By Michael Smith | Reflective MVS
Salvation was one of the first books I ever read by choice.
Not because a teacher assigned it. Not because I needed to pass a class. Not because I was trying to look intellectual in public, though let the record show there are worse crimes. I read bell hooks because something in me was looking for language, and she had a way of putting words where the wound was.
That is what great writers do. They don’t just explain the world. They hand you a mirror, then refuse to let you look away.
For me, bell hooks was not just a writer on a shelf. She was a guide through love, Blackness, memory, family, pain, and the complicated work of becoming whole in a country that loves broken people better when they stay useful.
So when I see JD Vance walking around with book titles that seem to orbit suspiciously close to bell hooks, I do not see a cute literary coincidence. I see a pattern worth naming.
Not because I need to prove he sat in a room with a highlighter and a guilty conscience.
America rarely leaves fingerprints when it erases Black women.
Sometimes it just renames the room.
The Elegy Before the Hillbilly
Before JD Vance became the political mascot for Appalachian grievance, bell hooks wrote Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place.
Let that sit for a second.
bell hooks, born in Kentucky, wrote of Appalachia not as a costume, not as a campaign prop, not as a way to explain away reactionary politics with a sad fiddle playing in the background. She wrote of land, memory, grief, racism, belonging, and the hard poetry of place.
Then came Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance’s book became a national decoder ring for people who wanted Appalachia explained to them without having to hear too much from the people they already ignore. The country treated him like he had discovered a hidden America, as if Black people in Appalachia had not been there, writing, working, burying kin, surviving violence, and loving the land long before somebody gave Vance a book advance and a Netflix adaptation.
That is the trick.
When bell hooks writes Appalachia, it is poetry, race, gender, class, memory, and place woven together with care.
When JD Vance writes Appalachia, it becomes political currency.
Same mountains. Different microphone.
Communion, But Make It Convenient
Now Vance has a second book called Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.
That title should ring bells. Church bells, even.
bell hooks already wrote Communion: The Female Search for Love, the closing work in her love trilogy. Her Communion was not just about romance. It was about women claiming love as liberation. Love as courage. Love as a discipline. Love as a way to resist domination instead of confusing control for devotion.
That matters because hooks treated love as political. She understood that domination does not only live in government buildings. It lives in households, pulpits, classrooms, bedrooms, families, and language. It hides in what we call normal.
Vance’s Communion arrives as a political faith memoir, a public story of religious return from a man whose politics often seem far more comfortable policing other people’s lives than liberating them.
That contrast is not small.
bell hooks wrote about communion as connection, mutuality, and the difficult work of love.
JD Vance writes about communion as personal redemption in public office, which is a very American genre: confession with a campaign schedule.
This Is Not Just About Titles
Let’s be careful here, because careful does not mean soft.
I am not saying JD Vance plagiarized bell hooks. That is a legal claim, and I am not trying to spend my afternoon helping a vice president discover defamation law.
What I am saying is simpler and, frankly, more damning.
His titles keep landing near her work, and the culture keeps acting like he is the original voice in the room.
That is how erasure works.
It does not always come dressed as theft. Sometimes it comes dressed as coincidence. Sometimes it comes with a better marketing budget. Sometimes it comes wrapped in whiteness, masculinity, faith, and a publishing industry that knows exactly whose pain sells best when translated through the right face.
Black women write the framework.
White men get the franchise.
And then the public asks why we are always “bringing race into it,” as if race was not already sitting in the room with its shoes on.
bell hooks Wrote Toward Love. Vance Writes Toward Power.
The deeper difference is not merely literary. It is moral.
bell hooks spent her career trying to move people away from domination. She wrote about patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, loneliness, family wounds, education, spirituality, and love with a rare kind of clarity. She did not flatten pain into branding. She did not turn suffering into a ladder and then kick it down behind her.
She wrote toward freedom.
Vance, on the other hand, has built much of his public identity by narrating pain in a way that often punches downward. His work gave America a story it was already eager to believe: that poverty, family dysfunction, and social collapse could be explained mostly through personal choices, cultural failure, and a lack of moral grit.
That story is convenient.
It lets systems off the hook.
It lets policy wash its hands.
It lets people look at a region wounded by extraction, addiction, deindustrialization, racism, and abandonment, then say, “Well, maybe they just need better values.”
bell hooks would not let us get away with that.
She understood that love without justice is sentimentality. Faith without accountability is theater. Memory without truth is propaganda with a family photo attached.
Appalachia Was Never Just White
Part of what bothers me about the Vance phenomenon is how easily America lets Appalachia become shorthand for white pain.
That framing is lazy. Worse, it is useful.
Black Appalachians exist. Indigenous memory exists. Labor history exists. Migration exists. Land theft exists. Racial violence exists. Women’s labor exists. Queer life exists. Poor people of every background have been ground up by systems that profit from turning hardship into character tests.
bell hooks knew that.
Her Appalachia was not a cardboard backdrop for a conservative morality play. It was complicated, haunted, beautiful, wounded, and alive.
That is why this conversation matters. Because when someone like Vance becomes the face of Appalachian storytelling, the public imagination narrows. Suddenly the region becomes one man’s origin story. One family’s dysfunction. One political lesson. One path from poverty to power.
And if Black women’s work sits nearby, quietly holding deeper truths, America shrugs.
That shrug is the erasure.
The Identity Crisis Is the Point
There is something almost poetic about it, in the messiest possible way.
JD Vance seems drawn to the language of bell hooks while embodying so much of what she warned us about. The titles circle her work, but the politics walk in the opposite direction. The words suggest communion, place, return, faith, and healing. The public project often feels more like hierarchy, resentment, performance, and control.
It is giving identity crisis with a book tour.
And maybe that is why the echo feels so loud. Because bell hooks wrote with a self-possession that did not need permission. She was not trying to be palatable. She was not trying to be absorbed into somebody else’s respectability machine. She told the truth plainly, and if the truth made people uncomfortable, then good. Discomfort is sometimes the first honest thing in the room.
Vance’s work, by contrast, often feels like a man trying to translate pain into authority.
That is not healing.
That is branding.
Why It Hit Me Personally
I keep coming back to Salvation because that book met me somewhere real.
It was one of the first books I chose for myself, and choice matters. When you choose a book, you are not just reading. You are reaching. You are saying, “There is something I need that I have not yet been given.”
bell hooks gave me language for love that did not require surrendering my dignity. She gave me language for Blackness that did not treat pain as the whole story. She gave me language for healing that did not ask me to pretend the wound was imaginary.
That is why this is not just about JD Vance having two book titles that make a person squint.
It is about who gets remembered.
It is about who gets treated as a public intellectual and who gets treated as a niche feminist writer, despite having already mapped the territory everyone else keeps rediscovering with a flashlight and a contract.
It is about the old American habit of finding brilliance in Black women, taking the useful parts, and then acting like the source was too radical, too emotional, too Black, too female, too inconvenient to cite.
Give bell hooks Her Communion
If Vance wants to write about faith, fine.
If he wants to write about Appalachia, fine.
If he wants to write another memoir while holding one of the most powerful offices in the country, that is between him, his publisher, and whatever poor staffer has to pretend this is normal.
But let us not play dumb.
bell hooks was there.
She wrote Appalachia before the hillbilly became a brand. She wrote Communion before Vance found his way back to faith in hardcover. She wrote about love, domination, patriarchy, place, spirit, and liberation with more courage than most politicians can locate with both hands and a donor list.
So no, I am not saying JD Vance is bell hooks.
That would be disrespectful to bell hooks, literature, and possibly the alphabet.
I am saying America has a habit of letting men like him stand near the work of women like her and receive the applause.
And I am saying we should stop clapping long enough to ask who built the stage.
0 Comments