Myths about Appalachia linger in the national subconsciousness and rise to the surface when politicians and pundits find them to be particularly useful. In the 1960s, for instance, President Lyndon Johnson made Appalachian poverty the face of his War on Poverty, believing that voters would be more willing to support programs that seemed to be aimed at poor White people than poor African Americans.
Recently, myths about Appalachia have been recruited to explain the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency. As historian Elizabeth Catte points out in her important new book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, the myths of poverty, backwardness, and homogeneous Whiteness have made it easy to paint Appalachia as “Trump Country.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election, an entire journalistic genre emerged that ignored Trump’s support among White voters of all income levels and in all regions of the country and instead focused on White working-class voters, especially in Appalachia. Somehow, the ignorance and racism of this “other America” had propelled Trump to victory, not the votes of middle-class suburbanites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas.
The Whiteness of Appalachia is one of its most enduring stereotypes. Black folks, the story goes, live elsewhere. But in fact, African Americans, some of them enslaved, have inhabited the region since the first soldiers and pioneers drove Native Americans off of their land. Catte notes that when coal industry employment was at its height, in the early to mid-twentieth century, African American miners made up “20 to 50 percent of the workforce.” Even today, she writes, more people in Appalachia “identify as African American than Scots-Irish.” Yet the myth of Whiteness is so strong that even well-known Black people from the region—the educator and politician Booker T. Washington, singers Nina Simone and Bill Withers, and writers August Wilson, Nikki Giovanni, and John Edgar Wideman—are rarely associated with it.
Twenty-five years ago, poet and scholar Frank X. Walker, coined the term “Affrilachian.” It was a response to the long history of writing African Americans out of the stories we tell about Appalachia, giving a name to the Black presence in the region and raising its visibility. The term struck a chord and is now widely embraced.
Photography, Catte shows, played a crucial role in the creation of the mythology of Appalachia. Many others agree. Appalachian filmmaker Elizabeth Barret once noted that outsiders with cameras “mined images in the way the companies mined the coal.” Too often, the images they made were the ones that myths and stereotypes had prepared them to see—poverty, despair, and a cast of characters that was uniformly White.
