What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

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.

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.

these narratives employed a sleight of hand that used working-class people to illustrate the priorities and voting preferences of white middle-class and affluent individuals.

People didn’t “do their best” to keep the nation’s lights on; they died.

Many assembled wore red bandanas around their neck, the only insignia available, leading their enemies to call them “rednecks.”

If we use reported numbers we find that only 27 percent of McDowell County voters supported Trump.

The argument that corporations did not help create the problems of Appalachia is stunningly ahistorical,

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,

McWhiney and McDonald, with their emphasis on shared white ethnic heritage and their mitigation of white supremacy as a feature of antebellum life, became the favorite historians of white nationalist groups.

The idea that confronting racism risks irrevocably alienating individuals of all races is both a common and predictable strain of thought among conservatives,

there is no basis for the belief that historic or contemporary white Appalachians share a distinct culture informed by their homogenous ethnic heritage.

In 1927 the fruits of their labor blossomed when the infamous Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell effectively legalized compulsory eugenic sterilization nationwide, which was practiced in Virginia until 1979.

Perry used the principles of community organizing to bring poor people together, and found these principles to be successful.