Common Appalachian at Two-and-a-Half Years, and What's Next

Covering social change and Appalachian solidarity, Common Appalachian is a chronicle of the activists, leaders, community members, and change-makers who deeply love this region and its people.

“Appalachia is a creature of the urban imagination. The folk culture, the depressed area, the romantic wilderness, the Appalachia of fiction, journalism, and public policy, have for more than a century been created, forgotten, and rediscovered, primarily by the economic opportunism, political creativity, or passing fancy of urban elites.” -Allen W. Batteau, THE INVENTION OF APPALACHIA

Starting Common Appalachian more than two-and-a-half years ago, I imagined it could become many things: “a front porch where we can talk about what’s happening in our community… a pew on Sunday where we can discuss better ways to help our ailing or marginalized neighbors…a town square where we can debate the changes we want to see or better address how to solve the problems troubling the foothills…a town bulletin where we showcase what matters to us…a flying banner for Appalachia.”

Each of these is true, but only partially realized; every piece of writing—news story, editorial, essay, and article—has given me a chance to learn, experiment, and further refine what exactly this project is. The many people placed in my path, the readers I’ve spoken with in person, and the stories that have naturally arisen from these encounters have dictated much of what I’ve detailed at Common Appalachian.

I’ve covered the ongoing campaign to remove a white supremacist monument from Downtown Morganton, North Carolina, and other efforts to address racism and its persistent legacy; the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina; conservation work and the opening of new parks in Burke County; preservation of cultural history, such as Catawba Valley pottery; restoration of passenger rail between Asheville and Salisbury; circular economics and rooting wealth; and, the impact resurgent authoritarianism is having on the queer community.

I’ve also explored aspects of Appalachian identity and solidarity, and what they mean in a flattened and increasingly placeless world.

It’s always good to reevaluate what one is doing and whether to stay on that same rust-colored road, or to modify one’s course; this project will certainly continue to evolve, but stay the course, if not also further refine it.

That’s one of the beautiful things about Substack and the creativity these online communities foster.

Here is my attempt at a Common Appalachian 2.0, covering much of the same territory with, hopefully, a bit more clarity and depth of understanding.

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A history of solidarity, democratic movements, and resistance to authoritarianism runs deep in these ancient mountains.

Workers have bled and died across Appalachia, clawing for higher wages, better working conditions—and wresting for their human dignity. Consider Blair Mountain in 1921: Thousands of armed pro-labor activists and miners protested oppressive working conditions, facing off against violent lawmen and private security forces hired by the coal companies—made all the more combustible by the Matewan Massacre a year prior.

While popular portrayals of the region—in film, print, political campaigns, and television—are littered with images of white Appalachians, people of color have always been here. They’ve had to work tirelessly and vigilantly to overcome their erasure from history.

For instance, Black activists created the Black Appalachian Commission (BLAC) in 1969, an effort to bring attention to the government policies that keep them among the poorest in the region; today, BLAC’s stated mission is to “confront systemic inequalities, combat environmental and economic injustices, and amplify the voices of those too often unheard.”

“I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.” bell hooks, BELONGING

Long is also the list of egalitarians and anti-authoritarians, those concerned for the downtrodden and disenfranchised.

Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Demon Copperhead and Prodigal Summer; Edith Easterling, anti-poverty activist from Kentucky; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a pillar of African-American letters; bell hooks, a critical theorist who has written extensively about race, gender, class, sexuality, and belonging; Florence Reece, who wrote the pro-worker ballad “Which Side Are You On?”; Elizabeth Catte, author of What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia; and many more.

That’s to say little about the many unsung, calloused hands and defiant faces of Appalachian progress. These common Appalachians have spoken truth to power, stood by the vulnerable and oppressed, and demanded justice: These are the bleeding heart mountain folk who know when enough is enough.

Contrary to the narratives imposed upon them by outside commentators, Appalachians are a diverse collection of high-country and hill dwellers, enriched by varied cultural practices and social values. Many have lived—and continue to live—also according to the communitarian principles of localism, mutual aid, cooperation, stewardship, humility, harmony, and place, virtues espoused by the “mad farmer” from eastern Kentucky, Wendell Berry.

Perhaps, above all else, Appalachians maintain a stinging sense of place—too often wounded by naked profit-seeking and a disregard for the earth that sustains.

Many communities throughout this region are also working toward greater sustainability, economic justice, and racial reconciliation, knowing that if one wants an Appalachia they can be proud of, work must be done to both acknowledge and correct the wrongs of the past—for their effects persist in the present.

Extractive industries, such as mining and timber, typically under absentee ownership by wealthy elites (many from beyond this rolling region), have exploited Appalachia for more than a century, scarring mountains and poisoning communities.

"I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms. . . . The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results.” -William James

Political opportunists and authoritarians have convinced some Appalachians that their marginalized neighbors—be they socioeconomically disadvantaged, people of color, LGBTQ+, religious minorities, undocumented, disabled, insert targeted group here—are a bigger threat to life, liberty, and their pursuit of happiness than the ruling class.

Appalachians have been caricatured in mass media as ignorant, backwoods “hillbillies,” morally degenerate, poor, toothless, and inherently violent. These portrayals played out on TV and the silver screen, giving other Americans the hollow comfort of having somebody “below them” to mock and scorn.

Or, as J.W. Williamson declared in Hillbillyland: “Many hillbillies in the mass media are there to make the normative middle-class urban spectator feel better about the system of money and power that has him or her in its grasp. Someone is always beneath us, lending proof that the twig on which we stand is really a rung of a ladder leading upward to something we must defend with our lives.”

These visual representations and tropes penetrate deeply into the American consciousness. Elsewhere in his work, Williamson notes that more than four hundred silent films featuring these inauthentic Appalachians were made between 1904 and 1920.

Some of Appalachia’s tragic stories include those who have committed unspeakable cruelties to fellow mountain folk. One need only reflect on the history of slavery and the impact its legacy continues to have on Black Appalachians through various forms of white supremacy: lynching, redlining, convict leasing, mass incarceration, racial profiling, “urban renewal,” unequal access to healthcare, financial services, and education, and the list goes on.

Or consider the local elites, free market evangelists, neoliberals, peddlers of pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ideology who oppose social safety nets and a more democratic society. These forces have further entrenched the interests of those who benefit from a rigidly hierarchical and inequitable economic order.

Their policies and electoral votes have perpetuated vicious cycles of poverty and ineducation; their rhetoric of radical individualism undermines communal solidarity and compassion.

Admittedly, social change is hard to come by when so many friends, kin, elected officials, and fellow citizens benefit from the status quo—or fail to recognize the creep of authoritarianism and anti-democratic policies.

Or worse, amplify them.

While Common Appalachian focuses mostly on politics and news in western North Carolina—reports, thought pieces, explainers, and commentary—it routinely touches on cultural issues relevant to southern Appalachia, and the rest of the region.

Common Appalachian is a chronicle of the activists, leaders, community members, and change-makers who deeply love this region and its people, and a reckoning for the obstacles in their way. It’s an investigation into Appalachian identity and what a more abundant, rooted, sustainable, just Appalachia looks like.

“You cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in the terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.” -Richard Rorty, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY

As such, Common Appalachian often engages in advocacy journalism. This ascendant style of reporting blends traditional journalistic practices with a clear stance on particular issues or causes. The truth: all types of journalism carry a specific perspective or bias; this can’t be avoided. The so-called “view from nowhere” doesn’t exist. Even the very act of choosing which stories are worth reporting on reveals a host of value statements and journalistic biases.

However, by remaining transparent about one’s values and committed to journalistic integrity, Common Appalachian invites you, dear readers, to investigate further on your own. I simply ask you to remain open to the perspectives shared here. After all, when one honestly considers the facts, available evidence, first-hand accounts, and history connected to any event worth reading (or writing) about, some accounts are more justified than others.

The louder, more repetitive and forceful, or better-funded a bullhorn (or “bully pulpit”) becomes, doesn’t make it any more true.

Truth hinges on what proves fruitful in the daily lives of all people, that which helps us solve problems in our immediate contexts and challenges the injustices endemic to our inherited social, cultural, and political systems.

So, while tradition means not having to regularly relearn which plants are toxic, progress is about letting go of institutions, worldviews, or practices that no longer serve communities, or, as in many cases, abandoning those things that were, by design, at odds with the well-being of Appalachia’s most marginalized people from the very beginning.