What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

By Elizabeth Catte

An antidote to bigotry and a "perfect primer for readers seeking factual, realistic portrayals of the rural and working-class experience" (Los Angeles Times).

 


In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working-class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians—ultimately offering a much-needed insider's perspective on the region.


 


"The most damning critique of Hillbilly Elegy." —New York Review of Books

 


"Succeeds in providing a richer, more complex view." —Publishers Weekly

 


"A necessary response to the bigotry against a much-maligned culture." —Chris Offutt, award-winning author of Code of the Hills

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780998018874

Book preview

PART I

APPALACHIA AND THE MAKING OF TRUMP COUNTRY

FROZEN IN TIME

On a frosty January morning in 2006, an explosion occurred in a coal mine owned by the International Coal Group in Sago, West Virginia. The explosion instantly killed one miner. Twelve others became trapped by debris, flames, and toxic gas. Their first shift after an extended New Year break had gone terribly wrong. All the missing men were fathers, some to young families, and the world watched as rescue crews tried to pinpoint their location in vain for two days.

Much of the news coverage focused on the anguish of the miners’ families and how their grief reverberated in small communities like Sago or nearby Tallmansville. The families kept vigil at the Sago Baptist Church, just yards away from the mine, and national and international media crews kept watch with them. Sentimental and intimate narratives of faith and resilience overtook attention to the International Coal Group’s notorious record of safety violations and fines.

Forty-eight hours after the explosion, an official working with rescue crews at the mine called the church to deliver news both heartbreaking and miraculous: the body of the one dead miner had provided an important clue in the discovery of the twelve living ones. The official informed families that rescue efforts were underway and activity at the mine intensified as celebrations at Sago Baptist Church became breaking news on every major network. Their hope dimmed, but they never gave up, said ABC reporter Sonya Crawford, live from West Virginia.

Some families believed that rescue workers might triage the rescued men in the church and so they reorganized their surroundings as best they could for such a fraught reunion. They prepared and celebrated for three hours until a new report informed them that all miners save one had perished. A reporter for National Public Radio later confirmed that for most of that period, mine officials were aware there had been a grave miscommunication.

Captured on video, the celebrations of the families were frozen in time, and in their rebroadcast became a symbol of cruelty of the highest magnitude: false hope. Unfolding news coverage foregrounded the spectacle of decent but damaged people hoping in vain for a miracle. This made the reporting about the International Coal Group’s lethal labor practices feel distant by comparison. As sociologist Rebecca Scott wrote of the incident, Why miners might be afraid to report safety violations at a nonunion mine took second place to a story of a tight-knit, deeply religious community tortured on national television by the dramatic plot twist.

The coal company was indeed villanized by the press for its part in the tragedy, but not for its longstanding record of shirking state and federal safety regulations. The media presented families expressing anger toward the International Coal Group. But that anger was framed as a melodramatic response triggered by grief, not as a series of reactions compelled by the often abusive tension between mine operators and the communities that served as their workforce.

The media coverage of the Sago Mine disaster naturalized many practices in Appalachia that are not natural. It is not natural for individuals to mine coal, although it is a dominant industry in Appalachia and therefore a logical choice of employment. It is not natural for employees to die in the name of corporate profit and it is not natural to recycle the raw grief of devastated families into a spiritual lesson about sacrifice, as reporters did. Journalists sought details from families about dead miners’ favorite scripture passages and analyzed them for clues that might indicate an acceptance of impeding death. It was as if the miners had undergone a meaningful spiritual trial instead of suffocating in the dark with their noses stuck in lunch pails because the rescue breathers supplied by the mine were useless.

When mine safety crews located letters written by the miners just before their deaths, reporters fixated on the last words of Martin Toler, Jr.: It wasn’t bad, I just went to sleep. A community and a nation seeking any sign of redemption from this tragedy naturalized even this most unnatural of deaths. Other, more invisible signs of redemption happened out of the public eye. Industry watchdogs challenged, in vain as it would happen, regulatory oversight of the coal industry and wrongful death lawsuits wound slowly through the courts.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Appalachians were once again framed as decent but damaged people looking for a miracle. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric centered the projection of a fantasy to make America great again by promising to correct the social and economic decline of disadvantaged white workers such as those who once populated the Sago Mine. My guys, he often remarked, referring to miners, don’t get enough thanks.

Many Appalachians also engaged in fantasies of their own. The mayor of Buckhannon, West Virginia, just miles from the Sago Mine, told the Washington Post that Trump is going to undo the damage to the coal industry and bring back the jobs, and all of our kids down there in North Carolina are going to come home. Every prestige publication from the New Yorker to Vanity Fair flocked to the region to capture a glimpse of the people whom they assumed stood ready to gamble the nation’s political health on a last-ditch effort at self-preservation and, ultimately, false hope.

Following Trump’s victory, pundits often engaged in a projection of a different fantasy, one where Appalachia might be isolated and left to reap what it had sown. For liberal political commentators there were no wealthy donors, white suburban evangelicals, or insular Floridian retirees responsible for Trump’s victory, only hillbillies. This time, however, there would be no dignity in death. A month into his presidency, Trump appointed Wilbur Ross, the former owner of the Sago Mine, as his secretary of commerce. Some pundits and commenters applauded the decision for its awful symmetry.

For many Americans, the election simply cast the Appalachian in a role he appeared born to play: the harried and forgotten white everyman, using the only agency left in his bones to bring ruin on his countrymen and selfishly move our nation backward, not forward. Instead of serving as the instrument of his own torture, his false hope was now weaponized and aimed at the

[kitlovestea · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brief, but illuminating