What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia Quotes

“And if you trace a flawed narrative about Appalachia back far enough, you’ll often find someone making a profit.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“How did journalists and correspondents for the New York Times as well as scholars not catch these acts of generalizing and aggrandizing on behalf of elite readers?” she asks. “How did we trade in the breadth of diversity the region has to offer for one view? While reading Hillbilly Elegy I thought, here is how. This is how places and people become caricatures of themselves, ourselves.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“Many things about Appalachia may be true simultaneously. The support for Trump may be real, too strong for my comfort, and it may also be true that there are many who hoped and still hope for a different outcome.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“I don't give a damn about geography, but I'll note that 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 abou the region.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia

“For many conservatives, the beauty of Elegy was not just what it said about the lot of poor white Americans, but what it implied about Black Americans as well. Conservatives believed that Elegy would make their intellectual platforming about the moral failures of the poor colorblind in a way that would retroactively vindicate them for viciously deploying the same stereotypes against nonwhite people for decades.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“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.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“The average Appalachian is not, then, a white, hypermasculine coal miner facing the inevitable loss of economic strength and social status, but the average Appalachian’s worldview may be impacted by individuals with cultural capital who are constantly assuming we are all made in that image.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“Defining Appalachian culture is often a top-down process, in which individuals with power or capital tell us who or what we are.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“There’s not a single social problem in Appalachia, however, that can’t be found elsewhere in our country.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“The company town became emblematic of this new industrial order. Miners and other coal workers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia—Appalachia’s historic coal fields—often lived in privately owned towns, which grew to outnumber independent and unincorporated communities.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“People in power use and recycle these strategies not because it’s enjoyable to read lurid tales of a pathological “other”—although that certainly informs part of the allure—but because they are profitable. And if you trace a flawed narrative about Appalachia back far enough, you’ll often find someone making a profit.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“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.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“Narratives of dependency conceal the uneven distribution of wealth that haunts Appalachia and indeed, much of the nation.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“The youthful volunteers who staffed the anti-poverty offices and community actions programs of the Kennedy-Johnson years were, like the religious and benevolent workers of the last century, fleeing events in the lowland South, namely the rise of Black Power…the liberal television commentators and welfare bureaucrats who displayed Appalachian poverty to the nation took obvious relish in the white skins and blue eyes of the region’s hungry children.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“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.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“Outdated theories about a culture of poverty in Appalachia, honed in the 1960s, had become popular once more thanks to Hillbilly Elegy.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“More than 80 percent of Appalachia’s population identifies as white, but for the past thirty years, African American and Hispanic individuals have fueled more than half of Appalachia’s population growth.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“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.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“Trump Country” pieces share a willingness to use flawed representations of Appalachia to shore up narratives of an extreme “other America” that can be condemned or redeemed to suit one’s purpose.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“The ARC defined Appalachia as a coherent political entity during the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“There are thirteen states with Appalachian counties—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York—and West Virginia is the only state entirely within Appalachia.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“The Washington Post and other outlets issued correctives, reporting that “the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a ‘coalition of mostly blue-collar and white working-class voters’ just doesn’t square with election data.”
― Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia