J.D. Vance, Alex Wagner, and the politics of place.
What the MSNBC host's reaction to the GOP's nominee for Vice President tells us about a divided America.
Hey y’all,
I was the fifth generation of my family to live on our eastern Kentucky mountain. The foundation of my great-great grandmother’s cabin is still visible near the bottom of our driveway. At the top, on the mountainside looming over the home she raised my grandmother in, my great-grandmother is buried. In high school, when winter stripped the trees bare, I could see her headstone from my bedroom window.
Accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, J.D. Vance expressed a desire to be buried in his own family’s plot just up the road from my homeplace. Whatever disagreements I have with the Ohio senator, the impulse to be buried “down home” is one I innately understand. When my time comes, I hope to be laid to rest near my great-grandmother and the rest of the Bakers in that cemetery. Where else would I belong?
My surprise can be forgiven, then, that Alex Wagner thinks that desire to join the ancestors is an “easter egg of white nationalism.” In comments made following Vance’s speech, the MSNBC host claims Vance’s desire to be buried with his forebears “reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit,” namely that Vance believes the only history that matters is that of his white family and not his wife’s Indian family. “But in America,” Wagner continues, “it doesn’t always have to be the white male lineage that trumps that, that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else.”
You can watch Wagner’s full remarks here:
https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1814013895578890524
Look, I understand the point Wagner is trying to make. There is this prevailing notion among many Americans, particularly white ones and especially but not exclusively on the right, that “American history” is “white history.” The way plantations are treated, with the focus on how the slaveholding white family lived and not the very real horrors experienced by the enslaved Black Americans on that land, is a prime example. We grow up learning about white people in our history books, but the stories and contributions of non-white Americans are more often than not left out. That is, indeed, a problem.
Given the nativist rhetoric we saw on display at the Republican convention – people holding signs demanding “mass deportation now” and the vilification of immigrants as violent thugs “invading” our country – Wagner can be forgiven for going with an uncharitable interpretation of Vance’s remarks. Nothing he nor his fellow travelers in the GOP have done in the past ten years warrant the benefit of the doubt.
There is another problem here, though, one that speaks directly to the divisions in our country. The desire to be buried in the same plot as your kin is not itself a dog whistle. For millions of Americans watching, suggesting it is understandably feels like an attack on them, even if that wasn’t Wagner’s intention.
I’m hardly the first to observe this, but the divide in America is at least in part a divide between rootedness and rootlessness. Another way of saying this is provincialism verses cosmopolitanism, with provincialism being a pejorative. “Provincial” posits Americans of the hinterlands as ignorant and uncouth. “Rootedness,” though, speaks to a positive association of people with place.
Rootedness is not a wholly rural or white concept. We see this in big cities all the time, where families who have lived in a neighborhood for one, two, three or even more generations are displaced by market forces, priced out as rents rise and wealthier, frequently white, people move in.
In big cities, at least, the left instinctively understands this to be a net negative. Neighborhoods lose their distinctive culture, low-income folks lose the community and housing they’ve long relied on, and the city loses part of its vibrancy and history. We call this gentrification.
When it happens in rural places, though, we call it progress. Never mind that entire communities are displaced either by an influx of new residents – such as the “half-back” retirees leaving Florida for southern Appalachia’s lower property taxes and a cheaper cost of living – or forced to leave because of a lack of economic opportunity. These people are rarely given the same consideration as those experiencing the same phenomenon in cities.
Vance’s grandparents, much like my own, left Appalachia in search of work. They went north out of necessity. Moving to Ohio – or Michigan or Indiana or Illinois – did not change their affinity for their home.
Harriette Simpson Arnow demonstrates this beautiful in her wonderful novel “The Dollmaker,” in which her main character, forced to relocate to Detroit when her husband found work in a factory, says “my country is Kentucky.” Her daughter repeats her mother’s words and sentiment when introduced to a classmate who tells her his family comes from Mexico. The little girl from Appalachia and the little boy from Mexico play and get along well.
It isn’t about race. It’s about place. It is about culture. When you come from a rural place like Appalachia, somewhere your ancestors have been for generations if not centuries, that place becomes a part of you. Vance isn’t from eastern Kentucky, but that family cemetery represents to him a tangible link to his family’s past and even his own past. It is sacrosanct.
So much of this misunderstanding is cultural, not racial. There are a lot of Black communities in the rural south who feel every bit as rooted to place as many white communities do. Native American tribes certainly would argue that rootedness and place matter a great deal.
From the perspective of a white American who does feel very rooted, Vance’s comments do not come off as racist. They come off as celebrating a legacy that now includes his own children, Americans of color, and hoping they will feel as proud of their ancestors, as attached to this legacy, as he is. This hope strikes me as a perfectly reasonable hope.
Does that seemingly ignore their mother’s family history and the story of Usha Vance’s ancestors? Yes, and herein lies the heart of the division between the MAGA right and the rest of us the nation, and it is one of culture. Are we a homogenous nation? Or are we a multicultural nation? And does homogenous mean cultural or racial?
In J.D. Vance’s defense, though – words I never thought I’d write – he was talking about his own family, from his own perspective. His wife’s family probably doesn’t have an ancestral burial plot in southern California because they only just arrived a generation or so ago.
Is it racist to point this out? I would argue the answer to that question depends on why someone is pointing out Usha’s immigrant family history. Vance and his comments do not exist in a vacuum. I understand Alex Wagner’s point, why she chose to make it, and why she would interpret them as underpinning white supremacy and an exclusive definition of America and Americanness.
America is a diverse nation, and that diversity is our strength. However, that diversity includes people who have been here for so long that they don’t actually know where their ancestors came from or, if they do, have no particular connection to it. Hell, my most recent ancestors arrived here in the middle of the 19th century with most of my family arriving 300 years ago or more. They got to Appalachia, and they stayed for centuries.
I don’t believe this makes me any more American than Usha Vance. The 14th Amendment is magical in that every generation it pushes a reset button on who is American. Usha Vance is as American as I am, as her husband is.
The problem is that many people who, like me, do feel that rootedness, won’t necessarily understand this nuance. They hear Alex Wagner saying that a love of place and a family burial plot is a white supremacist dog whistle, but all they see it as is having pride in their lineage and the place they call home, even if (as in the case of Vance), it was never literally their home. They naturally recoil at that suggestion, because it reads as a bad faith interpretation, as though Wagner is painting everyone with a deep sense of place, a rootedness to a particular land, as racist.
I don’t believe that is what Wagner meant. It is, however, how I heard it. And if I heard it that way, a lot of other Americans heard it that way, too.
Until next time, y’all be blessed.
x. Skylar