What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

The intentional omission of these voices fits a long tradition of casting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America.”

“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.”

Appalachia is, often simultaneously, a political construction, a vast geographic region, and a spot that occupies an unparalleled place in our cultural imagination.

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

Appalachia is nothing if not messily defined.

Many Appalachians are poor, but their poverty has a deep and coherent history rooted in economic exploitation.

Appalachia is real, but it exists in our cultural imagination as a mythical place where uncomfortable truths become projected and compartmentalized.

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?

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.

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.”

Outdated theories about a culture of poverty in Appalachia, honed in the 1960s, had become popular once more thanks to Hillbilly Elegy.

Elegy sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region.

While reading Hillbilly Elegy I thought, here is how. This is how places and people become caricatures of themselves, ourselves.”

The broadest point made by Elegy on the basis of this experience is that “public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”

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.

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.