The Forgotten Demographic



Reading the excerpt from Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance was eye opening in seeing the similarities in the problems that affect hillbilly communities and poor urban minority communities. Although each community can be found in very contrasted settings it is interesting how J.D. Vance mentions reading an article and wanting to write the author to express how much he felt the writing applied to him then realizing it was written about black urban struggles. Politically, these are often two groups that have very different views and can often clash politically. However, if people were to discuss these similarities and bring them to light I wonder how much this clashing would change.

J.D. Vance’s reading also made me think about the views that hillbilly and failed industrial white American communities have towards issues like solving the global warming crisis. We often are quick to criticize this demographic for a lot of times outright denying that these issues exist. Although I am not defending or advocating for the denial of these types of issues people often fail to think about why these demographics view these issues as unimportant. People fail to have any sort of sympathy with these demographics and fail to think about how a lot of them are simply trying to survive in a fast changing landscape. Even if they have to change their ways in order to become accustomed, there are those that want to simply give up on these communities. Instead of simply berating these demographics for not having such progressive views on certain issues, we ought to instead help them on their short term issues so that they can actually have enough freedom to focus on the long-term ones.

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