in February 2017, Vance gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Ins ute of Politics as part of a series called “America in the Trump Era” after his book,
Hillbilly Elegy, became a bestseller.
Discussing the 2016 presidential election, journalist Alex Kotlowitz asked Vance, “Where do you think race played into all this? Because I think the sort of myth is that all these Trump supporters are vehement racists and anti-immigrant. And so where do you think it played?”
Vance gave an answer that seems surprising today.
“Race definitely played a role in the 2016 election. I think race will always play a role in our country, It’s just sort of a constant fact of American life. And definitely some people who voted for Trump were racists, and they voted for him for racist reasons,” Vance
responded.
Vance couched his answer by saying he didn’t think racism was the main motivator for Trump voters, but jobs were. But he did say that the 2016 election was “hyper-racialized,” and he blamed conservative extremists.
“The people that I blame for that are actually typically well-educated coastal elitists, people like Richard Spencer and the alt-right,” Vance said. “It’s telling that the alt-right is driven by primarily very well-educated, relatively smart, relatively stable people. It’s not driven by people in the Rust Belt who go on 4chan and talk about Mic e Obama in these really nasty ways.”
“Like Steve Bannon?” Kotlowitz asked.
“Right,” Vance replied, taking a shot at the Republican strategist who is now serving a
prison sentence for contempt of Congress.
In an answer quite different from his present-day half-hearted defense of his Indian-American wife, Usha, Vance addressed racism against his marriage head-on back then.
“There were all these alt-right people, and I’m in an interracial marriage, and I got a lot of stuff directed at me and my wife on online message boards and Twitter and so forth. So I definitely buy this was a racialized discourse unlike any that we’ve had in a really long time,” Vance said.
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