"Hillbilly" is a slur

It's one of the last offensive epithets well-meaning people use without compunction. They shouldn't.

I know that given the tariffs and Hands Off, six days feels like forever ago, but because fighting Appalachian stereotypes is one my foundational commitments, I’m posting this lightly edited version of a letter I wrote last week to The New Republic about its use of the word “hillbilly” in the headline, “Denmark Just Took Hillbilly JD Vance to the Woodshed,” on its article of April 3. I sent it to Jason Linkins because TNR’s website says he edits the politics vertical and provided his email address, and because I doubt the writer has the final say on the headline. I haven’t received a reply, and nobody’s changed the headline.

Hi Jason,

Virginia Heffernan’s piece on JD Vance was great, but you undercut it with that headline. Using the word “hillbilly” in that context is a slur. And TNR would never use a comparable slur to describe anyone from any other group, no matter how evil the individual.

Honestly, even though I lived in Kentucky for several years and wrote a book called Citizen Power: Stories of America's New Civic Spirit, with an intro by Jesse Jackson, that profiles grassroots leaders in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky, since I’m originally from the Philly suburbs I hesitate to use it and only do so carefully.

After arguing with friends and neighbors in Park Slope that no, they shouldn’t assume everyone in Kentucky is a racist, or that everyone in Appalachia is white, I’ve been known to refer to myself as “the one-woman hillbilly defender of Brooklyn.” With apologies to Ray Gish, the late, great owner of Commonwealth, a bar with an award-winning jukebox, also in Park Slope. (Get it? Kentucky is a commonwealth, not a state.) Ray hailed from Whitesburg, in Letcher County. That’s the home of Appalshop, a multi-media cultural center that has given locals the means to create documentary films about their lives since 1969. Check out Elizabeth Barret’s doc, Stranger with a Camera, for a fascinating, honest and complex exploration of hillbilly identity. Ray’s family runs The Mountain Eagle, a weekly paper that, to the left of the masthead in the print version proudly proclaims: “It Screams.”

I’ve also been known to deliberately string together the words “hillbilly intellectual,” expressly because coastal elites think there is no such thing. I pointedly use that phrase whenever I describe how intensely my brilliant friends and former colleagues in the region — from university professors to activists who never went to college — have always despised Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, even back when northeast liberals embraced Vance as a never-Trump hillbilly whisperer. And whenever I suggest people check out the book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia edited by Elizabeth Catte, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior.

I’ve really been loving TNR lately, and have decided it was unfair of me to avoid it in light of how long it’s been since I fact-checked pieces about the magazine having become a neo-con mouthpiece way back when I was an intern at The Nation.

So, I know y’all can do better when it comes to throwing around the term “hillbilly.”

All the best,

Robin Epstein

I posted my letter on Facebook and an otherwise politically savvy FB friend who lives in a blue city challenged my premise, saying that “hillbilly” was used because Vance claimed it in his book’s title, and then excoriating Vance for some of his many indefensible sins.

I replied: “I know. But none of that excuses TNR’s use of the word in the headline. It is a slur. It doesn’t appear in the story. His book isn’t even mentioned. I hesitate to make the comparison, but just because someone from a group reclaims - legitimately or not - a word that has been historically used by outsiders as a slur, does not mean that outsiders get to throw it around. Not even critically. Or ironically. Or whatever. I could give examples, but they are so ugly. Anyway, don’t take my word for it if you don’t want to. Read what people from the region think about this. I should edit and say that I don’t know whether Linkins or Heffernan, who probably didn’t write the headline, are from Appalachia. Even if they are, the headline is not okay without further explanation in the story itself about the use of the term.

She thanked me for the clarification and said she of course objects to classist slurs.

Then a friend from Kentucky legit made my point better than I ever could. She commented: “I disown JDV as a hillbilly. He’s just a big dumb tag along!”