hitler” back in 2016? Well, like his “bro” in persona reinvention Clarence Thomas who, while at Yale morphed from a fist-pumping “Black Power” advocate to a more advantageous conservative, Vance the chameleon fine-tuned the art of reinventing himself to fit the opportunity and preferred narrative. All this begs the question, who the heck is J. D. Vance?
Okay, we’re familiar with the phrase, “past performance determines future behavior.” Well, that’s precisely what I had in mind as I tried to connect the dots between Vance’s upbringing, his personal values, his earlier comments about Trump and humiliating himself by begging for an apology during a visit to Mar-A-Lago. And above all – and more worrisome – is what all this stuff portends about his impact on policies as vice president.
In short, while growing up in Middletown, Ohio, Vance writes about a family history of poverty and low-paying, physical jobs that have since disappeared. He recounts his grandparents’ alcoholism and abuse and his unstable mother’s history of drug addictions and failed relationships.
Not unlike Clarence Thomas who has caused many to roll their eyes at his mouthing “pull yourself by your bootstraps” while shabbily deriding his own sister as a “welfare queen,” Vance raised questions about the responsibility of his family and people for their misfortune. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones, although the working Vance could not afford one. Like his “brother from a different mother,” Clarence Thomas, J. D. leaves no doubt about his resentment of those who seem to profit from poor behavior.
Now although Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” is about being invisible, what jumped out at me was the fact that the issue of race is suspiciously missing from his narrative and strangely from the demographics of where he was born and raised.
“The one great flaw in Vance’s book is a disingenuous near silence on his kinsmen’s attitudes about race,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts. “And a passage wherein he claims their antipathy towards Barack Obama has “nothing to do with skin color but rather with the fact that he is a ‘brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor’ is flat our intellectually dishonest.”
Wrote Asian/Indian American Neema Avashia, “I’m from Appalachia and J.D. Vance doesn’t represent us. People like me and my family – immigrants labor alongside white working-class whites don’t exist in Vance’s narrative. Black folks don’t exist in his narrative. Queer folks don’t exist in his narrative. And in his campaign rhetoric we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problem; never as one of its sources of strength.”
So to the astute reader, “flip flopping” best describes Vance’s position on race for first calling it out only later to disappear into the expedience of silence. Where he once slammed Trump on race, he quickly swallowed the pill of opportunism and lost his voice on race. Case in point is that in 2016, Vance told PBS Newshour, “There is definitely an element of Donald Trump’s support that has its basis in racism.”
According to CNN, in another interview, he said, “Race is definitely a part of the Trump phenomenon.” However, six years later when he ran for the U.S. Senate and trailing his opponents in a crowded primary a new J.D. Vance emerged, one where if race is mentioned at all it’s a “race” to the nearest restroom or to get to Mar-A-Lago for some serious ring kissing.
In the end, when it comes to the likes of Clarence Thomas and J. D. Vance, (Thomas 2.0), clearly, it’s politics and puppetry over principle, and acquiescence over righteousness and courage.
Well, should we be surprised?
Terry Howard is an award-winning trainer, writer, and storyteller. He is a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, recipient of the 2019 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the 2022 Georgia Press Award..