What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

There’s a phenomenon that occurs in Appalachia in which writers and other creatives who anchor their work in ideas about the unique genetic or cultural qualities of Appalachians also harbor close associations with eugenicists.

It turns out that if you create and sell a version of Appalachia as a place filled with defective people, eugenicists start paying attention to your work.

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.

These less evolved individuals, the experts argued, could only be saved through the intervention of outsiders.

The ghosts of Henry and Sherman would like you to know that they were not eugenicists. That really doesn’t matter, however, because eugenicists loved their work, filled as it was with lurid descriptions of white mountaineers’ degraded “pioneer stock.”

in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”

Curiously, the mountaineers identified by both Rothstein and the authors of Hollow Folk as the most degenerate lived in the area of the Shenandoah Valley closest to developed areas of the future national park, where wealthy businessmen hoped to accelerate evictions to begin the expansion and new construction of vacation resorts.

“After the survey is done, we’ll Colonize the worst of the bunch”—a sinister play on the eugenics institution’s abbreviated name.

He was, in other words, an artist of his time, and the residents of Corbin Hollow decorated their home with his art because, contrary to belief, they were people of their time as well.

His essay, “A Long Trail of Misery Winds the Proud Hills,” hinted at what would become a decidedly Cold War-era twist on long-standing narratives of Appalachian otherness: Appalachia as a third world within the heart of America.

The press embraced Caudill, much like Vance, because he could be both of the people and above the people.

Hillbillies had wasted taxpayer money, a cardinal sin that placed them in the ranks of the undeserving poor, an often racialized category that nevertheless has always welcomed white individuals thought to be, as Caudill once said, the “dregs” of society.

Imagine what it feels like to understand that if someone decides to purchase a book about Appalachia, there’s a 100 percent chance they’ll be recommended not one but two books used by their authors to win the esteem of white supremacists and eugenicists.

I don’t want anything that Vance could ever give the region, which works out, because he’s far more interested in taking.

I don’t give a damn about geography, but I’ll note that 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.

Members of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People described parts of eastern Kentucky in the late 1960s as a war zone where armed residents faced off daily against coal operators.

What the War on Poverty did was come to communities to rebuild roads. 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.

“A community action group would consist of low income citizens organized together to identify their problems and work toward possible solutions,” he explained. “I feel it is necessary that we take our time and build an organization that involves the poor in the decisions as to what types of programs they want, rather than sit down and write up what we think they want.”

In other words, the Highlander Research and Education Center still focuses on Appalachian issues because the fight for racial, environmental, and labor justice—wherever it takes place—is always our fight as well.

The lives and deaths of men like Cadle provided the fuel to process and transport food. As he stared into the store, he often thought, “We worked to make all that good food, yet there’s a piece of glass between us.” When I am asked who or what Appalachia is, I think of that piece of glass. I think of sides and boundaries and both the horror and solidarity of knowing one’s place.

After the mines closed, the prisons came.

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

“You are Letcher County, Kentucky. You are rural, mountainous, and in the heart of the central Appalachian coalfields. Your economy is not in good shape. Fox News has called your town ‘the poster child for the war on coal.’ You are offered funds to build a new federal prison. It could bring jobs but also brings up troubling moral issues. What do you do?” asked Benny Becker from WMMT.

But there are fifteen prisons within a one-hundred-mile radius and local economies have not been transformed. Local labor fills the lowest paid positions, offering starting salaries of just $16,000 to $24,000 a year. Transferred employees with seniority take the better compensated roles, but in anticipation of their next transfer, they are reluctant to purchase homes or put down roots in the community.

In some rural prison communities, only 10 to 20 percent of the workers, who all have to pass stringent background and credit checks, are local. Most of the counties that house prisons remain among the poorest parts of the state.

many rightly call a tool of the new Jim Crow.

Give Michelle credit where it is due. Not 'many' called the PIC the New Jim Crow. Michelle Alexander popularized this and deserves a name drop.

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.

It is no coincidence that the rate of mountaintop removal rose in tandem with increased hostility to organized labor in West Virginia in the 1980s.

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.

And once again, West Virginia’s coal companies reacted with their peculiar brand of hysteria to what they perceived to be an assault on their fundamental right to own not only the land and its resources, but also the region’s history.

There’s a particular form of coal industry math in which jobs that have never existed are perpetually taken away.

It defined the region’s long history of destruction in the name of capitalism as a form of colonialism. It also understood the use of stereotypes and myths as an extension of colonization. The “internal colony” model gave many Appalachians, for the first time, a tool for understanding the region’s web of exploitation, from the stories of local color writers in the early nineteenth century to the corruption that fueled the domination of the coal industry in the twentieth.

Barbara Smith and Steve Fisher wrote that the emotional power of the “internal colony” model helped students of Appalachia better situate the logic of “place-based exploitation…with cultural degradation” and work against it.

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

The use of a colony model to understand modern Appalachia elides the region’s history of indigenous colonization and the continued marginalization of Native American individuals both within Appalachia and the wider United States.

In rare moments when intellectuals praise Appalachia, and more often in moments when we praise ourselves, even those of us who are white are endowed with indigenous cultural traits. We are keepers and stewards of the land, for example, fighting the encroachment of destructive forces. For some, this cultural identity fosters solidarity between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Appalachia.

It risks excusing us from the responsibility of imagining how we in the region might be complicit in structural inequality and oppression.

“Homophobia lurks in the hollers and slithers along the ridges in Appalachia. The reason why is because Appalachia is in America. What is happening here is happening throughout the rest of the country.”

people are often blindly classist while remaining self-congratulatory about their other progressive credentials.

For us, however, this burden manifests in calls for migration and the de-population of our home, an exodus of sacrifice that must be performed in order to prove that we are not the people you think we are. 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.

Five years after the spill, only Tommy Charles and his wife were left in his neighborhood. He cried when reporters came to ask him why he didn’t leave. At the age of seventy-four, he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

When I traveled to give academic talks or to interview for other positions, I became convinced that the smell of refineries followed me, on my clothes, and would reveal my true identity: someone not important enough to not be poisoned.

In Appalachia, coal isn’t just coal. It’s the blackest part of a constellation of knowledge that tells us it is easier in our world to bury a person alive than lift her up.

Or it might be the bright purple of ironweed that Judy Bond pointed out to visiting reporters after her love for another ruined mountain earned her the Goldman Prize for environmental activism. “They say they’re a symbol of Appalachian women,” she said, “They’re pretty. And their roots run deep. It’s hard to move them.”

Pancake, Ann. Strange as This Weather Has Been. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.