What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

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.

While many regional groups experience this treatment, as scholar Elizabeth Engelhardt recently wrote in the journal Southern Cultures, “Appalachia stands out, however, in the sheer length of time that people have believed it could be explained simply, pithily, and concisely…again and again Appalachia is relegated to the past tense: ‘out of time’ and out of step with any contemporary present, much less a progressive future.”

The critic bell hooks wrote, “With critical awareness, we must recognize the spaces of openness and solidarity forged in the concrete experience of living in communities that were always present in radical spaces in Appalachia both then and now…I believe it is essential for unity and diversity to gather those seeds of progressive change and struggle that have long characterized the lives of some individuals.”

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. More than 80 percent of Appalachia’s population identifies as white, but for the past thirty years, African American and Hispanic individuals have fueled more than half of Appalachia’s population growth. Nonwhite Appalachians, as a group, tend to be younger and less likely to depopulate the region than their white counterparts. I’m hesitant to tell you who Appalachia is, but I can tell you who helps keep it alive: young individuals who work in racially diverse fields, including education, hospitality, and healthcare.

Only two Appalachian states—Kentucky and West Virginia—were identified among the ten “whitest” parts of the United States, behind Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, Idaho, and Wyoming.

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.

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

Appalachians are in the process of updating the land study, but what its original authors discovered in the 1980s is likely still true. 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.

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.

The media coverage of the Sago Mine disaster naturalized many practices in Appalachia that are not natural. It is not natural for individuals to mine coal, although it is a dominant industry in Appalachia and therefore a logical choice of employment. It is not natural for employees to die in the name of corporate profit and it is not natural to recycle the raw grief of devastated families into a spiritual lesson about sacrifice, as reporters did. Journalists sought details from families about dead miners’ favorite scripture passages and analyzed them for clues that might indicate an acceptance of impeding death. It was as if the miners had undergone a meaningful spiritual trial instead of suffocating in the dark with their noses stuck in lunch pails because the rescue breathers supplied by the mine were useless.

Following Trump’s victory, pundits often engaged in a projection of a different fantasy, one where Appalachia might be isolated and left to reap what it had sown. For liberal political commentators there were no wealthy donors, white suburban evangelicals, or insular Floridian retirees responsible for Trump’s victory, only hillbillies.

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.

Cohen’s dispatch is one of many that came to form a distinct genre of election writing: the “Trump Country” piece, which seeks to illuminate the values of Trump supporters using Appalachia—and most often West Virginia—as a model. “To understand Donald Trump’s success,” the composite argument flows, “you must understand Appalachia.” The march of the “Trump Country” genre became especially striking during a fraught election cycle marked by otherwise erratic coverage and scandal on both sides of the political aisle.

It is possible to glean, through the cumulative veneer of political analyses, think pieces, and grim photographs, some truth about the issues that vex Appalachia. But of equal importance is how this coverage reveals what vexes the nation about Appalachia. The voices of Appalachians as experts on their own condition are largely absent in the standard “Trump Country” think piece. 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. Whether readers find these protagonists sympathetic or self-sabotaging, “Trump Country” writing leaves its audience to assume that Appalachians have not earned the right to belong in the narrative of American progress and are content to doom others to the same exclusion.

It’s important to acknowledge that Donald Trump did (and still does) enjoy strong support amongst many Appalachians and West Virginians. And these supporters often framed their justification by identifying their alienation from both parties, triggered by unmet political expectations and white racial anxiety. None of their positions, however, were unique to Appalachia or West Virginia. What we know now, of course, is that these narratives employed a sleight of hand that used working-class people to illustrate the priorities and voting preferences of white middle-class and affluent individuals.

Economic strategies most often prioritized financial and tax incentives that helped larger corporations and staved off losses to coal company profits. These strategies offered a united message from Republicans and Democrats that the way forward requires the free flow of capital in the hands of businesses, not people. It’s a position that pits workers against the environment in the battle for economic stability. It also accepts that the replacement of permanent and benefitted jobs with unstable low-wage employment is a natural by-product of corporate growth. 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.

It’s not possible for anyone with more than passing knowledge of Appalachia and the coal industry to listen to those comments without cringing, regardless of one’s political affiliation. Clinton’s remarks about out-of-work miners are a ghastly but honest flub. But her tone—“those people who did the best they could” —and her poor appropriation of the “coal keeps the lights on” slogan are equally problematic. “Coal keeps the lights on” is often the rallying cry of those condemning the “war on coal,” but I suspect even the most progressive among us have been tempted to lob the phrase at someone clueless about the human cost of their energy. People didn’t “do their best” to keep the nation’s lights on; they died.

Prolific Appalachian historian Ronald Eller wrote, “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.

Just as immigrants and African Americans in the Northeast faced hostility for diluting the social and cultural norms of elites, Appalachians were also regarded with an assimilationist gaze. Since the dilemmas of “otherness” were so often self-created and abstract—the real conditions of life in Appalachia or in immigrant neighborhoods did not reflect what elites envisioned them to be—they could not be solved. 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. In order to reconcile these irreconcilable Americas, Appalachian “otherness” became a form of deviance.

A desire to “tame” Appalachians for the benefit of industry often lurked behind twentieth-century theories of Appalachian “otherness.” Although industrialists deployed region-specific narratives to justify the development of Appalachia, widely held attitudes about the social position of the poor aided them in this. 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.

In Appalachia, narratives that presented mountaineers as helpless and otherwise doomed without industrial purpose abounded. 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. The company town became emblematic of this new industrial order.

The government envisioned the American Guide Series, as one Federal Writers’ Project official observed, as a “history of the whole people…in which the people are historians as well as the history, telling their own stories in their own words—Everyman’s history, for Everyman to read.” In both theory and practice, the series raised uncomfortable questions about who constituted “the whole people” and what aspects of a “people’s history” should be remembered. Federal and state officials censored the contributions of local authors heavily, actions that resulted in power struggles and political crises in Appalachia, particularly in West Virginia.

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. Where were the “Bernie Country” pieces about Appalachia? 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? I associate contemporary eastern Kentucky with grassroots prison abolition, so where were the essays about how a presumed Trump victory would imperil that work? 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? In April, filmmakers in West Virginia hosted the fourth Appalachian Queer Film Festival. How did that play out at the close of Trump’s first one hundred days in office?

As Jessica Wilkerson observes, “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. bell hooks writes that “we will not change or convert folks without extending the forgiveness…that is essential for the building of communities of solidarity.”

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.

But for all the soul-searching performed by Barret, it is one of O’Connor’s Canadian colleagues, Colin Low, who delivers the most electrifying lines in the documentary: “A camera is like a gun,” he explains, “It’s threatening. It’s invasive; it is exploitative…and it’s not always true.”

The National Review, which employed Vance as an occasional contributor, was positively gleeful about the book’s release. 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.”

Perhaps Vance is an incredibly rare breed of humble venture capitalist turned regional memoirist turned social reformer. But perhaps it is wise to consider if this humility is just a strategy. By framing his celebrity as “reluctant,” Vance shores up an image of his insight as accidentally and authentically profound and not, for example, shaped by his three years writing for a conservative publication, or his mentorship under controversial figures like Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and the entrepreneur and political activist Peter Thiel.

He concludes his introduction with the hope that readers might gain from his memoir an appreciation for “how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.” 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.

The lives of poor white people, especially those with the additional burdens of addiction or legal issues, become the empirical proof for conservatives that we have based our attention to racism on fractured logic. The irony, of course, is that even as we become the ambassadors of this colorblind worldview, poor white people can’t escape the generic moralizing of their betters, who got a head start honing their brand of arrogant tough love and hard truths on Black communities.

Like Vance, Webb maintains that the people of Appalachia have unique genetic qualifications that have produced innate traits and characteristics. Webb, however, is more laudatory of these than Vance and even goes so far as to state that “no other group has been more denigrated, attacked, and even feared by America’s evermore connected ruling elites” than the Scots-Irish.

Vance appears to take particular relish in using inaccurate constructions of Appalachian whiteness to complicate universal notions of white privilege. As he told Ezra Klein from Vox, “The problem, as I see it, is that we haven’t necessarily developed a great vocabulary to describe disadvantage in a newer, much more culturally diverse country…it’s not just that talking to that kid [a young person from West Virginia] about white privilege is not an especially useful way to understand his real disadvantage. It’s that it actually makes it harder for him to see the disadvantages that other people face.” The idea that confronting racism risks irrevocably alienating individuals of all races is both a common and predictable strain of thought among conservatives, but it becomes more sinister when it is propped up by the belief that the white individuals in question represent a disadvantaged race unto themselves.

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.

Archaeologists also address this myth in their work. Audrey Horning writes in her work on migration, “The southern upland region attracted settlers not only from the British borderlands… but from all over North American colonial regions as well as from France, the Palatinate and West Africa, while later drawing from eastern and southern Europe.” Scots-Irish heritage is real, but the exaggerated dominance of its influence in the region is often put into the service of a variety of outcomes. In the early twentieth century, reformers utilized the belief that Appalachians were of “pioneer stock” in the application of a new social order that sought to curb the influence of “undesirable” people and modernize the nation.

Their work largely follows a pattern of casting mountaineers as a primitive, isolated, and backwards people with a homogenous white ethnic identity and monoculture degraded through idleness and inbreeding. They write, “Social evolution presumably still goes on but so slowly do groups go forward under their own power that no movement can be discerned through generations.” These less evolved individuals, the experts argued, could only be saved through the intervention of outsiders.

Almost everything about Caudill’s persona—his middle-class profession, his wholesome family life, and his eloquence—challenged dominant perceptions of the region. This is precisely why the press found him irresistible. The press embraced Caudill, much like Vance, because he could be both of the people and above the people. At his best, Caudill was a formidable enemy of the coal industry, leveraging his influence to expose and arrest the destruction of land by corporations. But he could also be vicious toward the poor, particularly after federal assistance came to the region.

When people asked Adam Yarmolinsky, one of Johnson’s economic advisors, if the War on Poverty had a color, he responded, “Color it Appalachian if you are going to color it anything at all.”

The Department of Labor commissioned the report from sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan and intended to use his findings in the development of War on Poverty economic policy. The resulting study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, is a remarkable example of the culture of poverty framework in action. Moynihan concluded that the foundations of the nation’s African American family were so weak, there was nothing but a “tangle of pathology” in place of a social structure. Every quality that was idealized in the world white middle-class families inhabited was absent in Black families.

You might be asking, “Why does Hillbilly Elegy sound kind of like the Moynihan Report?” 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 poor, an often racialized category that nevertheless has always welcomed white individuals thought to be, as Caudill once said, the “dregs” of society. The other reason Elegy sounds like the Moynihan Report is that the white people who are outspoken in their beliefs about the culture of poverty simply don’t count poor white Appalachians as part of their tribe. As Elegy makes clear, it’s satisfying to imagine us as a different culture, even a different genetic specimen, than “good” white people.

The L.A. Times wrote of him, “Shockley strayed well beyond the confines of established genetics into the shoals of eugenics. He suggested that welfare and relief programs prevented natural selection from killing off ‘the bottom of the population’: ‘with improvements to technology…inferior strains have increased chances for survival and reproduction at the same time birth control has tended to reduce family size among superior elements.’”

It’s here that we re-discover Caudill, disillusioned by the failures of the War on Poverty. Rather than stimulating the ambition of Appalachians, Caudill believed that a decade of government assistance had only rendered mountain people more complacent and dependent on social welfare. He became convinced this dependency had something to do with their defective genes. In Night Comes to the Cumberlands, shared ethnic ancestry within Appalachia gave the region a sense of romantic and noble mystery. A decade later it was, to Caudill, a source of the region’s woe.

It’s difficult to know what to make of Caudill’s early work in the region given his open association with eugenicists in his later life. Much in his correspondence with these individuals seems to indicate that he always felt this bias toward poor white mountaineers and simply adopted a more modern language, provided by dysgenics, to express his views. It isn’t hard to locate shadows of these beliefs in his older work.

It’s a chilling exercise to consider why individuals who are happy to deconstruct Black life down to the smallest data-point and to savage critics who disagree find J.D. Vance to be a savant in cultural studies, a field coincidentally held in poor regard by most conservative thinkers.

My former university insisted that Adams’s work “is the photographic analog of J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy…the author and the photographer tell corresponding stories through different means.” This is true, but not in the way that my alma mater insists that it is. The shared story and analogues at work are not about people, but about power. It reflects how credibility falls easily to those given the privilege of defining who or what Appalachian is. It also shows the rewards that fall to individuals, universally men and exclusively white, regardless of the company they keep. It is the power to grant yourself permission for continued exploitation of vulnerable subjects. It is the power to have your work selected as emblematic of a cultural moment by individuals and organizations that didn’t care one iota about Appalachia until their gaze could fill the region with pathologies.

A flaw of popular narratives of Appalachia is the willingness of authors to describe destruction and social decline in lurid detail while remaining wholly uninterested in the people who challenged it. 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.

References to challenging ways of seeing or looking at Appalachia appear in many projects created by Appalachians as opposed to those that are about Appalachians. It is often second nature for many of us to inject the language of visual literacy into our work because we’re accustomed to serving as passive subjects for others and ultimately just want to be seen as we truly are.

The War on Poverty’s logic worked something like this. In Appalachia, it often happened that flooding caused by mining destroyed roads. Community residents would approach coal companies to ask permission to use their private access roads, requests that were universally denied. Community residents would would ask their political leaders for urgent assistance rebuilding their roads, requests that were universally denied. 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. Perry tried to change that by rigging the War on Poverty to work directly for the people.

“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.” This was the ethic that fueled much of the logic of Appalachian grassroots activism and motivated young reformers during the War on Poverty—involving and integrating poor people into every aspect of community life and governance.

Mingo’s political establishment hoped it could do what elected officials and businessmen in neighboring McDowell County had done, which was to siphon off federal funding—as much as two million dollars—and use it for their own purposes, most often to buy votes or sweeten business arrangements to ensure patronage. 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.