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What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia Paperback – February 6, 2018
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length146 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBelt Publishing
- Publication dateFebruary 6, 2018
- Dimensions5 x 0.4 x 7.25 inches
- ISBN-100998904147
- ISBN-13978-0998904146
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A necessary response to the bigotry against a much-maligned culture." --Chris Offutt, author, Kentucky Straight
“A bold refusal to submit to stereotype.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Fiercely argued and solidly grounded, this an excellent primer on understanding and resisting the common distortions about Appalachia’s past and present.” —Anthony Harkins, author, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon
“You couldn't kill this book with a hammer. Come and watch Elizabeth Catte clip the hollow wings of little Jimmy Vance. Stay and behold an enlightened vision, a living solidarity found among the strong and varied peoples of this misunderstood land. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia asks Florence Reece's old question: Which side are you on? Some of us are sticking to Appalachia until every battle's won.” —Glenn Taylor, author, The Ballad of Trenchmount Taggart
"Succeeds in providing a richer, more complex view of a much-maligned region." —Publishers Weekly
"Highlighting decades of suppressed workers' rights movements, as well as prison facilities that still exploit low-cost labor, Catte expands the perspective on Appalachia. Readers will indeed get more right about this slice of the country after reading her book.” —Cheryl Krocker McKeon for Shelf Awareness
"A 146-page ass-kicker." —Jim Branscome, The Daily Yonder
"What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a brief, forceful, and necessary correction." —Frank Guan, Bookforum
"... the most damning critique of Hillbilly Elegy." —Nancy Isenberg, New York Review of Books
Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
By Elizabeth CatteBelt Publishing
Copyright © 2018 Elizabeth CatteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9989041-4-6
Contents
INTRODUCTION,PART I Appalachia and the Making of Trump Country,
PART II Hillbilly Elegy and the Racial Baggage of J.D. Vance's "Greater Appalachia",
PART III Land, Justice, People,
SUGGESTED RESOURCES,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
CHAPTER 1
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 nation.
This projection of Appalachia is melodramatic and strategic in equal measure. It reflects a longstanding pattern of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic "other America" that defies narratives of progress. These narratives, however, are designed to allow you to applaud the casting choice without wondering who wrote the script. We'll watch the film here, but we're also going to stay for the credits.
APPALACHIA AND THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Of the 2016 presidential election, New York Times international affairs correspondent Roger Cohen wrote, "The race is tightening once again because Trump's perceived character — a strong leader with a simple message, never flinching from a fight, cutting through political correctness with a bracing bluntness — resonates in places like Appalachia where courage, country, and cussedness are core values."
Cohen's dispatch is one of many that came to form a distinct genre of election writing: the "Trump Country" piece, which seeks to illuminate the values of Trump supporters using Appalachia — and most often West Virginia — as a model. "To understand Donald Trump's success," the composite argument flows, "you must understand Appalachia." The march of the "Trump Country" genre became especially striking during a fraught election cycle marked by otherwise erratic coverage and scandal on both sides of the political aisle.
Sandwiched between email servers and Access Hollywood outtakes, Appalachians stood ready to offer human interest stories that demystified, or so the press assumed, the appeal of a distinct type of political annihilation. Pundits explained our socioeconomic realities to one another under the guise of educating a presumed audience of coastal elites whom, they argued, had become hardened to the plight of the forgotten American.
It is possible to glean, through the cumulative veneer of political analyses, think pieces, and grim photographs, some truth about the issues that vex Appalachia. But of equal importance is how this coverage reveals what vexes the nation about Appalachia. The voices of Appalachians as experts on their own condition are largely absent in the standard "Trump Country" think piece.
The emotional politics of this genre cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional "other" who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we — the presumed audience of indifferent elites — should feel about their collective fate. Whether readers find these protagonists sympathetic or self-sabotaging, "Trump Country" writing leaves its audience to assume that Appalachians have not earned the right to belong in the narrative of American progress and are content to doom others to the same exclusion.
I first encountered the "Trump Country" genre in a February 2016 Vanity Fair essay by John Saward. "I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump," Saward explains in "Welcome to Trump Country, USA." Saward's offering is something of a travel dispatch of his accumulated experiences in Morgantown, Clarksburg, and Charleston. It begins with a tableau of Saward fondling a gun in a small-town strip club and ends with homespun mountain wisdom from a drifter. This structure implies that reality lies somewhere in between the maniacal Trump-supporting strip club denizens and the cosmically indifferent drifter. It also suggests that we should prepare for an age of extremes using Appalachia as a preview of coming attractions.
Saward takes pains to emphasize his difference from the subjects of his essay. What sets West Virginians most apart, according to him, is their longing and nostalgia for ordinary things. "You have never heard people speak so fondly, so intimately about hot dogs," he writes. "I have never cared as much about anything as this man did about a hot dog recommendation." When a local provides Saward with a list of restaurants to visit, he shares that "this will keep happening to me, people talking about the decency of other West Virginians and ordinary-seeming food like a dream."
This dream-walking offers sharp contrast to the realities Saward describes where "everywhere things are leaning, teetering; you might consider this metaphorically, but it is literally true, the houses are breaking." To collapse this sense of ruined nostalgia into a single anecdote, Saward lists half a dozen crumbling enterprises — car washes, bakeries, auto body shops — named after ordinary people, a "human with a name who had an idea for a place to do a thing and did it." In "Trump Country, USA," a car wash closed for the season isn't just a car wash, but a harbinger of a future when we might all wish for ordinary things in vain.
Early political forecasting compelled Saward and others to visit West Virginia in order to find "Trump Country." In December 2015, the polling firm Civis Analytics provided the New York Times with data suggesting Donald Trump would perform well in Appalachia and particularly West Virginia, his "best state" according to the Times. A national survey of 11,000 Republican-leaning voters indicated that Trump's strongest supporters tended to be individuals who once registered Democrat but presently vote Republican, a phenomenon that isn't uncommon in the South and Appalachia as a holdover from union-influenced politics.
Nate Cohn, who analyzed the data for the Times, argued that candidate Trump was the best fit among individuals "on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition." The Civis data also suggested, however, that eight out of the ten best congressional districts for Trump were in New York, and particularly on Long Island. Other news sites often highlighted the metrics of Trump's appeal in West Virginia in early 2016 as well. A FiveThirtyEight report, for example, suggested that many of Trump's Facebook "likes" came from users in West Virginia.
Examining election predictions in the first days of the Trump administration is like looking at one's reflection in a dirty mirror. Many polls and forecasts show something recognizable amongst other distortions, and this phenomenon is also true of the "Trump Country" genre, which built momentum as primary season approached and all but exploded after the West Virginia Republican primary in May 2016. It's important to acknowledge that Donald Trump did (and still does) enjoy strong support amongst many Appalachians and West Virginians. And these supporters often framed their justification by identifying their alienation from both parties, triggered by unmet political expectations and white racial anxiety. None of their positions, however, were unique to Appalachia or West Virginia.
What we know now, of course, is that 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. 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."
To be fair, the Trump campaign, and the continued rhetoric used by his administration, participated heavily in this myth making. Individuals on both sides of the political aisle, however, are reluctant to change the narrative. Months after the election, hastily written diagnostic texts about the white working class, such as Joan Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, were published, creating further entrenchment.
No place demonstrates the uneasy reality of the "Trump Country" genre better than McDowell County, which sits firmly in West Virginia's historic coal fields and once had the largest population of African American individuals in the state. In our present climate, however, McDowell County is a majority-white community that shares the worst local employment and health outcomes with neighboring coal counties Mingo and Logan.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, McDowell County became synonymous with "Trump Country." It was the subject of profiles for the Guardian, Huffington Post, Circa, the National Post, CNN, and CBS, with mention in dozens more about West Virginia or Appalachia at large. A widely-shared video segment in the Guardian in October 2016 asserted that "Donald Trump was more popular in McDowell County than anywhere else in America."
Coverage of past elections told a different story about McDowell County and West Virginia. In 2008, McDowell County was among the few counties in West Virginia where Democrats held on to a margin of victory. A more modest number of reporters and journalists dove into the history of the county and its politics to explain that phenomenon. The documentary Divide, for example, explores the 2008 election through the eyes of union organizer Sebert Pertee, who canvassed for Barack Obama in coal country. In those days, West Virginia was "Hillary Country," with Clinton beating Obama in the state's Democratic primary by substantial margins, including in McDowell County, where she won more than 70 percent of the vote.
Obama won McDowell County by 8 percent in the 2008 general election, but lost West Virginia. By 2012, West Virginia was entirely red. West Virginia Democrats appeared so disillusioned with their party that they gave Keith Russell Judd, a federal corrections inmate in Texas, 40 percent of their vote in the 2012 Democratic primary.
It isn't difficult to locate compelling political angles in West Virginia's coal country, which was solidly Democratic for forty years. Analysts point to the dwindling strength of unions and the coal industry's hostility to environmental regulations as the chief political frustrations turning the tide. Both Republican and Democratic state politicians have pushed "war on coal" narratives that suggest industry decline is the product of overregulation, not market forces and competition from cheaper energy. With often little difference among their elected leaders, West Virginians have witnessed a remarkable political indifference to economic diversification.
Economic strategies most often prioritized financial and tax incentives that helped larger corporations and staved off losses to coal company profits. These strategies offered a united message from Republicans and Democrats that the way forward requires the free flow of capital in the hands of businesses, not people. It's a position that pits workers against the environment in the battle for economic stability. It also accepts that the replacement of permanent and benefitted jobs with unstable low-wage employment is a natural by-product of corporate growth.
(Continues...)Excerpted from What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte. Copyright © 2018 Elizabeth Catte. Excerpted by permission of Belt Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Belt Publishing; None edition (February 6, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 146 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0998904147
- ISBN-13 : 978-0998904146
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.4 x 7.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #109,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Sociology of Rural Areas
- #72 in Human Geography (Books)
- #1,058 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Dr. Elizabeth Catte is a historian and writer of compact non-fiction. She is the author of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia and What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Elizabeth's essays, with subjects ranging from politics to pop culture, have appeared in the Boston Review, the Nation, In These Times, and the Washington Post. She currently lives in Staunton, Virginia but calls Knoxville, Tennessee home.
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That being said, sounded outlandish to me, and the author sounded perfectly reasonable while being passionate.
Why do I love this book? Two reasons:
1) This is a nuanced yet sympathetic history, focusing on the the multiple dimensions to Appalachian life and history and reminding readers about the past and contemporary history of labor movements, of minority rights, of solidarity in the region. The author also delves into the historiography of the region and how Appalachia has been portrayed in the past, and how those models continue to play a role.
2) This is a rant, and it is magnificent. The author was inspired to write this book in part as a response to a terrible book about Appalachia. Frankly, I loooooove writing aggressive critiques of books that I disagreed with. For the author to write a 132 page critique - and a sympathetic, engaging, fast-paced critique, complete with an extensive bibliography - is something that I deeply respect and absolutely adore.
The people of Appalachia are more like their inner-city counterparts in poverty than many may think. They have both been exploited, stereotyped, and marginalized.
But both are resisting, you just hear more about the resistance in the inner cities.
Anyone who wants to see that repression and resistance aren't confined to the ghetto should read this book
This book is a scathing, visceral response to the mainstream view of Appalachia peddled by outsiders and outsiders in disguise. It exposes the manipulation of our history by corporations and individuals for personal and monetary gain. A few reviews I've read have used Catte's anger as an excuse to discredit her, and it's true at certain points in the book her anger and frustration shine through. But there's a reason for it to, we should all be angry that our narrative is being manufactured and sold and our region stereotyped and ridiculed from the mass production of misinformed propoganda.
If you're a fan of history this book is for you. If you're upset about the state of truth and reason in an age of fake news and pseudo-academics then this book is for you.
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Nun, Elegien sind Trauerlieder die dafür bekannt sind, dass sie nicht immer die Wahrheit vermitteln.
J.D.Vance beschreibt die Arbeiterklasse aus dem er stammt als gewalttätige, faule Menschen die häufig Alkohol und Drogen in großen Mengen konsumieren. Vance gibt auch an, einige Bücher über Soziologie gelesen zu haben, womit er seine Beschreibungen der Arbeiterklasse wie üblich am rechten Rand gerechtfertigt; sie sind faul, sie wollen nicht arbeiten und der Grund dafür ist, dass sie durch zu viel Sozialhilfe verwöhnt sind. Sie machen halt die falschen Entscheidungen im Leben, meint Vance.
Selbst hat er gewählt Marinesoldat zu werden, danach hat er an Yale studiert, als Risikokapitalist gearbeitet und überlegt jetzt, als Republikaner für den Senat zu kandidieren.
Das dies alles nicht so einfach ist wird durch das Buch von der Historikerin Elizabeth Catte ausführlich belegt. Im Gegensatz zu Vance hat sie umfassend geforscht und zeichnet ein ganz anderes Bild von den Menschen in der Region. Diese sind durch die Geschichte von verschiedenen Kapitalinteressen und staatlichen wie lokalen Behörden enteignet, ausgebeutet und verfolgt gewesen. Weil sie angeblich alle weiß sind kann man sie auch kritisieren ohne Gefahr zu laufen, als Rassist bezeichnet zu werden. Dies ist aber nicht der Fall. Die Menschen sind in dieser Region sehr heterogen, aber sie haben überwiegend gemeinsame Interessen. In dieser Region haben die größten Auseinandersetzungen zwischen der organisierte Arbeiterklasse und der skrupellose Kohleindustrie stattgefunden.
Das Buch ist leicht zu lesen und gibt auch eine Menge Tipps über weiterführende Literatur, Dokumentarfilme und Spielfilme wenn man mehr über diese Region wissen möchte.