What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

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.

According to Shapiro, these outcomes and their justifications formed a “secondary vision of Appalachia as an area in need of assistance from outside agencies.” Experts, he continued, “insisted vigorously on the vision of Appalachian ‘otherness’…and their discussions on the nature and meaning of Appalachian otherness were rarely made with reference to the real conditions of mountain life or the normal complexity of social and economic conditions which prevailed in the mountains as in every other section of the nation.”

As Shapiro observed, outsiders “defined Appalachia as a discrete region and the mountaineers as a distinct people, and responded to abstract dilemmas which this ‘fact’ seemed to pose without asking whether it was a ‘true’ fact, or indeed whether it was still a true fact in 1920 as it might have been in 1900 or 1870.”

Intellectuals like MacClintock looked to other solutions when the triumph of law and order in the valley proved to be short-lived. One popular solution was simply capitalism. If Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose, these theories suggested, then they might be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence. This was music to the ears of developers, who justified economic expansion by contending that modern employment would bring order and harmony to the mountains and save mountaineers from their own worst impulses in the process.

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.

Mary “Mother” Jones, who cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World, said of West Virginia, “The story of coal is always the same. It is a dark story. For a second’s more sunlight, men must fight like tigers. For the privilege of seeing the color of their children’s eyes by the light of the sun, fathers must fight as beasts of the jungle.”

reminds me of Helen Lewis, an elder Appalachian activist who wants to reclaim former mining land with apple orchards.

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.

In the 2016 presidential election, McDowell County gave Donald Trump 4,614 votes and Hillary Clinton 1,429. The election rolls indicate that there are 17,508 registered voters in the county, although the actual number in circulation is likely lower. Nevertheless, Trump won McDowell County during an election that had a historically low voter turnout for the county. If we use reported numbers we find that only 27 percent of McDowell County voters supported Trump.

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?

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.” I admit this election has caused setbacks for me on this path of grace.

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.

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.”

Hillbilly Elegy. Much like the visual archive generated during the War on Poverty, Elegy sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region. For white people uncomfortable with images of the civil rights struggles and the realities of Black life those images depicted, an endless stream of sensationalized white poverty offered them an escape—a window into a more recognizable world of suffering. This intimacy, both now and then, does not equal less contempt, just more value for the viewer and creator.

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

The argument that corporations did not help create the problems of Appalachia is stunningly ahistorical, but not even the most problematic claim Vance makes.

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.

Curiously, the mountaineers identified by both Rothstein and the authors of Hollow Folk as the most degenerate lived in the area of the Shenandoah Valley closest to developed areas of the future national park, where wealthy businessmen hoped to accelerate evictions to begin the expansion and new construction of vacation resorts. Many of them even worked at the Skyland Resort, which hoped to offer luxury accommodation to visitors of the new park.

Kelli Haywood, the Public Affairs Director of Whitesburg, Kentucky, radio station WMMT, recently argued that people in Appalachia dislike J.D. Vance because he “airs our dirty laundry.” For me, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t dislike Vance because I get embarrassed when he talks about “hillbilly culture.” I dislike him because I think about children stolen from their parents. I think about white nationalist flyers that proclaim, “Appalachia is white, Scots-Irish, proud.”

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.

Otis Trotter’s Keeping Heart, a memoir about growing up poor, sick, and Black in Appalachian Ohio springs to mind, as does Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the story of a dysfunctional West Virginian family and finding the courage to leave. Linda Tate, in Power in the Blood, tells of the re-discovery of her Cherokee roots, and Creeker, by Linda Scott DeRosier, is yet another memoir about coming of age in Appalachia.

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.

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 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.

The region’s political elites and local business leaders, however, benefitted from the uneven distribution of wealth. In the 1960s, Pike County had a population of just 5,000 people, most of them poor. But there were also over fifty millionaires who had been enriched by the coal industry.

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.

Highlander persists today. It still operates out of East Tennessee, now as the Highlander Research and Education Center. In September 2017 the organization will celebrate its eighty-fifth anniversary. Many of the platforms supported by the organization will be recognizable. #BlackLivesMatter, Fightfor15, and mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline all received recent support.

In the prison industrial complex, inmates are commodities. They are bought and sold and transferred according to the cost of beds and the cost of land and the cost of the labor required to imprison them.

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 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.”

Silas House writes, “There is a language in the kudzu and it is all ours and belongs to no one else. This is my tongue for you, whispering our history: words words words.”

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.

Ours is a region that makes graveyards for mountains, because companies have made our mountains into graveyards. “In his hands are the deep places of the Earth; the strength of the hills is His also,” one gravestone reads, quoting Psalms.

SUGGESTED RESOURCES FICTION & POETRY Andrews, Tom. The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Awiakta, Marilou. Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet. Memphis: St. Luke’s Press, 1978. Berry, Wendell. The Country of Marriage. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 1973. Giardina, Denise. Storming Heaven. New York: Norton, 1987. Gipe, Robert. Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. Giovanni, Nikki. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: Harper Perennial, 1980.

Good, Crystal. Valley Girl. CreateSpace, 2012. Haun, Mildred. The Hawk’s Done Gone. Nashville: McNaughton & Gun, 1968. Holbrook, Chris. Upheaval. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. House, Silas. Clay’s Quilt. New York: Algonquin Books, 2001. Howell, Rebecca Gayle. Render. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013. Manning, Maurice. One Man’s Dark. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017. McKinney, Irene. The Six O’Clock Mine Report. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Miller, Jim Wayne. The Brier Poems. New York: Gnomon Press, 1997. Norman, Gurney. Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories. New York: Gnomon Press, 1977. Offutt, Chris. Kentucky Straight. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Pancake, Ann. Strange as This Weather Has Been. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007. Pancake, Breece D’J. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. New York: Back Bay Books, 2002. pluck! The Affrilachian Journal of Arts and Culture. Rabble Lit–Working Class Literature. Rash, Ron. The World Made Straight. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006. Still, James. River of Earth. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Taylor, Glenn. A Hanging at Cinder Bottom: A Novel. Portland: Tin House Books, 2015. Walker, Frank X. Affrilachia: Poems by Frank X Walker. Lexington: Old Cove Press, 2000. White, Charles Dodd and L...

NON-FICTION Bageant, Joe. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Broadway Books, 2008. Blizzard, William C. and Wess Harris. When Miners March. Oakland: PM Press, 2010. DeRosier, Linda Scott. Creeker: A Woman’s Journey. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. Perry, Huey. They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2011. Mann, Jeff. Loving Mountains, Loving Men. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2005. McClanahan, Scott. Crapalachia: A Biography of Place. New York: Two Dollar Radio, 2013. O’Brien, John. At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. New York: Anchor, 2002. Offutt, Chris. My Father the Pornographer. New York: Washington Square Press, 2017. Sonnie, Amy and James Tracy. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power. New York: Melville House, 2011. Tate, Linda. Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2009. Thrash, Maggie. Honor Girl: A Graphic Memoir. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015. Trotter, Otis. Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine....

Inscoe, John, ed. Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Kiffmeyer, Tom. Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987....

McDonald, Michael J. and John Muldowny. The TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981. Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pudup, Mary Beth, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina Waller, eds. Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Purcell, Aaron. White Collar Radicals: The TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Rice, Connie Park and Marie Tedesco, eds. Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Ac...

Scott, Rebecca. Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachia Coalfields. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Shapiro, Henry D. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Shiflett, Crandall. Coal Towns. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Straw, Richard and H. Tyler Blethen. High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place. Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Turner, William H., Edward J. Cabbel and Nell Irvin Painter, eds. Blacks in Appalachia. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Thomas, Jerry Bruce. An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depressio...

Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. FILMS & VISUAL ART Before the Mountain Was Moved, dir. Robert K. Sharpe, 1970. Blood on the Mountain, dir. Mari-Lynn Evans and Jordan Freeman, 2016. Burke, Bill. Portraits, 1987. Chemical Valley, dir. Mimi Pickering and Anne Lewis Johnson, 1991. Dotter, Earl. The Quiet Sickness: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America. Gowin...

Harlan County, U.S.A., dir. Barbara Kopple, 1978. Kentucky Route Zero, videogame designed by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy for Cardboard Computer. The Last Mountain, dir. Bill Haney, 2011. May, Roger. Testify: A Visual Love Letter to Appalachia. Durham: Horse and Buggy Press, 2014. Night in the Woods, videogame designed by Alec Holowka, Scott Benson, and Bethany Hockenberry for Infinite Fall and Finji. Queer Appalachia Collective. Electric Dirt, 2017. Rothstein’s Last Assign...

Stranger with a Camera, dir. Elizabeth Barret, 1999. Up the Ridge, dir. Nick Szuberl...