What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

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 be pro-environment and pro-worker is to walk a tightrope where individuals on either end hope you fall.

“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.

“The leadership of both major political parties in West Virginia had long clung to the notion that organized labor, especially among miners, was a deadly conspiracy to be ignored publically and suppressed privately.

The battle to control the narratives of Appalachia went through many phases between the Civil War and the Great Depression, but we see a number of similar themes. Chief among them is the tendency of those in power to represent rank-and-file Appalachians as helpless and in need of intervention to earn their place in the story of American progress.

The press often used the perceived helplessness of Appalachians to naturalize a specific political choice and ignored the voices and stories of those attempting to call a different outcome into being.

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?

Many things about Appalachia may be true simultaneously.

It might be true that much of the region is overwhelmingly white, but it is also true that there are few towns or cities in Appalachia without a visible African American or Latino community. Constructions of the region as “all-white” to satisfy a particular fetish about the white working class maliciously erase individuals whose lives also matter.

“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.

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

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

I don’t want to lose race in discussions of class.

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.

“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.”

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.

There are many things that have come to Appalachia that no one wanted, but how we respond to them once they’re here is important.

“Well, Nazis put out a call to white families to come here, and I’m here as the mother of a white family to say that Nazis aren’t welcome in Appalachia. We have real problems here with pipelines, oil and gas and coal companies are poisoning water and air. A few people are getting rich while our children get sick and Nazis come in and tell us to blame that on other poor people because they have a different color skin? Please.”

people are often blindly classist while remaining self-congratulatory about their other progressive credentials.

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.

Whatever happens next for Appalachia, there are people here who deserve similar moments of liberation from their pain and shame, to see their lives and history as something other than an incoherent parade of destruction and wretchedness.