What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

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.

While reading Greek poetry, my professors warned us to be careful of the double meaning of elegies; they were, it seems, often written as political propaganda.

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.

Henry and Sherman, with no small amount of assistance from area social worker Miriam Sizer, described the residents of Colvin Hollow as living in primitive squalor, subsisting on a diet of weeds and small vermin, and overrun with illegitimate children. According to the two writers, these individuals knew little of the “outside world” and did not include in their basic vocabulary more modern words like “post office.”

Caudill wrote to Hirsch months after the Whitesburg Conference that “during the Johnson years when anti-poverty programs were in vogue I once told a federal official that the best way to fight poverty would be to move an army camp into the region. My theory was that the soldiers would get the mountain girls pregnant to the everlasting benefit of the region as a whole. I still think the suggestion was sound.”

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.

In the age of Hillbilly Elegy, a book applauded by the National Review for proving that signs of white distress “have gone neglected as LGBTQ identity politics and Black Lives Matter antics” have monopolized the nation’s attention, we’re told to be grateful that Vance has returned Appalachia to the nation’s conscience. But I don’t want Appalachia to be used as a siphon to suck attention away from LGBTQ politics and Black Lives Matter, movements that also flourish here.

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 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.

The fringe group Mountaintop Gun Club, for example, rented private surface land for $1 from concerned landowners. In return, the club established shooting ranges on threatened land in the hopes that the presence of armed individuals might deter coal companies from taking the land by force. 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.

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.

After the mines closed, the prisons came. People desperate to replace their only source of employment opened their communities and tore apart the mountains to imprison people deemed the most violent and dangerous offenders. Like in times past, local people saw the degradation of human dignity and the exploitation of labor and land and fought against it using familiar methods.

Tarence Ray, an organizer with the Letcher County Governance Project, a community group that formed to oppose the proposed prison, believes that 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.

Appalachian prison abolition is, in many ways, a perfect storm of new regional activism. The movement is led by young people who connect the legacy of anti-coal and anti-poverty activists to modern causes. They are often anti-capitalists, a tradition that has a long history in Appalachia. As the work of Appalshop and WMMT demonstrates, community organizers are skillful storytellers and communicators committed to the idea that telling our stories is central to our activism.