What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

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.

It’s a strange experience to be grilled about the social decline of “your people” less than five hundred yards from a refinery that gives poor African Americans cancer, but that is what happened to us.

extraordinary and singular pathologies of Appalachians,

There’s not a single social problem in Appalachia, however, that can’t be found elsewhere in our country.

According to the bulk of coverage about the region in the wake of Trump’s election and the success of Hillbilly Elegy, currently at fifty weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, I do not exist. My partner does not exist. Our families do not exist. Other individuals who do not exist include all nonwhite people, anyone with progressive politics, those who care about the environment, LGBTQ individuals, young folks, and a host of others who resemble the type of people you’ll meet in this volume. The intentional omission of these voices fits a long tradition of casting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America.”

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

One of its first tasks was to grade each county thought to be Appalachian on a scale of economic distress in order to administer federal aid efficiently. By its design, the region came to be defined by poverty, and subsequently poverty came to be defined by the region.

Appalachia is nothing if not messily defined.

It is important to understand that whatever “Appalachian” is, it should first be seen as a flexible regional identity that has nothing to do with ethnicity.

The real forgotten working-class citizens of Appalachia, much like the rest of the nation, are home health workers and Dollar General employees. They’re more likely to be women, and their exemption from the stability offered by middle-class employment is not a recent phenomenon.

“Writers and their readers play into political arguments that simplify Appalachia as a region that absorbs large amounts of government aid but gives back little, making it easier to condemn the people who live there.”

Narratives of dependency conceal the uneven distribution of wealth that haunts Appalachia and indeed, much of the nation.

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.

Many Appalachians are poor, but their poverty has a deep and coherent history rooted in economic exploitation. The coal industry is no longer a significant employment sector in Appalachia, but the dominance of coal’s extractive logic has permanently ruined people and land in ways with which we must still contend.

For liberal political commentators there were no wealthy donors, white suburban evangelicals, or insular Floridian retirees responsible for Trump’s victory, only hillbillies. This time, however, there would be no dignity in death. A month into his presidency, Trump appointed Wilbur Ross, the former owner of the Sago Mine, as his secretary of commerce. Some pundits and commenters applauded the decision for its awful symmetry.

“You have never heard people speak so fondly, so intimately about hot dogs,”

Political candidates committed to labor and environmental issues don’t often fare well in West Virginia, not because they’re unpopular with the electorate but because pro-business moderates from both parties invest in their failure.

People didn’t “do their best” to keep the nation’s lights on; they died.

Pundits previously content to cast an entire region as universally white and poor now demanded the absolution of nuance for themselves.

What these pieces lack, however, is an acknowledgment that this dynamic fits a longstanding pattern of “expert” analysis of Appalachia. Appalachians are the subjects of the “Trump Country” genre, not its creators. Indeed, the primary factor determining expertise in this and other eras is social and geographic distance from Appalachia.

Appalachia is real, but it exists in our cultural imagination as a mythical place where uncomfortable truths become projected and compartmentalized.

if you trace a flawed narrative about Appalachia back far enough, you’ll often find someone making a profit.

“It is a race for the prize.”

Coal companies often justified their expansion and the recruitment of local populations into their workforce as benevolent actions that would bring backward mountaineers into their own as equal participants in America’s expanding spirit of industry.

these outcomes and their justifications formed a “secondary vision of Appalachia as an area in need of assistance from outside agencies.” Experts, he continued, “insisted vigorously on the vision of Appalachian ‘otherness’…and their discussions on the nature and meaning of Appalachian otherness were rarely made with reference to the real conditions of mountain life or the normal complexity of social and economic conditions which prevailed in the mountains as in every other section of the nation.”

Appalachians were not uncivilized in the way that intellectuals imagined them to be, and the symptoms of their “backwardness”—favoring different religious practices, for example—did not constitute pressing social issues.

Would love to know more about the religious practices referened. I have never heard discussions of non-Christian practices in the region. Or is itjust non-traditional Christian practices?

In order to reconcile these irreconcilable Americas, Appalachian “otherness” became a form of deviance.

outsiders “defined Appalachia as a discrete region and the mountaineers as a distinct people, and responded to abstract dilemmas which this ‘fact’ seemed to pose...

For industrialists, the national perception of Appalachia as a blighted and unnatural place aided their economic expansion.

Academics also offered their analysis of Appalachia’s primitive culture by dissecting the Hatfield-McCoy spectacle.

Need to search for works on academia and Appalachia

Today, Appalachians are free to profit off the feud through tourism, but only if we present it through the most clichéd of regional hillbilly stereotypes.

If Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose, these theories suggested, then they might be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence. This was music to the ears of developers, who justified economic expansion by contending that modern employment would bring order and harmony to the mountains and save mountaineers from their own worst impulses in the process.

Many industrialists felt little responsibility to their workforce, often believing that their social assistance would encourage an undesirable overpopulation of the lower classes.

Inklings of eugenic ideology? Edit: looking back at this later. The answer is yes.

Coal barons credited their industry with bringing order and harmony to an uncivilized place, but what actually came to the mountains was a vast system of economic exploitation, facilitated through violence and malice by both outside developers and compliant local elites.

Mary “Mother” Jones, who cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World, said of West Virginia, “The story of coal is always the same. It is a dark story. For a second’s more sunlight, men must fight like tigers. For the privilege of seeing the color of their children’s eyes by the light of the sun, fathers must fight as beasts of the jungle.”

the history of the people, in Holt’s view, did not include the mine wars, labor agitation, or industrialists murdering Black workers with impunity through silicosis. Mother Jones never came to West Virginia, Blair Mountain never happened, and coal camps were as clean as a pin and populated only by whites.

Chief among them is the tendency of those in power to represent rank-and-file Appalachians as helpless and in need of intervention to earn their place in the story of American progress.

The use of the phrase “the America” to set Appalachia apart from the places inhabited by the article’s presumed audience is telling; Appalachians, of course, don’t need an invitation from flagship outlets to take a look at their surroundings.

Many things about Appalachia may be true simultaneously.

Constructions of the region as “all-white” to satisfy a particular fetish about the white working class maliciously erase individuals whose lives also matter.

“Ignoring or erasing stories of community organizing and coalition building makes it easier to paint Appalachians as perpetual victims of economic decline or hypocrites who receive government aid without reciprocity.”

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.

Barret examines the impact of Appalachian “poverty pictures”: images of lurid white poverty intended to shock middle-class audiences. Their creators often cited “poverty pictures” as a necessary catalyst for social change, exposing the alarming conditions of inequality in Appalachia. In reality, Barret argues, outsiders often “mined images in the way the companies mined the coal.”

The visual archive of Appalachia created in the 1960s focused exclusively on the region’s deprivation. In the process of its creation it provided the raw material for a new moral position about the lot of the poor. The belief that poverty is a character flaw—a demonstration of moral weakness—hangs over every image of a barefoot child or unemployed miner.

To be Appalachian was to be heir to a distinct kind of wretchedness, endlessly performed before an international audience.

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

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

Their review, one of the first, all but explicitly congratulated the author for at long last proving that white Appalachians have “followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.”

For many conservatives, the beauty of Elegy was not just what it said about the lot of poor white Americans, but what it implied about Black Americans as well.

The shared culture of Appalachia, he writes, is one that “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”