Elizabeth Catte's Blog

The rolling hills of Appalachia are not your refuge from the coronavirus

Cindy tells me, the rich girls are weeping
Cindy tells me, they’ve given up sleeping alone
And now they’re so confused by their new freedoms
And she tells me they’re selling up their maisonettes
Left the Hotpoints to rust in the kitchenettes
And they’re saving their labour for insane reading

This is a story about a woman, a puppy, and a pandemic. It is not my story, but author Meghan Daum’s, who recently fled New York City to “quarantine in Appalachia” at a vacation rental and wrote a whole-ass essay about it. Where in Appalachia? Oh we don’t need to know specifics, only that it’s a location about ten hours away from Manhattan where the hills roll,  the cows moo, and the local hospital won’t be overtaxed by sickness according to noted rural healthcare expert and epidemiologist Meghan Daum.

In Daum’s version of her narrative, placeness is relative. What matters is that she won’t be in New York City, where an older neighbor bothers her to walk his dog, where elevator rides are fraught with danger, where the outdoor air seems infected, and where her new puppy can’t possibly thrive and so, by extension, neither can she. The idea of fleeing New York City for greener pastures “didn’t feel great, but it didn’t feel wrong,” she writes. Having hatched her escape plan with a neighbor she feels it necessary to assure us is only a platonic friend, Daum sets out to find “the kind of place you should be with a new puppy,” which I’d be willing to bet money turns out to be North Carolina, where some localities have appealed to tourists from places like New York, Seattle, and California to re-think their travel plans.

“I chose our destination after an evening of Airbnb research,” Daum explains, “deciding on a place in Appalachia because it was in the middle of nowhere yet within an hour of a hospital that wasn’t yet pegged to be overrun.” That hospitals that serve rural communities are always overrun, every day, all the time isn’t material to Daum or a factor in her decision to get the fuck out of dodge. I happened to read her essay the day I learned that the hospital in my partner’s hometown, Clifton Forge, Virginia, is closing its intensive care unit. This closure isn’t strictly COVID-19 related but rather a business decision made by hospital administrators who are tired of losing money to and wasting resources on low-income people with shitty insurance or no insurance at all. Send them to the hospital in the next county over, then the next county over, then the next county over until delivering a baby or treating an abscessed tooth requires just as much frantic travel as fleeing a major city during a pandemic.   

But Daum isn’t thinking about scenarios like that, or what the realities of community health in her nameless haven actually are. On the contrary, the part of her mind that is still anchored in her past life soothes itself by remembering “the potential hospital bed I freed up in New York City.” Oh. Oh. Do you see how this works? Let me explain. Instead of potentially intensifying the rationing of critical healthcare resources, Daum is in fact bringing cosmic balance to the act of living and dying. The person on a ventilator in New York City might not die as quickly or at all because Daum has selflessly removed herself from the equation. 

In exchange for this act and a willingness to eat groceries that come from Walmart, Daum has awarded herself endless days of dewy grass, puppy romps, clear night skies and unfenced freedom “while the rest of the world withers under the weight of existential horror.” The contours of this existential horror are left vague and unsaid, but elsewhere Daum highlights the angst of forcing herself to watch pundits on cable news, the “doomscroll” of Twitter, and inboxes stuffed with updates about projects that no longer matter. 

All that matters now is that Daum’s puppy can shit freely in the wilderness like god intended animals to do and their loving masters to admire. Is there guilt about leaving, or about potentially bringing illness with her? Perhaps, but after a reasonable attempt to self-isolate and now confident that she is healthy, it only stings like a papercut compared to the guilt of “having to eventually take the puppy away from all this grass.” Will the future Daum think fondly of Appalachia every time her dog drops a hot pile on a New York City street and she remembers the simplicity of those bagless days and grass-impaled shits? What an honor for us.

******

Cindy tell me, what will they do with their lives?
Living quietly like labourer’s wives
Perhaps they’ll reacquire those things they’ve all disposed of

Of course, Daum isn’t the only person fleeing heavily-impacted places for more remote settings. The Guardian recently ran an item about public backlash to Paris-based authors decamping to their second homes in the French countryside, where some had resorted to switching cars to avoid detection. Closer to home, American reality star Kristin Cavallari’s insistence that she and her entourage were trapped in paradise during a vacation to the Bahamas, prevented from returning home due to travel restrictions, was mercilessly debunked by TV writer Claire Downs on Twitter. 

Less tabloid-y stories about the dangers of travel to isolated and under-resourced communities are also plentiful. For Buzzfeed, writer Anne Helen Petersen provided an impressively-thorough account of how COVID-19 spread to rural communities near Idaho’s Sun Valley resorts, likely from people traveling in from places like Seattle. In the case of Sun Valley’s early outbreak, travel restrictions came too late and so the community’s fate became a cautionary tale.

During the early weeks of March I got my news about what America could become in the era of COVID-19 from an unusual source: a livestream generated by a camera placed on a tower in downtown Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Gatlinburg is a popular hub for Smoky Mountain vacationers, and I was desperate to see their numbers growing smaller. Online, I could perform keyword searches on social media and find out-of-state families and couples planning quarantine getaways, hoping to take advantage of low-priced vacation rentals and let the pandemic pass them by while they floated in over-sized hot tubs. I could also see locals pleading with their elected leaders to do something about this, scared for the public health implications but also furious to watch cars with out-of-state plates crammed full of panic-bought groceries heading back to the tourist districts. There was nothing I could do about any of this, of course, but I wanted to know what was happening because my family and many of my friends live in the largest nearby city with a hospital network. Alison Stein reported on this phenomenon at the end of March, with an emphasis on D.C. residents attempting to seek refuge across the border in West Virginia’s wilderness.

On Twitter, Daum made a partial defense of her essay and decision to seek shelter in “the rolling hills of Appalachia” by repeating her belief that she “freed up a ventilator in NYC” and “thought long and hard about this before I decided to leave.” Some writers revel in controversy, enjoying the buzz that comes from floating about the outrage. Not so Daum, who seems genuinely puzzled that anyone could be upset about what she did or wrote. Since that is unclear, let me explain.

You have made an unwise travel decision based on your need for self-care and a desire to give your pet a more comfortable place to shit. You did not travel because circumstances forced your hand, because you were made homeless or because a relative needed your assistance. In a moment where many people are struggling to afford one place to shelter, you are subsidizing the second home of someone who should also know better. You made critical judgments about the resource capacity of a community based on an evening’s worth of research driven by where available rental property could be most easily located. You are not a person with a history of advocacy for the region where you are sheltering or the people who live there. You did not even throw passing discouragement into your essay, to advise others to not attempt a similar scheme. On the contrary, you took pains to make your actions seem logical, healing, and benevolent, something that you might even recommend to others who are frazzled and inconvenienced by urban pandemic realities.  

Do I want to tell Meghan Daum to suck it up and go the fuck home? Yes, absolutely, but more urgently than that, I want to tell people who are thinking of writing essays about homesteading in vacation rentals during a global crisis to just keep it to themselves. And if that request is too unbearable, at least next time just let the dog write the essay.

“Cindy Tells Me” by Brian Eno, from Here Come the Warm Jets, 1973.

Mutual Aid is Always Political

This post is an exercise in bringing clarity to the term “mutual aid” based on how this idea, as an organizing aspiration, is spreading through my community in Staunton, Virginia. That said, I imagine what is happening here is happening in a lot of communities at the moment: that large and quickly-formed networks, chaotically-online and predominately on Facebook, have formed under the banner of “mutual aid” and are managed by people who are best described as active community members but not organizers. On the contrary, their status as active community members might even make them people who, under different circumstances, could be targets of organizing themselves: landlords, business owners, and local politicians, for example.

What I want to emphasize here is that there are important, key differences between being helpful, neighborly, community-spirited or self-nominating as a leader,  and engaging in mutual aid. Mutual aid is a type of organizing with a long history that aspires to do specific things and bring about specific outcomes while also accepting certain universal truths. Most notably, mutual aid is a survival strategy that accepts as truth the failure of our systems — political, social, and economic — to meet our basic needs. Mutual aid is a product of precarity, which is often an artificially-rendered state, and its goal is to replace this precarity with radical care. 

Here is how organizer Dean Spade defines mutual aid, “Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are survivable.” Many people see mutual aid as a form of resistance, understanding that it helps ordinary people live beyond and imagine a future free from oppression. Another helpful definition of mutual aid comes from prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, who recently collaborated on a Mutual Aid 101 primer with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kaba defines mutual aid as “a practice and politics that emphasizes solidarity rather than charity…It means that we recognize our well-being, health and dignity are all bound up in each other.” Other useful resources include a recently recorded program by the Highlander Center in Tennessee, and tools from Big Door Brigade. There is information about many historic and contemporary examples of successful mutual aid projects linked in those toolkits, from the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programs to community bail organizations and rapid response projects specific to COVID-19.

Locally — but I suspect this is also true beyond my community — I see a lot of conflict stemming from the fact that newly-formed mutual aid groups want to reinvent mutual aid without politics. Mutual aid is always political, because it is a form of political action. This does not mean mutual aid is a tool for securing political patronage, or that it seeks to advance the agendas of political parties. Rather, what makes mutual aid political is the way that it elevates the needs of people over the needs of the system and seeks ways to reduce its power. It replaces accomodation with participation and self-help. To be clear, for mutual aid to work and be sustainable, to actually be mutual aid, we must accept that we are living in a state of failure with guaranteed and intentional harm promised to the most vulnerable. Many people in this moment hope that this failure will be temporary, but longtime organizers understand that the forces we live under — capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism — are designed to fail people and harm them so that wealth and power can continue to consolidate among the few.   

Skilled organizers know ways to channel political angst into action. But in the absence of this experience, I see a lot of energy and concern prematurely stifled with warnings to keep politics or personal opinions out of engagement and information sharing. Organizing is about providing material aid, but it is also about broadening awareness and creating opportunities for personal growth building toward systemic change. For example, in helping others navigate the bureaucratic nightmare of filing for unemployment, it is good to reflect on and talk about the fact that the systems we are seeking relief from have never provided adequately for people who need urgent assistance, and will continue to fail people long after the worst impact of the pandemic has passed. It is necessary for our continued survival to see how fragile our existing social contracts are, and to consider ways to replace them with something better. Novelist Arundhati Roy invites us to consider the pandemic as a portal, “a gateway between one world and the next.” In the new mutual aid groups that exist in my community, such discussion and conscious-raising is very much forbidden.

This heavy-handed strategy is likely a product of several choices, the most unhelpful of which is to protect the feelings of people whose actions helped bring us to this moment. This group obviously includes Trump supporters, but might also include people who have exploited workers as business owners, those who have sought to hoard community resources like property, or anyone who tacitly accepts that certain people are disposable. Given the scope of the current crisis, I think it would be a good thing to consider ways that these individuals, who are normally protective of the system and antagonistic toward change, might be useful or even challenged about their actions and beliefs. But shielding them from discomfort at the expense of others is counter-productive and reinforces privilege and hierarchies that are already disadvantageous to vulnerable people. This is emphatically true when these individuals are the ones claiming to lead mutual aid efforts.  

Another stumbling block is conflating mutual aid with charity. Mutual aid is never charity, it is a form of solidarity. One reason this distinction is important is because charity is often deployed based on notions of who is worthy or unworthy of support or even the right to survive. Dean Spade writes, “Charity makes rich people and corporations look generous and upholds and legitimizes the systems that concentrate wealth.” One goal of mutual aid is liberating people from competition for resources and a system that requires them to perpetually demonstrate that they are worthy of having their basic needs met, not rationed away. In charitable giving, the organization or individual retains the power to determine who will receive resources, typically because the giver isn’t burdened by the hardships of those forced to seek charity. Using mutual aid, individuals and communities receive the tools and resources to meet their own needs and exchange resources among themselves, each according to their own needs and ability to provide.

Being neighborly and encouraging community spirit is also not mutual aid. It is enormously helpful at the moment to keep track of store inventory, and to report to people who are uncomfortable going out where they can most easily locate supplies. For those who have the means, coordinated efforts to support local businesses are also very welcomed. Being a good steward of one’s community is impactful, genuine, and matters. When I say that these actions are meaningful but also adjacent to mutual aid, I am not dismissing them. On the contrary, the majority of my own actions at the moment look precisely like this — I have shopped at business that need support, I have made small donations to organizations with a greater capacity to do work and maximize those resources, and I am providing individual help and mutual assistance to one of my communities, which is self-employed individuals trying to navigate public benefits. 

Is it a big deal that people are doing these and other good things and calling it mutual aid? On one hand, not at all and especially not now that preserving community health is rapidly stretching our conception of mutual support. But on the other hand, I think it is vitally important for new organizers to understand the history of the tools and theory they are trying to use. The practice of mutual aid, in America, has a long history in black, brown, and indigenous communities, in queer and trans communities, and in places where depravation, exploitation, and climate catastrophe are ongoing. To engage in sustained efforts to depoliticize mutual aid, to distance it from its implied critique of capitalism and racism, is wrong. Being successful at mutual aid is tantamount to threatening power structures that are both obvious and seemingly benign and it is not possible to be engaged with and committed to these practices at the same time one is invested in upholding or restoring the system. There is a useful term for helping others outside of political struggle, and that is volunteering. 

My concerns about this have been exacerbated by the way my local government has promoted and endorsed this iteration of mutual aid work. In email digests, city government has linked to these groups and elected leaders seem to be active in them as well. Mutual aid is also not typically endorsed, supported, or utilized by government. To the extent that the government wants to be informally involved in this practice, either by recommending that people use new mutual aid networks to meet their needs or through the efforts of elected leaders to manage or moderate mutual aid networks, we should be cautious. Joining these groups means attempting to organize, engage with others, and seek assistance through a space where discussions deemed political, opinionated or negative are suppressed and can result in a loss of access to the tools the government is actively recommending. Lines are blurring and fast because of the gravity of the situation we are facing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be thoughtful about the conditions we place on people in exchange for support and whose comfort and needs we are prioritizing.

In solidarity,

Elizabeth

A message to the future of Appalachia

In late February, I gave a talk at West Virginia University. I was honored to be invited and felt that it was important to directly address young people for two specific reasons. The first is that JD Vance, who is known for many things that are the opposite of youth empowerment, spoke at the university a week before me. The second is that I came to West Virginia in the middle of its historic strike. Education and public workers cited many reasons for their collective action, but one that wasn’t receiving wider purchase in the national conversation about the strike at that time was the deep conviction teachers’ had for envisioning a better future for their students. I wanted them to know their solidarity was seen, and felt. Jessica Salfia, an English teacher, wrote from that perspective here.

As you may know, a small cohort within the Appalachian Studies Association invited JD Vance to speak at our most recent conference and participated in the abuse of young members who stood in dissent. There are many things I want to and will likely say about that, but for the moment, I am going share part of the remarks I made at West Virginia University. For them. For us. For the future.

My book is called What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia and people like to speculate who the “you” is in the title. Is it JD Vance, his fans and supporters? And they’re not wrong – that is definitely the direction in which the book started. But as it developed, I started to see that the “you” was me and that I was writing against an experience where people with more power tried to tell me what I should think and feel about my history and identity. They were happy to tell me what I was getting wrong about Appalachia, and usually the thing I was getting most wrong, according to them, was that there was any hope for the future.

“Coal is dead. Just move. I hate that you’re stuck there.  If it wasn’t for welfare there wouldn’t be any signs of life in the mountains.” And so on. But I believe that within our history we have the tools to help us move forward. I see this when I look out at rallies of teachers and public employees wearing red bandanas, connecting their actions not only to the 1990 teachers’ strike but further back, to the mine wars. And what I hope to leave you with is a sense that the heritage we share isn’t some ridiculous ethnic component and it isn’t about how long your people have lived here, and it isn’t about how you make your cornbread, although now I fear assassination or at least a decline in book sales for saying that. Our heritage is the way we have shared and supported each other in struggle – in the past, in the present, and in the future, here at home and beyond our borders. If we did not have the power to create change, we would not be the heirs to a 150 year old propaganda industry designed to tell us and the world we are powerless.

You know, people ask me now, all the time, what it means to be Appalachian. If it’s not a mediocre memoir, if it’s not dependency narratives, if it’s not Scots-Irish heritage, if it’s not black and white poverty photos – what is it? And I like to decline to say because I think self-definition is power and if I tell you what or who you are I have taken some power from you and I do not want to do that. I want you to ask these hard questions of yourself and get more powerful for the work that must be done. But I can tell you what flashes through my mind when I’m asked that question.

There’s an old documentary called Harlan County USA, directed by Barbara Kopple, about the miners’ strike against Duke Energy in the 1970s. Many of you will know it. Barbara was a very young woman from New York when she started making this documentary but grew close to her subjects because they were all in danger – their fates became connected. A strikebreaker indiscriminately firing a gun into a crowd was just as likely to hit her or one of her crew as a miner. And there’s a very important scene in this documentary – a blink and you’ll miss it scene – where there’s a physical altercation on the picket line. And what you can hear but not so much see is a breathless Barbara Kopple running toward that altercation and throwing her big boom mic between the strike breakers and her crew and the miners. In other words, I think being Appalachian is running toward your friends when they need you. So here I am.

Image by Robert Gumpert via the Appalshop archive.

The public history job board that’s killing our field

Over at the job board for the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), the opportunity of a lifetime: an unpaid internship with the Montana Heritage Commission that is 40 hours a week for 5 months, working among rodent droppings during the peak of winter. Housing is provided. Duties including moving and cataloguing artifact collections, which we are told in the job ad “takes time, money, and people.” How much money? Well, using embarrassingly low estimates, around $16,000 at least in wages that will go unpaid under the guise of gaining of professional experience and exposure – and no, not just exposure to the elements and animal waste. The kind of exposure that, in a better world, would help you earn a job where people actually pay you to perform vital employment functions.

According to the Department of Labor, there are six criteria that must be met for a private sector unpaid internship to be considered legal, and you can read them here. Legalities become more complicated when dealing with non-profit and government partners, but we can still use two of the above criteria as a general sniff test: 1) The internship experience is to the benefit of the intern and 2) The employer that provides training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded. I am comfortable stating that it does not take 800 hours for an individual to learn how to catalogue artifacts in a database, so what we very clearly have is an advertisement for work the Montana Heritage Commission needs performed and doesn’t want to compensate. That might not be illegal, but it is deeply unethical. If this were a private sector job, it would likely be an employee misclassification and fall under policies regarding wage theft.

But this grey area does not seem to be a problem for AASLH, which continues to feature positions such as this on their very popular job board. The last time I contacted them with concerns, this ad was in circulation, which offered candidates $100 for a 40 hour week at the George Ranch Historical Park in Texas. Their response to me was a pat on their back for paying their own interns, which I assume is meant to be taken as the weakest sort of leading by example. The fact that other professional organizations filter or decline to advertise unpaid work and work that offers compensation that isn’t commensurate with experience doesn’t really register with them.

You probably already know the range of options you have before you if you find this find of behavior problematic. Some people will and have suspended their memberships, others want to be the change from within. Many good folks are doing a better job coaching students and those new to the field about the value of their labor. And me? I’m just here to say that there is no universe in which it is appropriate to ask an individual to work full time for 5 months for no pay and any person or organization that does has no business being an advocate for the field.

Let me tell you a difficult secret: it is not possible to value history while contributing to the worsening material conditions of historians. This formula does not work, the math is broken, and you do not want to live in a world that is absent of historians. For one thing, a world without historians has no need for professional organizations to advocate on their behalf and won’t place prestige on their expensive accreditation programs. Just because people like me are the minute hand on the Doomsday clock, sweeping just that much faster around the dial, doesn’t mean your hour isn’t coming too.

BEAR LODGE, a ghost story about late-capitalism

Before Bear Lodge, I’d never actually taken an Uber. Part of the reason was circumstantial – I’ve never been much of a traveler – but I’d also made a promise to Dr. Safar, my old colleague at the community college. Dr. Safar emigrated with his wife from Syria ten years ago after she accepted a cardiology residency at Mercy Hospital. He was an anthropologist in Syria but in Pittsburgh, for a time, he was a taxi-driver. “Cliché, I know,” he told me once during our smoke break. “But that’s what a lot of us did when we first arrived. And I’d do it again if I had to. The firm took care of me. You should always take a taxi, Kate, not one of those internet cars. Much better for the drivers.” He stopped driving a taxi when he and wife had saved enough to move across the river and eventually he became my office mate at Wallace Community College, sharing the sunless warren of desks reserved for adjunct instructors.

Despite his wife’s profession, Dr. Safar was an unapologetic smoker and we spent most afternoons together at an uncomfortable concrete picnic table between the faculty parking lot and the administration building, killing time. Because the college paid us by the course – and quite poorly at that – we resented spending the long stretches of time between our 8am classes and 3pm classes in our office and rotated between the picnic tables and our small cafeteria. Without a hint of irony, Dr. Safar suggested the time outdoors would be “good for our health, Kate, with the fresh air,” and, weather permitting, we stuck to our routine. He’s gone now. His wife jumped at the chance to take a senior surgical position in Canada after the election, and I guess I don’t blame her.

But on this trip, it appeared I wouldn’t have the luxury of loyalty to my friend. The Amtrak, it seemed, had deposited me in the middle of nowhere; a small spur at the base of Chapel Mountain in Virginia where the Modern Historical Association was holding its annual conference at the Bear Lodge. My hotel confirmation had come with instructions to summon an Uber – plentiful, by small-town standards, since the resort’s construction – or pay an additional $40 for pre-arranged shuttle service. I decided to take my chances on Uber. It was only 11 miles, after all, how much could they charge?

When the MHA announced its conference location last year, I was surprised the organization agreed to hold a meeting in Appalachia. But then I remembered the fire. Two years ago, a forest fire had devastated the south end of the mountain, destroying around half a dozen small hotels and an apartment complex. When the owners tried to rebuild, they discovered that a real estate investor had convinced the municipal authorities to mandate expensive fire-safety measures for all new construction. Even with insurance payouts, none of local business owners could afford to rebuild and the real estate investor purchased their land for quick sale. Out of the ashes rose Bear Lodge, a luxury resort facility set in the “the majesty of the Appalachian Mountains offering world-class accommodation and conference facilities for adventurous families and discerning travelers alike.” The story didn’t receive a lot of press attention – I only knew the details because my family hails from the other side of mountain.

I didn’t have the stamina to lodge a protest with the MHA and to be honest, I’m certain they wouldn’t have given a shit about my opinion. The MHA is all about keeping the field’s luminaries happy and in attendance, and judging by chatter on the internet about the generously negotiated hotel rates at four-star resort, the MHA called it right even though it’s still expensive as hell for the rest of us without the luxury of travel reimbursement.

And, to be honest, I didn’t even want to be at the conference. I had a job interview, you see – one of those awful cattle calls where you pay a grand for the privilege of a 20 minute slot with half of the search committee for a tenure-track job. I knew the odds were that I’d be nursing a huge credit card bill for the next year without a job to show for it, but I’d also been frustrated at the community college, especially after the Drs. Safar left.

Still, I couldn’t deny that the area was stunning. It made me homesick in all the right and worst ways. The town below, Jackson, was one of those ordinary paper mill towns on the decline you find throughout Appalachia, but the mountain above glowed with the last of fall’s colors. It didn’t seem fair that the area had turned into a playground for the rich, but it also wasn’t surprising. I knew from growing up over the mountain that the favorite economic revival strategy for the region over the last few years was tempting new businesses with huge tax breaks, and better a resort than a chemical plant, I suppose.

I’d tried to scope out the area online before arriving – as a smoker, I’d felt an urgent need to stake out the closest corner shop since I was sure the Bear Lodge’s luxury provisions probably wouldn’t stretch to Marlboros – and there didn’t seem much between Jackson and the resort at the top of the mountain. The only other sign of civilization on Google maps seemed to be a modest sized trailer park, Mountain Side, about three miles from the resort. The trailer park wouldn’t be any use for me but it still made me smile that the real estate investors hadn’t managed to drive off all the locals.

Off the train, I dug my phone out of my bag to use the Uber app I’d downloaded before leaving and I figured I’d get a lung-full of nicotine to go along with the paper mill fumes that had settled over Jackson. I put my details in the app, lit up, and was only half way through my cigarette when my phone vibrated to let me know my driver, Sarah, was waiting for me in the parking lot. Sure enough, when I walked out front, there was an old but immaculate Toyota running in the lot with a small black decal on the window and a middle-aged woman waving at me from behind the wheel. She popped the trunk for my luggage from inside the car and hopped out to greet me.

“Kate, right – for Bear Lodge? I’m Sarah. Let me help you with that bag, honey and listen, I don’t mind waiting if you want to hit the restroom before we go. People think it’s a quick trip up the mountain but we go slowly on these roads and I haven’t had a run yet where I ain’t got stuck behind of a delivery truck heading for the lodge. It’ll probably take us 20 minutes but don’t worry, honey, you only pay for the mileage and it’s a pretty, pretty drive.”

I told her I was ready to go.

“Then hop in, hop in sweetie – and sit in the front if you don’t mind. The heater don’t work too well in the back seat. The cold don’t bother me but I’ve got it nice and warm for you.”

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I have to admit, I was impressed with my first Uber trip. Sarah radiated maternal warmth, and her accent took me right back to childhood. She fussed over me like a grandmother – “are you warm enough, sweetie? It’s gets a lot colder up the mountain!” – and I drank it up, basking in the last bit of kindness I’d get for the next few days.

“Have you taken many folks up the mountain for the conference?” I asked as we circled back through the parking lot, slipping into my old accent. My stab at small-talk was a weak attempt to probe my driver for what she wouldn’t know was gossip. The MHA had made the decision this year to organize interviews for the day before the conference, an alternation to normal scheduling presented as a benevolent touch to get potentially distressing business over before the conference began. In reality, the reorganization was nothing more than an attempt by the MHA to boost conference attendance on opening day when sessions were notoriously poorly attended. I knew that if Sarah had taken anyone up the mountain it was likely to be by competition, and I was curious about the turn out.

“What conference is that, sweetie?” she answered. “You know, I clean rooms up at the lodge – it’s my full time job – but I don’t remembering hearing about a conference. Although, with the way those folks work us, we wouldn’t know anything unless they wrote it on a pillow case.”

“Oh, it’s a history conference. I have a job interview tomorrow and I’m really dreading it. I can’t even afford this stupid trip in the first place…” To my horror, I found myself unloading on this poor stranger, my voice cracking with emotion. It took me a second to compose myself before I could offer an apology. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m just in a bad mood. There’s no reason for you to know about the conference.” I couldn’t explain why I’d been so selfish, but something about Sarah reminded me one of my mother’s friends – one of those nice ladies who’d given me rides after school and asked me about my day when my mom was working the night shift.

“Honey, don’t you worry about that,” she said. “I know a little bit about what you’re going through. Listen, that lodge? I work there 40 hours a week, sometimes 50, and on my days off I’m 8 or 9 hours in my car up and down the mountain,” she laughed, and reached over the pat my hand.

“What I mean is, I know a lot about what it’s like to work hard for something better and not get it. Before the fire, there were a lot of us girls –“ she giggled as she said girls, then paused for correction, “—there were a lot of us women who did rooms for the local hotels. Top of the Mountain, Ogle’s, you know. It was hard work but we felt like we was doing for family and got paid well too. And the owners gave us our dinner and if the roads were bad they’d let us bunk up in an empty room.” The some of the warmth left her voice.

“Those people at Bear Lodge? They act like they’re doing us a favor by letting us work there for $8 an hour. Honey, those managers? They don’t even let us go into rooms scheduled for check out unless they peek inside them first. They say it’s to do inventory but we all know it’s so they can take our tips. Greediest people alive if you ask me. I heard they’s going to start a shuttle and charge people $40 to go up the mountain. Do you believe that? At least I won’t be put out of my driving work – can’t see a lot of people paying that much unless they’re bringing up a bunch of youngins.”

“Oh, they’re already doing that,” I replied, happy to change the conversation, which was making us both upset. “But I’m glad it isn’t hurting your business.”

“Well that sure got that together quick,” Sarah said. “I’ll ask May about it next time I’m at the lodge. Nothing gets past her.”

“Is that Mountain Side?” I asked Sarah as we cruised past what looked the entrance of a trailer park. “Sure is,” Sarah answered. “Lot of girls, I mean women, who work up the mountain live there – five, six to a trailer. Some of the women live in Jackson like me but it’s hard to get up the mountain in the winter when the roads ice. Course, they salt ‘em better now because of the resort, and there ain’t nobody up there at all in the winter, but if an ice comes early it’s a nightmare and you’d best believe the management don’t take no excuses for missing a shift. Last year I’d’ve lost my job if I hadn’t been able to get one of the Mountain Side girls to cover my shifts.” She gave a hearty chuckle as she said girls, like she’d given up trying to make a good impression.

Sarah was right – the drive was gorgeous but ten minutes on the twisty mountain roads had made me slightly car sick. I didn’t have the heart to ask Sarah to turn down the heat so I closed my eyes for a moment. I had barely enough time for a deep breath when I felt Sarah slam on the breaks.

When I opened my eyes, I saw what Sarah had seen. A young woman, dressed entirely in white, standing in the middle of the road. She was unsteady on her feet – almost like a sleep walker – and when she noticed the car she made a half-hearted attempt to stick out a thumb, which almost knocked her off balance completely.

“Oh shit honey,” Sarah said, “Excuse my language, and excuse me for asking, but would you mind if we gave this poor thing a lift the rest of the way up the mountain? I’m not sure I recognize her but I recognize the uniform – she’s a cleaner, like me. If she’s walking up the mountain at this time of day it must mean she’s on a split shift. I hate ‘em, splits. Management makes us work ‘em we’ve just done a double, acts like it’s some kind of kindness to let us take the morning off. She looks exhausted.”

“It’s fine, really,” I answer, nervously imagining a delivery truck barreling down the mountain and taking all of us out with it.

“Thanks, I owe you,” Sarah said, giving her horn a couple of light taps to signal to the girl we were stopping. “I can’t refund your ride I don’t think – the system does all of that – but I’ll give you a code so you don’t have to pay for your ride back down the mountain.”

As she ambled down the road, Sarah and I glance at each other as if we were both wondering if the girl would even be able to open the backseat door. She looked so frail. Coming closer, I could see that she was wearing something that looked like surgical scrubs, gleaming white, and her complexion almost seemed to be the same shade.

Despite our worry, the girl managed to open the backseat door and slide to the middle of the Toyota’s seat.

“You going up the Lodge, hon?” Sarah asked, turning around. “Charles got you on doubles?” The girl didn’t respond, but her head bobbed down in something like a nod.

“Bless your heart, sweetie,” Sarah said, adjusting her mirror and pulling back on the road. “You don’t look well. But lord, how white your uniform is! How’d you manage that with those machines at Mountain Side? Joan, you know her? Came to work last week with dog hair on her uniform because some idiot had put a dog bed in the washer. I thought Charles was going to send her home but Nancy had a spare in her locker. Joan had to wash him at her momma’s house and give ‘em back because there was still dog hair all in the washer a week later.”

I turned around a stole a glance at the backseat when the girl didn’t answer. Sarah was right, the girl didn’t look well. Under-dressed for the weather, I could see dark circles under her eyes even with her head bowed. I expected to see her arms covered with goosebumps, hairs standing on end, but her skin was smooth – almost translucent. Her hair was fine and blond, pulled into a sloppy pony tail. Her lips were slightly cracked and had unhealthy purple tinge to them. Based on what I’d just heard about Charles, I couldn’t imagine him letting his staff wear purple-colored lipstick, but it frightened me to think she looked so naturally pale and bruised.

“Hi, I’m Kate,” I said, when I felt I’d been turned around too long just to steal a glimpse at our passenger. “Are you, ah, warm enough? Sarah was just saying the heater in the backseat doesn’t work.”

Her head rose, catching my gaze with watery, sad eyes. “I can’t feel the cold anymore,” she said softly. “I used to get so cold waking down the mountain, even in the summer time but I guess I got used to it.”

I tried to catch Sarah’s eye, but she was focused on the road. There was something not right with the girl, something that went beyond fatigue. A strange, damp smell, like wet leaves, had followed her into the car, setting my car sickness on edge. A glimpse of my own reflection in the side mirror confirmed I looked alarmingly wan – but as sickly as I looked, it was nothing compared to the girl in the back seat.

I was surprised to hear her continue from the backseat, “Adam told me to be careful walking down the road, ‘specially at night. Said the trucks would just run me down sooner than give me space. One almost hit me last once. I went into the ditch, and must have knocked myself out. When I woke up, I had such an awful grass stain on my uniform.” She absently rubbed knee as if remembering. “I didn’t think it would ever come out.”

I was ecstatic to see the entrance to the lodge appear appear. “Listen, Kate,” Sarah said, “I need to ask one more favor. Let me just drop her off real quick at the employee entrance round back. Hopefully someone will give her some coffee before she goes on her shift, and I don’t think I can bear to make her walk all the way around the building in this weather.”

“It’s no problem, really,” I said, as I dug in my purse for a tip.

The lodge itself was both ghastly but impressive. Rough-hewn pillars and rocking chairs decorated the entrance of what looked more like a Bass Pro Shop than a luxury resort. It made me angry to spend what little money to stay at this poor imitation of rustic charm, and learning how the resort treated its workers didn’t help.

Behind the lodge, I finally got a look at one of those infamous delivery trucks. We were force to wait a minute while a driver negotiating a dolly stacked with boxes down a delivery ramp. When we when we able to move forward, I caught the driver’s eye as he frantically pointed to our back seat. Stopping a moment later at the employee entrance, I understood his alarm. Sarah had been driving with her backseat door open, and it must have almost clipped the delivery trick. Our passenger was nowhere to be found.

“Well good grief,” Sarah said, hopping out of the car to shut the door. “I don’t see her anywhere. I’m sorry, sweetie. That was the rudest thing I’ve seen in ages and believe me, I’ll be having words with her the next time I see her.” She swung the car angrily around and headed back toward the guests entrance.

It only took a few minutes to drive back to the pillars and rip-off Cracker Barrel porches. “Thanks Sarah,” I said, handing her a five-dollar bill. “It’s been good to meet you.”

“Let me pop the trunk for you, hon,” she said, “and here, take this card. There’s a referral code on it for your next ride. Good chance I’ll be the one to take you back down the mountain and, if you’re staying on the 4th of 5th floors, we might run into each other before then. Good luck with your interview. I hope it works out for you and try to enjoy yourself.”

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I said goodbye and took a few deep breaths before entering the resort. I wasn’t sure if the dread I felt was a memory of the frail and disoriented, but now missing, passenger or if I was getting nervous about my interview. When the hotel put me on the 2nd floor, I was secretly relieved. I didn’t mind running into Sarah again but I hated the thought of her cleaning my room, too.

As it turns out, I didn’t see Sarah again during my 2 day stay, and I didn’t see the mysterious passenger either. I spent most of my free time avoiding academics, walking around the resort’s man-made lake and splurging on room service I couldn’t afford. I had to hand it to the resort’s marketing – the mountains were magnificent. By the next month, most of the trees casting their burnished shadows on the mountain would be skeletal – didn’t Sarah say this place closed for a few months in the winter? Jesus, what happened to the staff?

The conference unfolded exactly as conferences past. I interviewed well but left certain I wouldn’t be offered a campus visit – and networking was a nightmare once people spotted my community college affiliation on my name badge. Catching up with an old graduate school friend, usually the saving grace for these awful trips, just put me in a worse mood this time. Mary-Kate was full of gossip about an old classmate of ours who’d just landed an incredibly cushy fellowship, the same classmate who made half of her dissertation committee quit in protest because her work was so bad. Rumors were swirling she’d been having an affair with a married professor, who bought her silence with a fellowship after she threatened to expose him to his wife. Normally I love lurid academic gossip but on this trip I just took it as further confirmation that no one gets anywhere in our field without someone powerful pulling some strings.

I also did what I promised myself I wouldn’t do – check my credit card balance after one too many drinks. The trip was going to cost me slightly more than I earned for teaching an entire course, and I’d be lucky if I had 3 on the books in the spring. I also saw that Sarah hadn’t charged me for my ride after all. It wouldn’t have been much, and I had flashes of worry throughout my trip that she’d get in trouble with the service. I went to toss the referral card but I’d already lost it, I guess.

I was eager to check out on my last day. I slapped twenty bucks beside the TV and hauled ass out of my room, but catching sight of a housekeeper in the hallway made me remember something Sarah said, and I ducked back inside the room to grab the money.

In the hallway, I jogged over to the housekeeper before she went into her next room. “Excuse me, I said, were you the person who cleaned my room yesterday – 205?”

The housekeeper looked nervous. “Ah yes, that was me. I’m sorry – did I do something wrong?”

“Oh not at all. But do you know Sarah, cleans rooms on the 4th and 5th floors? She told me that y’all have a problem with your tips going missing and I just wanted to hand you this myself.”

Relief washed over her face. “Yes m’am. I don’t know any Sarah – I just started working here 2 months ago – but she is correct about the tips. Thank you.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” I asked. “You know, is there a comment card or something I can fill out that would help you out with your managers?”

“That’s nice of you to ask, but we ain’t got no comment cards here and I can’t think of anything that would help us out with these managers. There’s a waiting list to work here. Management knows it don’t have to do right by us because if we don’t like it someone else is out there waiting to take our place.”

“A waiting list – even for housekeeping jobs?” I knew the moment the words left my mouth I’d put my foot it in. “What I meant is – I heard the pay was terrible.”

“Well, it is but in a place like this some pay is better than no pay I guess because everyone is hurting for work. The only reason I’m working here is because some woman got herself killed going home on the mountain road. One minute I was watching the police out my window and the next thing I knew, the phone in my trailer was ringing with someone asking did I want to interview for a housekeeping vacancy up here. Aw hon, you’ve gone white as a sheet. Listen, I didn’t mean to get all morbid. Thanks, you know, for looking out for me. If you’re driving down the mountain watch out for those trucks – they think they own the road.”

I mumbled my thanks and grabbed the nearest elevator. I was suddenly feeling hot and claustrophobic. I couldn’t get the image of that sickly hitch-hiker swaying back and forth in the road out of my mind. What had she said – she’d woken up in a ditch after a truck forced her off the road? It felt like it took me ten years to make my way down the stairwell. When the elevator opened I realized I’d taken the one meant for staff. I found myself in a corridor that lead to a laundry room and a small break room lined with lockers. I could see a fire door, marked EXIT, just inside the break room. I pushed the door open and took gulping breaths of clean air.

I found myself outside the employee entrance, where Sarah and I had stopped to drop off our mysterious passenger two days ago. The air was quiet and still. From the corner of my eye, I saw a small concrete picnic table at the edge of the employee parking lot. I walked over to it, weeping. I thought of Dr. Safar all the people who scheme and plot for better things sitting around uncomfortable tables like this. I took a seat facing the woods and fished my cigarettes out of my bag. I figured that Sarah or whoever has driving that day wouldn’t begrudge picking me up at the staff entrance since most of the drivers seemed to work at the lodge.

Behind me, I heard the crunch of leaves. When I turned around to apologize for invading their space, I was shocked to see the hitchhiker walking towards me, looking to be in much better health.

The woman must have read something unpleasant in my face because she immediately threw her hands up in apology as she sat down next to me. “It’s you, from a few days ago. Listen, I’m sorry for bailing on you after y’all were nice enough to take me up the mountain. In my defense, I was feeling terrible and didn’t even know which way was up.”

She continued, lighting up her own cigarette, “Doctor has me on some strong painkillers for my knee – one of them trucks almost hit me walking home down Mountain Side and I busted up my leg something awful jumping out of the way. It just won’t heal right. All we get around here is painkillers and I don’t like to take ‘em while I’m working but when am I not working, you know? I hope I didn’t embarrass myself or make you too worried.”

We smoked in silence for a few minutes. I finished, and tossed my butt into a little flowerpot filled with sand. “It’s funny,” she said, “it must have just been the drugs but that driver looked exactly like one of our housekeepers that got killed about 2 months ago going home. I only knew her to say hello but she was one of the nicest people here. Not fair what happened to her. My stepdaddy is with the sheriff’s office down in Jackson and he said she must have fallen asleep at the wheel – got her little car wrapped around a tree. Found out she’d been working doubles all week.”

She stubbed out her own cigarette. “In a way, I guess it was lucky. I mean, that it was only her that died. She always had a few of the other housekeepers in her car – she hated to see anyone have to walk down the mountain – but she was alone the day she died. Must have been coming off a split shift. Anyway, thank you again for the ride and sorry if I spooked you. The cold weather does bad things to my leg. One of the girls covered for me while I got some rest and I’m feeling better now. Safe travels to you wherever you’re headed.”

I don’t remember requesting an Uber back down the mountain but I must have gone on automatic pilot because ten minutes later an old Jeep Cherokee pulled up with a small, black decal on the window. “Kate, doing to the train station?” the driver asked, “let me help you with your bag.”

The driver introduced himself as Tyler, and said he was just coming off the night shift at the lodge. “Between you and me, I’m beat,” he said, “I think I’ll let one of the only drivers have the fares today and get some sleep, but I’m happy to run you down the mountain since I’m going that way myself.”

The trip down the mountain was a blur. I mumbled my thanks at the Amtrak station and it felt like I didn’t breathe until the train was speeding past Jackson. An hour down the line, I checked my credit card and this time I was relieved at what I saw – Tyler had charged me $14 plus tip for the ride down the mountain.

I went back to work at the community college that Monday but I left at the end of the semester. I moved back home, to the other side of Chapel Mountain. I don’t teach anymore. I write history term papers for rich kids for one of those sites that brag they get professors to do the work. I’m not proud of it, but I’m earning double what I did for adjuncting. I haven’t been back to the lodge, even though it’s just an hour and a half from me. There’s a class action lawsuit against the owners, now, for wage-theft. It seems that the managers hadn’t paid anyone for overtime despite working some housekeepers and cooks fifty hours a week. The brother-in-law of one of the porters happened to be an employment lawyer and organized the suit on behalf of employees. In the meantime, some of the employees are on strike. I sent their GoFundMe my last check from the community college.

Sarah is named in the suit, incidentally, or at least her estate is. The lawyers are using her accident as evidence of the managers’ unscrupulous labor practices. Sarah had requested off the day she died citing extreme fatigue, but the managers told her that her position didn’t come with any sick days and wrote her up for even asking. A few good-intentioned politicians picked up on the story and are using it to challenge the state’s right-to-work laws but it doesn’t look like they’ll be successful.

I’m finding my way now but I went through a bad patch when I first moved home — almost ended up in the hospital after I drank too much one night and vomited my guts out. Fortunately, even shitfaced me remembered that writing essays for rich kids doesn’t come with health insurance and I didn’t call an ambulance. Woke up without the slightest hangover the next day, though, and promised myself I wouldn’t waste my second chance.

For some reason, though, I can’t bring myself to turn on the heater in my car, despite the plummeting temperatures. I guess I just don’t feel the cold anymore.

Experimental journalism project Report for America announces Appalachian pilot program

Report for America, an experimental project supported by GroundTruth and Google News Lab, announced today the creation of a pilot program to recruit and install “top, emerging” journalists in “rural Appalachia.” First conceptualized in 2015 and billed as a “a new model for saving local journalism” that borrows from “national and community service programs,” Report for America is currently accepting applications for three positions with West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and the Kentucky Herald-Leader respectively, with the latter announcing a complimentary plan to re-open a reporting bureau in Pikeville.

As a centralized national organization eventually supporting journalists across the country, Report for America will subsidize the cost of recruiting and training journalists with the expectation that these journalists commit to a period of service of at least two years (one year for the pilot program) in an under-served area. Local employment partners are responsible for kicking in a smaller percentage of the wage-subsidy as well as supervising daily assignments and contributing to the cultural literacy of a new generation of journalists.

Sponsors present Report for America as an antidote to parachute journalism, one that will give local newsrooms better control of regional coverage and in the process help restore “trust in journalism at a time when it is in deep crisis,” according to GroundTruth CEO Charles Sennott. It’s clear that there’s an urgent need to collapse the divide in local and national reporting on Appalachia. When the Columbia Journalism Review reported in July 2017 that not a single outside journalist attended the West Virginia-based New Story 2017 media conference despite persistent outreach, the snub surprised few here. I’m happy to acknowledge that Report for America has correctly diagnosed a problem, but the larger question is whether or not their planned solutions are as original and sustainable as presented.

Let me make a disclaimer that I’m not a journalist and when I examine the context for this project I do so as a historian familiar with the longer arc of experimental programs and service projects in Appalachia. That said, the questions raised by Report for America are relevant to my field as well. Report for America uses Teach for America and Americorps as models for compensation and service and both projects have impacted the shape of work in cultural and education sectors in significant ways.

Although Report for America exists solely in the private sector (regional coverage of the announcement highlighted the financial support of Kentuckian L. Thomas Galloway’s Galloway Family Foundation), it shares in common with TFA and Americorps a stated commitment to the public good and prioritizes leveraging candidates into entry-level positions complimentary to an ethos to train-up the next generation of professionals. Applications to join Report for America’s pilot program are also open to individuals currently living in Appalachia and those successful can expect a salary commensurate with entry-level wages at their employment partner.

My local colleagues here and in the Rust Belt have long predicted a program like Report for America, not because such a program is necessary but because it’s a natural outgrowth of the logic that fuels a lot of experimentation in Appalachia – that enticing “emerging talent” to the region through philanthropy or corporate incentives will revitalize our stagnant economy, industries, or range of cultural products. It centers often imaginary or self-created labor shortages (many stemming from already weak pay) as justification for intervention. This logic contains promises to elevate compliant and welcoming locals. And, reflecting a more recent turn in Appalachian problem solving, presents neoliberal strategies as benevolent and infused with deep civic and moral purpose.

Not too long ago when I hit stumbling blocks in my employment search in Appalachia I turned to Americorps and found many partners in the region willing to take me on if I could support myself on $10,000 per year – the average stipend for a service year. One partner was a heritage organization dedicated to telling the stories of Appalachia’s labor uprisings. The price of my entry into a world that utilized my training to celebrate the dignity of labor in the past was my own exploited labor in the present. These are the kind of perverse situations that occur when neglected sectors must or choose to rely on subsidized workers. Common too in the region are stories of veteran teachers displaced by cheaper Teach for America recruits who help coast local school districts through budget crises, union disputes, and school board elections.

The Americorps-driven wage depression in Appalachia in my field still forms a dysfunctional barometer of the value of my labor, even in my own assessments. I am currently self-employed as a writer and consultant and often have to stop myself from believing that if I make over $10,000 a year then I’ve been successful. That’s fucked up, and yet when a powerful organization tells you that’s your maximum worth to both the federal government and your local community it’s difficult to operate differently.

GroundTruth’s Executive Editor Kevin Grant assured me on Twitter that the Report for America team is mindful of these pitfalls – and to be fair, the dimensions of the project are still developing. Few people in Appalachia can make a living as a writer or a journalist – I certainly don’t – and the national media frequently snubs regional reporting at the expense struggling news outlets and freelancers. These are dilemmas that Report for America aims to solve or at least mitigate through the alchemy of fresh talent, dynamic local/national partnerships, and a healthy chunk of private funding beyond imagining to most who live and work here.

It’s not surprising that my circle is guarded toward the project, but Report for America has boosters even in that narrow context. Much of this optimism, however, stems from a place of conceding that it’s hard to image how our range of options in Appalachia and the quality of our narrative could get worse. This kind of cynical optimism is well-earned and practical. Many of us are still recovering from an election season fatigued by serving as a hotline for established national reporters on the Trump Country beat and it’s not hard to give explicit promises to do better more than their fair share of weight in trust.

But whatever it might achieve, the existence of Report for America reminds us what a hard road it will be to see the solutions to our region’s precariousness decoupled from the industries that helped create it. The national media has profited for more than a hundred and fifty years from bitter narratives of Appalachia, although there have been many welcome individual exceptions to that trend. The media once treated us as nothing more than a third world nation within the heart of America, and while explicit associations with that argument have fallen out of fashion, it’s still remarkably easy to see the imprint of that colonialist logic not only in the stories it tells but also in the relationships it wants to have with the people who live here.

Report for America doesn’t annihilate the possibilities for other local creative projects (imagine a Higher Ground Theater project or Appalshop in every Appalachian region), but it does underscore us how far we are from their realization. It reminds us that you’re not somebody until Google wants to fix you or when toxic politics compel your region to the national spotlight. Perhaps that’s an unfair burden to place on a nascent project, but I’m sure that organizers who enjoy a living wage in their desired field and the creative support of wealthy donors can withstand such criticism.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia now available to pre-order!

[image error]My book taking on Trump Country narratives, J.D. Vance, and the amnesia surrounding Appalachia’s progressive side is now available to pre-order through the wonderful folks at Belt. Place your order before November and you’ll automatically receive a signed copy. Details here, including contact for advance copies, media requests, and larger distribution orders.

No, Laurie Lin, I did not get Trump elected by talking about white nationalism in Appalachia

Earlier last week, I made a series of tweets about white nationalism in Appalachia. It’s been almost a month since white nationalists rallied in Pikeville, Kentucky and while media coverage of the event was significant it was also understandably superficial given the frequency with which such things are now happening. Take a look at the coverage of the event, and you’ll find many individuals in the region asking, with pain, “Why are people like this targeting us?” To be sure, one answer lies in our current political moment and the region’s demographics, but there’s another answer to be found in how Appalachia fits into the white nationalist worldview. The tweets I made briefly explain this, using both recent and older examples of white nationalist ideology. The very short version is that, for some white nationalists, Appalachia is a source, or should be a source, of uncontaminated white heritage. In order to forward that belief, white nationalists often cite an exaggeration of the cultural and genetic dominance of the Scots-Irish in Appalachia. The quote I used to begin my series of tweets, for example, shows a white nationalist group proclaiming “Appalachia is White, Scots-Irish and proud, don’t run from your heritage, celebrate it!” last month. If you feel up to it, take a stroll through the online world of white nationalists and you’ll find plenty of distillations of this particular brand of ethno-nationalism.

To my surprise, the West Virginia Public Radio show Front Porch used my tweets, or more correctly, truncated versions of my tweets in their own discussion of white nationalism. In abbreviating my remarks, co-host Laurie Lin removed the white nationalist quotes that I supplied and did not make any attempt to reference or summarize them in her own comments. The reason that this was likely so became clear when she commented, “…I hate to be that person who says this is what got you Trump, but this is the kind of thing that gets you Trump, when liberals say ‘you guys shouldn’t celebrate your ethnicity because it’s somehow helping…you’re not white nationalists but you’re aiding and abetting white nationalists. I don’t think anyone says that Appalachia is only Scots-Irish…” To be clear, Laurie Lin claimed that no one says such things about ethnicity in Appalachia while quoting a tweet I made that contained verifiable evidence of white nationalists saying that exact thing. My remarks, therefore, were presented as untrue and vague despite the fact that Laurie Lin had to be staring directly at their proof in order to read my work on air. She then exploited the ambiguity that she created in order to make a tired, stale point about political correctness gone mad. The program ends its segment with a discussion of the multi-racial and multi-ethnic dimensions of Appalachia, as if I did not make precisely the same point in my remarks, and indeed, the entire body of my recent work.

As an individual who often writes about race, I am no stranger to the point-scoring against imaginary liberals that Lin attempts. But the Front Porch crew would do well to consider why they need it to be true that a fact-checked discussion of white nationalism is somehow more responsible for our current political moment than, say, individuals who actually voted for Trump or the white nationalists quoted that called my comments into being. They would also do well to consider why their co-host deemed the words of white nationalists explaining their decision to rally irrelevant to a segment about white nationalism that no one forced them to do.

In my forthcoming book, I have a longer discussion of how individuals in Appalachia negotiate  their relationships with “outsiders.” This is an appropriate framework when citing economic conditions but falls short in acknowledging our complicity in toxic attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, and religion that are found here. To be clear, that complicity doesn’t look like ordinary white individuals taking an interest in their heritage, but it does include examples similar to the Front Porch’s discussion of the white nationalist rally in Kentucky, in which they locate imaginary liberals like me and Black organizations long disbanded as bad actors while intentionally omitting a bit of disturbing ideology conveniently supplied for context.

To be transparent, I expressed my concerns to the show’s producer about their manipulated use of my remarks and I was offered a chance to appear on the show to “continue to conversation.” Strangely, I do not feel inclined to engage in conversation with individuals who insinuated that I was to blame for Trump’s victory on the basis of views I did not express and a political alignment I do not hold. For everyone else, I am quite easy to contact and am always happy to discuss these subjects, because they are important to me and, in my view, are important to the health of the region as well.

On the politics of emotions in coal country

Over at Slate this week, science editor Susan Matthews takes New York Times daily podcast host Michael Barbaro to task for choking up during an interview segment with a retired coal miner from Kentucky. Coal country is back in the news with feeling this week after Trump signed an executive order to dismantle much of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Although this new order affects environmental standards nation-wide, much of the focus both from the White House and national media has been on Appalachia’s coal industry. I discussed this development with WNYC’s On the Media program here. With a similar intent, the New York Times selected a voice from Appalachia for its segment and included a former coal miner from Harlan, Kentucky, on their program. During the interview, Barbaro’s voice breaks several times with emotion after questions turn from environmental regulations and politics to the realities of coal mining and life in coal communities. For Matthews, this is irresponsible and unethical journalism. I’m certainly interested in Barbaro’s reaction, but it’s Matthews’ reflection on this segment that troubles me.

According to Matthews, “it’s a miraculous 10 minutes of radio, ending with Barbaro crying while he realizes he doesn’t really understand coal country at all, and perhaps if he just visited a mine he would have an entirely different perspective on the situation.” Matthews faults Barbaro for not challenging his subject’s views on the coal industry more forcefully, finding his line of questioning and emotional response not only dangerous but ultimately cruel for “allowing” the miner to believe his myths about the promise of better days. “I’m sorry, but what can living in a coal town teach you about whether coal is actually damaging to the atmosphere?” she asks as a means to de-legitimize the tone and content of the interview.

Matthews’ piece omits two key facts about the interview. The first is that Barbaro’s 10-minute segment with a miner was prefaced by a thorough conversation with an industry expert reporting on the overall financial health of the coal industry, the larger ebb and flow of energy markets, and Trump’s recent executive order. The second and most heinous omission is that Barbaro’s subject was suffering from Stage 3 Black Lung, a condition that I presume made the interview difficult on a number of levels. The interview is punctuated by moments where the miner has difficulty breathing and providing longer responses and the pair discuss the condition, although the miner is reluctant to dwell on the fact that he is critically ill. In short, broadcast of flawed beliefs aside, Matthews is shaming a reporter for displaying emotion during an interview with a man who has a terminal and very obviously debilitating illness without mentioning that fact.

But let’s return to those flawed beliefs. The miner is a Trump voter and proudly so, and is a believer in both narratives about “the war on coal” and related promises to revive the coal industry in Appalachia through de-regulation. In short, the miner’s thoughts are consistent with Trump’s public position on this matter and I’m comfortable agreeing that both are unrealistic. The miner is warm and excited to be interviewed, but resolute in his opinion that over-regulation killed an industry that is otherwise profitable and not unreasonably dangerous, both to individuals and the environment. Barbaro is perplexed by this and we can understand why – an individual whose life will be cut short by an industrial illness appears to be disregarding the consequences even to his own health. Barbaro is not accustomed to interviewing people who regard their health and labor in such stark ways and the shift in tone is obvious. The miner states clearly he’d choose mine work again even knowing he’d develop Black Lung because it let him provide for his family. He asks Barbaro why he doesn’t just visit Kentucky and look at coal country for himself. “Kentucky isn’t so far away,” he chuckles, and Barbaro loses his resolve.

On a broad level, Matthews’ frustrations are earned. Our political conversations are too often driven by unproductive debates about what we should think or feel about individual Trump supporters and their preferred outcomes. Barbaro’s interview, and his emotional response, tips the scale toward empathy, or at least understanding. Barbaro acknowledges that he’s never visited coal country and might well have a different outlook if his background or knowledge base was different. This satisfies the miner, who finds it odd that individuals outside the region have such strong beliefs about what its people and industries do right or wrong. But ultimately, Matthews’ only gives the pendulum a big push in the opposite direction by arguing that it’s a mistake to allow voices such as the miner’s out into the wider world and manipulates context that provides important background.

To return to this presumption that Matthews’ finds especially irritating – that a coal town could teach us anything about the dangers of coal to the atmosphere – let me offer a suggestion. And that is to find any number of environmental experts that live and work in coal towns that approach these issues through accepted science and offer them your platform. I think, for example, that it would be informative to hear or read the discussion that could take place between miners-turned-environmentalist and active or retired miners, and Nick Mullins’ work comes immediately to mind. The reluctance to see those inside the region as anything other than passive subjects results in the frustrations Matthews’ expresses, although she participates in it herself by preaching behavior modification – casting local and scientific beliefs as incompatible, referring to the cruelty of our ignorance – instead of alternative perspectives. But by branching out, it would mean accepting that Kentucky isn’t so far away, especially as a warning of what’s to come.

There’s a better life and you dream about it, don’t you?

Despite the absence of posts here, I’ve been working 9-to-5. I wanted to round-up a few links to my writing and share from the responses, but first let me quickly say we’re in countdown mode to wrapping up things here and heading home. This is great news.

I got back into the swing of things after the New Year with a piece for Belt Magazine, “To the Rust Belt, Solidarity from Appalachia.” The Women’s March on Washington inspired sister marches throughout the world and I reflected on those that took place in Appalachia while wondering if these acts of solidarity might be enough to turn the narrative tide about Trump Country. Unfortunately, based on the pieces I’m about to link, this was wishful thinking.

I took a break to attend the Appalachian Studies Conference in Blacksburg, Virginia, but came back with an essay about the political uses of whiteness in Appalachia for the 100 Days in Appalachia Project, a multimedia catalogue of how the region is responding during Trump’s first 100 days in office. Appalachia is often coded as “all-white” despite increasing regional diversity. I ask why that myth persists and how it serves historic and contemporary politics.

Finally, I published two responses to a number of recent high-profile articles written by progressive condemning West Virginians, specifically, and “hillbillies” more generally. These reached a wider audience and came with a wider range of responses, and I’d like to highlight a very typical response I’ve received. But first, my longer essays are here in Belt Magazine and here in Salon. Both, although different, raise a question that runs through a lot of my writing: why are progressives outside the region obsessive about Trump voters in coal country when there are more significantly populated Trump enclaves in their backyards?

In disputing the answers I give in these essays, folks often raise this point, although in sometimes less polite ways. Below, from a Twitter exchange.

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This point – that the electoral college vote is supreme – is not technically incorrect. But, my work is premised on a very simple push-back: if you are acting in good faith, it’s more righteous to hold individuals accountable for their racism and other harmful attitudes than the design of the electoral college. If my neighbor is a bigot and is starved out of civic engagement according to progressive hillbilly divorce fantasies, what does he become when he moves to New York and is your neighbor? It is even possible to develop an outlook that does both. In other words, it is appropriate to grant individuals their specific weight in the body politic while conceding that none of us are weightless. Skewed pieces about Appalachia written by media elites often do none of these things and, of course, I often write about why.