What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

Texas, upon hearing where we were from, everyone wanted to talk to us about a new book called Hillbilly Elegy, by a guy named J.D. Vance. The best-selling “memoir of a family and of a culture in crisis,” now set to be turned into a film by Ron Howard, had become our political moment’s favorite text for understanding the lives of disaffected Trump voters and had set “hillbillies” apart as a unique specimen of white woe.

Using the template of his harrowing childhood, Vance remakes Appalachia in his own image as a place of alarming social decline, smoldering and misplaced resentment, and poor life choices. For Vance, Appalachia’s only salvation is complete moral re-alignment coupled with the recognition that we should prioritize the economic investments of our social betters once more within the region.

There’s not a single social problem in Appalachia, however, that can’t be found elsewhere in our country. If you’re looking for racism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, addiction, unchecked capitalism, poverty, misogyny, and environmental destruction, we can deliver in spades. What a world it would be if Appalachians could contain that hate and ruin for the rest of the nation. But we can’t.

Momentum to visit and re-visit Appalachia to decode the ascendency of Trump also sustained itself through the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, and Vance’s consequent media ubiquity as chief analyzer of the white working class. The proliferation of Vance interviews featured in articles with titles such as “How hillbillies helped Trump shake politics” and “Trump: Tribune of poor white people” did little to complicate what had become an entrenched belief that Appalachia,

Many are fed up that reasonable discussions of racism among Trump’s base keep getting deflected with copies of Hillbilly Elegy. Most writers appear exhausted by relentless election re-litigation that suggests #Berniewouldhavewon by citing his popularity in red states.

There are a number of different ways to evaluate the Battle of Blair Mountain and what it meant to West Virginia and Appalachia, organized labor, and the larger body of exploited workers in the United States.

If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700,000 square miles, then we should ask a number of questions.

There are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots-Irish, so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and blackness through the lens of the election?

West Virginia has the highest concentration of transgender teenagers in the country, so why didn’t anyone examine this facet of “Trump Country” and how the election might reverberate in their lives?

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.

Outdated theories about a culture of poverty in Appalachia, honed in the 1960s, had become popular once more thanks to Hillbilly Elegy. Much like the visual archive generated during the War on Poverty, Elegy sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region.

Appalachian Studies scholar Jordan Laney recently described the experience of reading Hillbilly Elegy while preparing snippets of local color for her class.

“How did journalists and correspondents for the New York Times as well as scholars not catch these acts of generalizing and aggrandizing on behalf of elite readers?” she asks. “How did we trade in the breadth of diversity the region has to offer for one view? While reading Hillbilly Elegy I thought, here is how. This is how places and people become caricatures of themselves, ourselves.”

Men who shirk employment and women who lack the appropriate amount of shame for their illegitimate children populate the world of Elegy. Instead of attending church, the people of Elegy worship material desires beyond their means and use welfare fraud in the service of their doomed pursuits.

Vance uses an enduring myth about race in Appalachia and parts of the Rust Belt to give Hillbilly Elegy its organizational logic. It is, in essence, the magic that transforms Elegy from a memoir of a person to the memoir of a culture. Central to Elegy is Vance’s belief that both historic and modern white Appalachian people share a common ethnic ancestry in the form of Scots-Irish heritage.

This is a remarkable statement, because the only way to truly understand Hillbilly Elegy is through a racial prism, one that centers a mythical form of whiteness that has a dangerous history.

In Elegy and in Vance’s comments about Elegy’s subjects, white Appalachians take on the qualities of an oppressed minority much in the same way that conservative individuals view African Americans: as people who have suffered hardships but ultimately are only holding themselves back. This construction allows conservative intellectuals to talk around stale stereotypes of African Americans and other nonwhite individuals while holding up the exaggerated degradations of a white group thought to defy evidence of white privilege.

Is it true that white Appalachians share a common Scots-Irish heritage and does this heritage inform our social position in the modern world? The answer to both questions is an emphatic “no.” Apart from myths and legends, there is no basis for the belief that historic or contemporary white Appalachians share a distinct culture informed by their homogenous ethnic heritage. In fact, fighting that myth has been the life’s work of many Appalachian historians.

Murray, who also claims Scots-Irish ancestry, was quick to point out, “and our leading characteristics though, which I learned long before I read Hillbilly Elegy, is being drunk and violent.”

Some of them even anchor frank discussions of social problems within moving personal stories. Otis Trotter’s Keeping Heart, a memoir about growing up poor, sick, and Black in Appalachian Ohio springs to mind, as does Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the story of a dysfunctional West Virginian family and finding the courage to leave. Linda Tate, in Power in the Blood, tells of the re-discovery of her Cherokee roots, and Creeker, by Linda Scott DeRosier, is yet another memoir about coming of age in Appalachia.

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.

the Mulloys and McSurelys were indeed attempting to help poor individuals in the mountains seize power from the wealthy. In other words, they were engaging in one of the finest and oldest Appalachian traditions.

His project has introduced me to some of my favorite photographers, including Megan King, who documents Hispanic Appalachia, and Raymond Thompson, who photographs the journeys of families to visit their incarcerated relatives.

if you’re invested in arguing that Appalachians are trapped in the past—and especially if you make a name or living from it—it seems disingenuous to not find out what people in the past actually did to address poverty and inequality.

Appalachia is images of strikes and strife and land hollowed out for coal, but it is also images of joy and freedom. Our album is filled with images of people who suffered, but also people who fought.

The history of eastern Kentucky is special to me because the people of eastern Kentucky asked us a question that demanded, and still demands an answer: Which side are you on?

Hall opened the Mud Creek Health Clinic in 1973 out of a trailer in her yard. 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.

After the mines closed, the prisons came. People desperate to replace their only source of employment opened their communities and tore apart the mountains to imprison people deemed the most violent and dangerous offenders.

In the prison industrial complex, inmates are commodities.

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

Most of the counties that house prisons remain among the poorest parts of the state.

bringing prisons to rural, predominately white communities fits an established pattern of pitting poor white individuals against African American people by convincing them that their economic survival depends on supporting structures that harm and oppress.

An argument can be made that concepts such as white privilege are also used to pit poor whites against blacks in the US. It is no secret that Critical Social Justice is most championed by white elites.

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

Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia by Jack E. Weller…

Its usual duty is to act as a bookmark in my partner’s copy of Yesterday’s People, but I disturbed its slumber not long ago to scan and send it to a particularly defensive fan of Hillbilly Elegy.

To carry his burdens to the mountains and speak his regret is perhaps one of the most Appalachian things a person can do.

Few places symbolize the currents of Appalachian history like Blair Mountain. After the labor uprising there in 1921, the mountain became a direct link to the region’s radical history. It’s also a handy piece of evidence to counter people who tell you that your heritage is one of complacency.

It is understandable that, for some miners, working on the surface of a mountain is preferable to working underground. But it is also true that mountaintop removal has intensified environmental destruction while surrounding communities have become poorer as stable jobs have dwindled.

One tells the group of activists that the 1921 miners would be ashamed of them because they had taken up arms for their right to mine coal. “They fought to unionize. Do you work at a unionized mine?” an organizer corrects him, to a blank stare. A mind remained unchanged but a boulder got moved.

The “internal colony” model came courtesy of 1978’s Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case, by Helen Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins. It defined the region’s long history of destruction in the name of capitalism as a form of colonialism.

The “internal colony” model is deeply satisfying but problematic.

In one county, for example, corporations that owned 70 percent of the land contributed just 4 percent of the county’s property tax stream.

As Emily Satterwhite wrote, “The idea of Appalachia as racially distinct, rural, and premodern has served to reassure white Americans of the persistence of an indigenous white national culture.”

There is and was, for example, enormous support among Appalachian activist groups for indigenous water-protectors at Standing Rock.

You’ll often hear, in the region, variations on the belief that “hillbillies are the only group it’s still socially acceptable to belittle.” This is not the case, not by a long shot. What is true, however, is that people are often blindly classist while remaining self-congratulatory about their other progressive credentials.

The logic of exodus just shrugs its shoulders at these realities and tells us to move smarter. I decided to ignore this logic and come back home to fight smarter.

Ours is a region that makes graveyards for mountains, because companies have made our mountains into graveyards.

When the rush of questions abated, I realized that this was the first time I had looked closely at an image of Appalachia that didn’t inspire shame or pain.

Howell, Rebecca Gayle. Render. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013.

McKinney, Irene. The Six O’Clock Mine Report. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.