Damage precedes and causes disfunction

Oppression damage causes individual, family, community and cultural disfunction.  Cultural inferiority is not the cause of cultural dysfunction; even among the experts there is much discussion of cultural dysfunction apart from the systems of oppression that cause such dysfunction.

If you see someone with a black eye, your first question usually is who hit you, not why did you hit yourself?

The very definition of PTSD is "outside force or trauma", not inner weakness or lack of willpower.

When a physical hurricane destroys the housing in a whole community, such as with hurricane Katrina, we usually don't blame the residents for destroying their own homes.  But when a social hurricane, such as slavery, segregation, share cropping, prison gangs, lynching, hits the Mississippi Delta, we often blame poor blacks.  If we visit the Delta decades later and see the dysfunction, we  blame the residents saying this proves blacks are inferior: we blame the victim, not the oppressor.  The church's response to hurricane Katrina was excellent; the church's response to the social hurricane in the Delta has been severely deficient over the decades.

In 1967 President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to study the black ghetto and its violence.  Who and what caused it?  The largely white commission surprised everyone by reporting that white institutions were responsible.  White  oppression caused the ghetto dysfunction.  This was a rare and bold decision for any largely white group.

But after a few years most whites including most white churches essentially ignored and rejected this accurate conclusion.  White churches did not engage in massive repentance, massive restitution or massive repair of the ghettos.  Whites quickly reassumed their supposed superior role, their righteousness.  How could they possibly be the oppressor?

Rarely do white scholars see the close connection between oppression damage such as PTSD and cultural dysfunction.  If there is any expertise, it is either in the area of dysfunction or oppression, not both.

J.D. Vance, himself an Appalachian white, represents expertise in Appalachian white culture and its massive individual, family, community, and cultural dysfunction.  Hillbilly Elegy is a masterpiece in describing a culture in crisis, but little is said about the system of oppression that played a large role in creating this culture in crisis.

Matthew Stewart's expertise lies in describing a system of oppression which creates individual, family, community, and cultural dysfunction.  His article, "The Birth of a New Aristocracy" can be found in the June, 2018 Atlantic Magazine.  Here he writes like a secular prophet exposing the political and economical rule by the rich-the upper 10 percent of American society.  They rule at the expense of the other 90 percent of the population-all the rest of us.  According the Stewart, all the rest of us are either in stagnation, or in decline, or in increasing poverty.  The gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow.

Rich, white males have created a system of political and economic oppression rigged by the rich for the rich.  This was even true in 1776.  Most of the founding fathers were rich, white males.  Some of them like Washington and Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves.  So from 1776 to 2018 there has been continuity of rule by the rich.

This rule by the oppressive rich has included Appalachian whites, poor blacks and all the rest of us to one degree or another.

So Vance's fine book tells half of the story-the dysfunction, PTSD.  Stewart's fine article about oppression and exploitation by the rich tells the other half of the story.  So a person cannot read either Vance's book or Stewart's article alone and get the whole story.  One must read both, the book and the article, and then do some of your own analysis before you will see how the system of oppression causes the culture and crisis.

There are two authors that have done a fairly good job of combining oppression and dysfunction, something that is rarely done.  I would recommend Michelle Alexander's  The New Jim Crow.  I would also recommend Joy De Gruy's book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.