"What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia," By Elizabeth Catte, Book Review
"The Hills Have Eyes: A New Book Challenges The Myth Of Trump- Era Appalachia," Frank Guan, *2018.
If there was one book impossible to escape during the eternal election of 2016, it was J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. The Ohio native’s “memoir of a family and culture in crisis,” which detailed his dismal childhood with a substance-abusing single mother and his ascension, through hard work and education, into the ranks of the coastal elite, received rapturous praise upon its publication. Liberal and conservative commentators alike seized on its narrative and setting as a key to the candidacy and election of Donald Trump. In Vance, they discovered a trustworthy local interpreter from Trump Country—one willing to confirm that poor white Appalachians were degenerate, bigoted, and to blame for putting a degenerate bigot in the White House. East Coast journalists parachuted into West Virginia to prove their hypothesis that the core of Trump’s voters were the impoverished and uneducated.
The dire condition of the region, the story went, was the natural outcome of its inhabitants’ sins, and electing Trump, who would only inflict upon them further calamity, was yet another self-inflicted punishment, one that summed up all the rest.
By invoking the authority of personal experience, Vance effectively enshrined this account in public opinion. When Hillbilly Elegy was published, he had long since left Middletown, Ohio, for Yale Law and Silicon Valley (he is currently employed at Peter Thiel’s investment fund Mithril Capital Management), but his name became synonymous with Appalachia overnight. CNN hired him as a talking head. A film version of his book, directed by Ron Howard, is forthcoming. “Vance is in our schools, our libraries,” Elizabeth Catte writes in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. “He is at our graduations. He is on our timelines and in our newspaper. He is a member of our faculties, with new honorary degrees. He’s like the monster from It Follows.” When Catte, a trained historian from Tennessee, moves to the Gulf Coast of Texas after receiving her doctorate, everyone she meets tells her about Hillbilly Elegy. “Why don’t more people just leave?” they ask.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a brief, forceful, and necessary correction. Though the referent of the accusatory “you” in the title is left intentionally vague, it clearly points to J. D. Vance. Many pages are given over to enumerating the ways the region doesn’t conform to Vance’s sensational portrait (not all Appalachians live below the poverty line, and certainly not all coal miners; true, Appalachians are mostly white, but what population growth there is comes primarily from blacks and Hispanics), and the book’s central section is devoted to situating Vance within a long tradition of those eager to blame Appalachia’s woes on anyone but the rich. Catte traces the legend of the hillbilly back to its sources at the turn of the twentieth century. As the discovery of abundant coal in Appalachia gave rise to an extractive industry that enriched mine owners while reducing miners to abjection, the area became a byword for backwardness and deprivation.
Big-city journalists in search of exotic narratives began visiting, and their reports painted the locals in a primitive light. Unwashed and unlettered, prone to inbreeding and violent family feuds, the dull folk of the hills and hollers stood in desperate need of moral guidance and modern improvement. Appalachian impoverishment, in this formulation, was not the result of market economics but of the natives’ own cultural failings. A rhetoric typically applied to people other than white expanded its targets to include paler Appalachians: They were “barbaric mountaineers” in “‘a blood-stained wilderness’ that was ‘as remote as central Africa.’” Hillbillies were not red, but they were lawless and ignorant rednecks; they were not black, but their flesh and lungs were caked with coal dust"...
More, https://www.bookforum.com/print/2405/a-new-book-challenges-the-myth-of-trump-era-appalachia-19146
Elizabeth Catte website, https://elizabethcatte.com/
* Also: Betsy Rader, "I Grew Up In Rural Poverty In Appalachia: 'Hillbilly Elegy' Doesn't Speak For Me."
(Article also appeared in the Wash Post. *If someone could post excerpts, I'd appreciate it, I'm unable to).
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article170871167.html
Wiki, J.D. Vance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._Vance
- A highland pasture near Maggie Valley, North Carolina.
= new reply since forum marked as read
