What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

You might think our biggest export is coal but it’s actually people.

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.

Coal miners, centered in political rhetoric as the face of the forgotten white working class, earn an average salary of $60,000 to $90,000 a year. It is more accurate to describe coal mining as a blue-collar profession that commands a middle-class salary, a rarity in our present moment and certainly an employment sector that is shrinking beyond hope.

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.

you substitute “philanthropist” with “venture capitalist,” you’ll find that this reality has not shifted much for some.

“Writers and their readers play into political arguments that simplify Appalachia as a region that absorbs large amounts of government aid but gives back little, making it easier to condemn the people who live there.”

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

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.

“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.” The

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

The voices of Appalachians as experts on their own condition are largely absent in the standard “Trump Country” think piece.

Republican-leaning voters indicated that Trump’s strongest supporters tended to be individuals who once registered Democrat but presently vote Republican, a phenomenon that isn’t uncommon in the South and Appalachia as a holdover from union-influenced politics.

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.

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.

“Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself.”

Appalachians are the subjects of the “Trump Country” genre, not its creators.

“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.

Coal companies often justified their expansion and the recruitment of local populations into their workforce as benevolent actions that would bring backward mountaineers into their own as equal participants in America’s expanding spirit of industry.

For many miners, however, unionization was a matter of life and death. One could die in the mines or march, and many chose to march.

Homer Holt, West Virginia’s anti-union governor, learned that his state’s history would be compiled by Bruce Crawford, the former editor of a left-wing union newspaper who was once shot while providing aid to striking miners and who called for a “producers’ dictatorship” to overthrow the elite.

“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.

West Virginia has the highest concentration of transgender teenagers in the country,

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.

The belief that poverty is a character flaw—a demonstration of moral weakness—hangs over every image of a barefoot child or unemployed miner. “The

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

If a camera is a gun, then surely a vote can be too.

Why can’t poor Black people get ahead? It’s not racism or the structural inequality caused by racism, many conservatives argue, because then what would explain the realities of poor white people?

While bemoaning our basic cognition, he takes liberties with his own by refusing to acknowledge that not all West Virginians or coal miners are white.

Much like projects in the Tennessee Valley, the government framed the relocation of farmers as a benevolent process that would move residents geographically, but also temporally, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Many individuals thought to fit that description, like Carrie Buck, ended up at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where they were sterilized to, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.” Into

These images worked, much like Elegy works today, by offering middle-class white viewers a glimpse into a world that feels both familiar and alien.

Poverty pictures allowed comfortable white Americans to consume the difference embedded in the images while believing they were engaging critically with pressing social issues.

Public support for the War on Poverty depended on getting white, middle-class Americans to care about poverty, and projections of white poverty worked best in this regard.

By that point in his career, Shockley was openly advocating coercive sterilization for the “genetically unfit.”

Apparently the people of Appalachia, although deemed unfit by Caudill, were intelligent enough to understand the often sinister purposes of intelligence testing because much of Caudill’s advice concerned how to not raise suspicions about the true nature of the study. “I

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.

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.

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

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.

I accept Weller not for what he did, but for what he became at the end, which is one of us.

renders both mountains and miners into abstract and disposable commodities, which is part of its design. 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.

Coal companies have further increased economic instability by using subcontracted labor instead of permanent employees, another common union-busting strategy.

One tells the group of activists that the 1921 miners would be ashamed of them because they had taken up arms for their right to mine coal. “They fought to unionize. Do you work at a unionized mine?” an organizer corrects him, to a blank stare.

Appalachian author Silas House writes, “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.” In

According to these local voices, Pikeville is a place of folksy neutrality where the good and the bad cancel each other out as long as no one steps out of line and becomes “an extremist.”

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.

When the rush of questions abated, I realized that this was the first time I had looked closely at an image of Appalachia that didn’t inspire shame or pain. I wasn’t looking at the usual images of people trapped in poverty, intended to evoke pity. I was looking at a photograph of men and women apparently content, more interested in making their own images than the image being made of them.