What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

Appalachia’s vote most assuredly helped Trump’s victory, but so did votes in Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

In the 2016 presidential election, McDowell County gave Donald Trump 4,614 votes and Hillary Clinton 1,429. The election rolls indicate

that there are 17,508 registered voters in the county, although the actual number in circulation is likely lower. Nevertheless, Trump won McDowell County during an election that had a historically low voter turnout for the county. If we use reported numbers we find that only 27 percent of McDowell County voters supported Trump.

“I didn’t vote in this election. I see no meaning of this. Whoever goes to the White House will do whatever he/she wants to do and won’t give a damn about us,” he told the Huffington Post.

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

Many things about Appalachia may be true simultaneously.

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.

What becomes of people, Barret’s documentary asks, when they become a wellspring for the nation’s pity or disgust?

To be Appalachian was to be heir to a distinct kind of wretchedness, endlessly performed before an international audience. This created layers of shame in communities like Jeremiah. The more well-to-do often came to resent the poor for acting as the enticement for those with greedy cameras. “

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

“The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, ‘In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. The family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.’”

“This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many

good traits—an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country—but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or most important, how they talk.” This

The first thing we should pull apart is that there’s really no such thing as “Greater Appalachia,”

Starting in the 1980s, Civil War historians Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald pioneered the “Celtic thesis,” which argued on the basis of remedial research that more than half of white Southerners, prior to the Civil War, were of Celtic stock. Because of this, the thesis suggests, the Civil War might be best understood not as a rejection of slavery, but as a clash of white ethnicities as Anglo-Saxon elites in the North attempted to forcibly impose their worldview on a largely Celtic South.

Scots-Irish heritage is real, but the exaggerated dominance of its influence

Reformers, photographers, the press, and politicians flocked to Appalachia to find the form of poverty they needed and wanted to see. The

One reason is that 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. Hillbillies had wasted taxpayer money, a cardinal sin that placed them in the ranks of the undeserving

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.

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.

that outside corporations owned the majority of the region’s mineral rights and almost half its surface land. The study also found that the property taxes of non-corporate land owners were offsetting the taxes on land owned by corporations. In one county, for example, corporations that owned 70 percent of the land contributed just 4 percent

of the county’s property tax stream. Not surprisingly, communities where such a stark imbalance existed experienced sharp declines in quality of life.