What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

Election season cast Appalachia as a uniquely tragic and toxic region. The press attempted to analyze what it presented as the extraordinary and singular pathologies of Appalachians, scolding audiences to get out of their bubbles and embrace empathy with the “forgotten America” before its residents elected Donald Trump. After the election, when it became too late, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction and empathy became heretical. Appalachia, political commenters proclaimed, could reap what it had sown.

My partner and I went about our daily lives in Texas trying to convince people that the oil industry and the coal industry weren’t fundamentally different to the person with undrinkable water.

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.

Defining Appalachian culture is often a top-down process, in which individuals with power or capital tell us who or what we are. These definitions tend to reduce people to pathologies, but can also include more clinical assessments, such as those that followed the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in 1965. The ARC defined Appalachia as a coherent political entity during the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. It still exists (if precariously, at the moment) to monitor and create economic development within the region.

These projections do a disservice to both Appalachians and other economically and socially disadvantaged groups by pitting their concerns against one another instead of connecting them.

Dependency narratives fuel popular talking points among individuals on both sides of the political aisle. They are often presented without acknowledgment that corporate welfare runs Appalachia. Corporate welfare allows business to shirk their tax burdens, hoard land, and wield enormous political influence while local communities suffer.

The average Appalachian is not, then, a white, hypermasculine coal miner facing the inevitable loss of economic strength and social status, but the average Appalachian’s worldview may be impacted by individuals with cultural capital who are constantly assuming we are all made in that image.

Individuals in Appalachia, for example, offered support and solidarity to communities in Flint and Standing Rock, understanding that the struggle for clean

I will not ascribe a culture to them, cohesive or otherwise, but I will locate them in shared experiences such as the struggle to arrest environmental destruction, to secure workers’ rights, to demand clean water, and to preserve folkways. These struggles are ubiquitous in Appalachia but are not unique to the region.

Since Vance and his fans have made it acceptable to remake Appalachia in one’s own image, let me do the same and create a volume with an image made in my own. Far from being monolithic, helpless, and degraded, this image of Appalachia is radical and diverse. This image of Appalachia does not deflect the problems of the region but simply recognizes the voices and actions of those who have struggled against them, often sacrificing their health, comfort, and even their lives. It is an image projected by bodies against machines and bodies on picket lines and bodies that most assuredly are not always white.

“Why miners might be afraid to report safety violations at a nonunion mine took second place to a story of a tight-knit, deeply religious community tortured on national television by the dramatic plot twist.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Appalachians were once again framed as decent but damaged people looking for a miracle. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric centered the projection of a fantasy to “make America great again” by promising to correct the social and economic decline of disadvantaged white workers such as those who once populated the Sago Mine. “My guys,” he often remarked, referring to miners, “don’t get enough thanks.”

A month into his presidency, Trump appointed Wilbur Ross, the former owner of the Sago Mine, as his secretary of commerce.

For many Americans, the election simply cast “the Appalachian” in a role he appeared born to play: the harried and forgotten white everyman, using the only agency left in his bones to bring ruin on his countrymen and selfishly move our nation backward, not forward. Instead of serving as the instrument of his own torture, his false hope was now weaponized and aimed at the nation.

The emotional politics of this genre cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional “other” who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we—the presumed audience of indifferent elites—should feel about their collective fate.

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.

To interpret this conversation generously, one might suggest that the authors aren’t angry with Appalachia at large, but instead are striking back at what the seemingly endless array of pre-election “Trump Country” pieces told them to think or feel. 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.

Indeed, the primary factor determining expertise in this and other eras is social and geographic distance from Appalachia.

This is the region’s most conventional narrative, popularized for more than 150 years by individuals who enhanced their own prestige or economic fortunes by presenting Appalachia as a space filled with contradictions that only intelligent outside observers could see and act on.

“We know Appalachia exists because we need it to define what we are not. It is the ‘other America’ because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives.” Appalachia is real, but it exists in our cultural imagination as a mythical place where uncomfortable truths become projected and compartmentalized.

Outside entrepreneurs pushed the limits of industry in the name of modernization, folklorists sought and collected “primitive” arts, missionaries brought religion to the “unchurched,” and industrialists drew from a vast pool of expendable labor.

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Social Darwinism, for example, posited that wealth and privilege fell naturally to those who most deserved them and that social differences between the rich and the poor reflected differences in their innate abilities.

The poor might improve their station through hard work and industry, but those of greater means owed them nothing in this struggle. This theory befit a world enthralled by the free market and the competitive accumulation of capital. Many industrialists felt little responsibility to their workforce, often believing that their social assistance would encourage an undesirable overpopulation of the lower classes. By contrast, some industrialists were paternalistic in their attitudes toward the working poor who labored in their factories, mines, and mills. Industrialists demanded obedience from their workers, much like children, and in return showed their benevolence in the form of housing, entertainment, or more comfortable working conditions. What these two social attitudes shared was the belief that power and capital came naturally to those of greater ability and that safe working conditions and other residual benefits of labor were a sign of their generosity, not the obligations of a good and moral business.

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.

“I call it a darn solid mass of different colors and tribes, blended together, woven, bound, interlocked, tongued and grooved and glued together in one body.”

I have no claim of kinship to this story, but I imagine it often, the unafraid and justice-seeking united in one body snaking through the mountains to reclaim themselves. “How do you come to Mingo?” the miners’ scouts asked, to identify their allies. “I come creeping,” came the answer. Like vines they went, slow and purposeful and of the earth, fed at long-last on sunlight.

“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.”

How does life go on in “Trump Country” for those of us who never lived in “Trump Country” to begin with? It goes on much the same as it always did. For me, I will try to build power with likeminded individuals and challenge the institutions that harm us. I won’t do that by reaching across political divides that are far more complicated here than you can image. I’ll do it by exercising the basic principles of mutual aid and community defense.

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...