What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

If we were destined to be poisoned by corporations and deprived of civil liberties by corrupt politicians, better the devil we knew, we reasoned.

You might think our biggest export is coal but it’s actually people.

Private businesses and out-of-state landowners do not carry anything close to an equitable local tax burden, making it impossible for communities to survive, let alone thrive.

Political corruption flourished in the coal fields. In West Virginia, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin made $50,000 a year in his prime in kickbacks from the Logan County Coal Operators Association.

Many assembled wore red bandanas around their neck, the only insignia available, leading their enemies to call them “rednecks.”

The people of Appalachia have never needed empathy; what we need is solidarity, real and true, which comes from understanding that the harm done to me is connected to the harm done to you.

“we will not change or convert folks without extending the forgiveness…that is essential for the building of communities of solidarity.”

While reading Greek poetry, my professors warned us to be careful of the double meaning of elegies; they were, it seems, often written as political propaganda.

“A camera is like a gun,” he explains, “It’s threatening. It’s invasive; it is exploitative…and it’s not always true.”

His use of the world “we” transforms the personal reality of his difficult childhood into a universal experience.

The broadest point made by Elegy on the basis of this experience is that “public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”

The argument that corporations did not help create the problems of Appalachia is stunningly ahistorical, but not even the ...

But perhaps it is wise to consider if this humility is just a strategy.

While bemoaning our basic cognition, he takes liberties with his own by refusing to acknowledge that not all West Virginians or coal miners are white.

The 1920s and 1930s became a critical decade in the construction of the “mountain white,” a peculiar specimen thought to stubbornly resist social and even genetic progress.

The government justified its actions in the name of progress and leveraged the consolidated power of the federal government to modernize the rural poor by force if necessary.

“In the last year we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip Van Winkle, to the fact that massive poverty exists.” The extent of poverty, Macdonald commented, “is difficult to believe in the United States of 1963, but one has to make an effort, and it is now being made.”

Both Caudill and Vance set themselves to the task of drawing the nation’s attention away from social unrest and racial inequality at a particular moment in time and refocusing it instead on the conditions of white poverty.

These images worked, much like Elegy works today, by offering middle-class white viewers a glimpse into a world that feels both familiar and alien. This world unburdens the white viewer from the fatigue of thinking critically about race, a mercy expressed in Elegy in its dismissal of the “racial prism.”

white Appalachians became persona non grata after the War on Poverty failed. The nation began to see them as individuals who had absorbed an unprecedented amount of federal aid and done nothing with it except continue to be poor.

There are many authors who have written about the people and problems of Appalachia and similar environments who don’t have eugenicists for pen-pals and mentors. Some of them even anchor frank discussions of social problems within moving personal stories.

we’re told to be grateful that Vance has returned Appalachia to the nation’s conscience. But I don’t want Appalachia to be used as a siphon to suck attention away from LGBTQ politics and Black Lives Matter, movements that also flourish here. I don’t want to lose race in discussions of class. I don’t want to keep talking about “brain drain” when millions of smart, capable, and good people still call the region home. I don’t want anything that Vance could ever give the region, which works out, because he’s far more interested in taking.

Vance has transcended one of the most authentically Appalachian experiences of them all: watching someone with tired ideas about race and culture get famous by selling cheap stereotypes about the region.

To the National Review, Appalachia is the “white ghetto,” a place filled with “the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted.” To me, Appalachia is a battleground, where industry barons, social reformers, and workers wage a constant war that is passed down through generations, often reflecting inherited struggles that feel repeated and never-ending.

What the War on Poverty didn’t do was help poor people deal with the fact that they lived in a world where those who hoarded wealth would rather see them starve than share.

“In old England,” one of Perry’s staff commented, “if a king didn’t like you, he would cut off your head. Now if they don’t like you, they’ll cut off your project!”

Mingo’s political establishment hoped it could do what elected officials and businessmen in neighboring McDowell County had done, which was to siphon off federal funding—as much as two million dollars—and use it for their own purposes, most often to buy votes or sweeten business arrangements to ensure patronage. When people ask, “Why do Appalachians always vote against their own interests?” here we see that, historically, a very compelling and simple answer to that question was voter fraud.

This, too, is Appalachia. Appalachia is images of strikes and strife and land hollowed out for coal, but it is also images of joy and freedom.

Like many Appalachians, she saw the War on Poverty pass the most desperate Appalachians by. Access to basic healthcare was, as it is today, a life or death issue in rural communities.

The most profound example I can give you of how the past, present, and future collide in Appalachia is to tell you about the prison industry here, and about the individuals who fight it. After the mines closed, the prisons came.

In the prison industrial complex, inmates are commodities. They are bought and sold and transferred according to the cost of beds and the cost of land and the cost of the labor required to imprison them.

Central Appalachia would soon become one of the most concentrated areas of prison growth in the country.

The two artists also created a documentary about the prisons produced by Appalshop, 2006’s Up the Ridge, which examines the prison industrial complex in a local, national, and global context.

anti-capitalists, a tradition that has a long history in Appalachia.

“Why have you voted against your own interests?” This question only seems relevant if you believe that individuals who were convinced to dismantle mountains can’t also be convinced to vote for outcomes beneficial to their employers.

The theory, quite accurately, presented unchecked capitalism as the root of Appalachia’s problems.

the region’s uneven distribution of wealth and resources is a significant obstacle in efforts to address Appalachian poverty.

One of the most insidious manifestations of this attitude is the belief that people could escape the problems of the region if they would just move.

To leave is to demonstrate our ambition, to be something other than dependent and stubborn.

To leave is to be productive rather than complacent, and to refuse is to be complicit.