What Confuses Me About Elizabeth Catte's Appalachia

"What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia" presents a diverse and pluralistic region. While praiseworthy, there's one aspect of Catte's vision that disheartens me.

Appalachia consists of a diversity of people with some common cultural and historical roots.

Last year, I read Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018), which is at its core a repudiation of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016), a controversial book made into a similarly polarizing film by legendary director Ron Howard in 2020. 

Catte’s short book is clearly a reaction against the political career of someone she not only feels misrepresents Appalachia but uses tropes about the region and misguided views on poverty to advance his particular brand of reactionary politics. 

I appreciate the main thrust of her book, but one aspect of it left me confused, and a little disheartened.

Catte Complicates Appalachia

As an opinionated and political history of the region and the idea of "Appalachia," Catte complicates the stereotypes and narratives that have been attached to the mountain people, or America’s so-called "forgotten tribe." She does her best to reclaim the egalitarian and populist movements in Appalachia, a region whose history is full of union organizing, communitarian mutualism, anti-capitalist campaigning, and anti-poverty activism.

For instance, Catte writes at length about many protests by Appalachians against the extractive mountaintop removal mining that leaves our lush and biologically diverse mountain range resembling something more like a barren moonscape. 

Alongside Catte, I think it's vital that we understand how central exploitation is to the Appalachian experience, much of which continues to this day (perhaps, also at the hands of people like Vance, as well). That’s a big part of the story Catte wants to tell of her Appalachia.

She also pushes back against the many journalistic pieces after and around the 2016 presidential election that claimed Appalachia was “Trump country.”

“If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700,000 square miles then we should ask a number of questions,” Catte argues. “Where were, for example, the ‘Bernie Country’ pieces about Appalachia? As a point of reference, there are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots-Irish, so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and Blackness through the lens of the election?”

As a historian from east Tennessee, these portrayals didn’t exactly resonate with the diverse and pluralist Appalachia she knows.

“There is no basis,” she writes, “for the belief that historic or contemporary white Appalachians share a distinct culture informed by their homogenous ethnic heritage.” In Catte’s view, Appalachia is only “Trump Country” in as much as the region’s stories are forged by outsiders, including politicians and journalists seeking to frame mountain people as a sort of “white ghetto” of working-class folk mostly of Scots-Irish heritage.

Demographics Aren’t Culture or Community

In reality, Appalachia is much more diverse—racially, ethnically, politically, religiously, and socio-economically.

While the recent census records reveal Central Appalachia, for instance, is more rural, white, and holds fewer bachelor’s degrees than the average across the United States, this is no way means Appalachia is a monolith. Any demographic category can suggest the existence of a majority trait (albeit an operationalized abstraction), but census records lack the ability to qualitatively articulate how Appalachians view themselves and relate to their cross-cutting identities.

Putting too much stock in demographic data or tired tropes about supposed Appalachian culture similarly fall prey to the problems involved with conceiving of community in the abstract. They invite sweeping generalizations that don’t really connect with the diverse lived experiences and lifestyles of folks in Appalachia.

They’re top-down analyses that don’t speak robustly of what life is really like in Appalachian communities. In philosophical terms, they’re not sufficiently phenomenological, an approach that prioritizes consciousness (including identity) as experienced from the first-person point of view.

Catte wants to complicate portrayals and dispel politically motivated myths and aims to present Appalachia as she knows it.

I truly appreciate what’s she’s doing with her book and know others who feel similarly.

While I thoroughly enjoyed this short volume (some 150 pages), I want to mention something that frustrated me, and a question I wished she spent more time answering (on a topic I’ll dig around in frequently at Common Appalachian). 

Does Catte Abandon the Idea of Appalachia?

In Catte’s mission to undo what she perceives to be the damage done by Vance and people like him (and there’s a lot), specifically his racialist and pick-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps remedies for Appalachia, her own commentary becomes frequently too narrow, in my view, her bleating the same note over and over again.

Catte highlights the diverse range of people who live in Appalachia (which is vast, given the 26.1 million people counted by the Appalachian Regional Commission), doing everything she can to humanize and expand the oversimplified image conjured up in the minds of Americans when they hear the word “Appalachia.” A praiseworthy effort, she shares stories from people of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds, sexual and gender identities, and political orientations, particularly those that contrast with Vance’s Trumpian nationalism. 

She helps the region’s more egalitarian voices and forward-looking perspectives feel seen.

Unfortunately, I wonder if her efforts to pluralize the many groups and experiences of people who live in Appalachia—hoping to annihilate any semblance of stereotypes—go so far as to ignore or erase commonalities for what it means to be Appalachian. 

And here is the big, fraught question(s): What counts as Appalachian, and what is it that holds Appalachian identity together? Is there a meaningful sense of Appalachian community?

(Note: If you’re interested in a progressive-ish podcast that jives with Catte’s call for a more pluralistic Appalachia, you’ll find the Appodlachia Podcast explores these questions, regularly. They’ve also taken J.D. Vance to task on many occasions, including in this episode.)

Again, I applaud Catte’s eagerness to show that Appalachia is not a monolith of white hillbillies of Scots-Irish descent with limited education and regressive views on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, but rather a cultural region that is also rich with many forcefully egalitarian and progressive voices. 

But surely there is some way to bring this plurality of people under a common designation? If not, Appalachia is another generalization, an abstraction that falls apart under the very real weight of our actual diversity.

Perhaps Appalachia isn’t all that distinct a cultural and bioregional area, after all?

Bonded by the ‘Same Kind of Historical Forces and Systems of Power’

In her campaign to complicate notions of Appalachian identity, Catte is mostly uninterested (at least, in her short book) in acknowledging the norms, culture, particularities, patterns of living, and beliefs that may demonstrate a decidedly Appalachian character.

In fact, in an interview with Guernica, she says, “People in the region—not just people like J. D. Vance—have tried really hard to make a case for a kind of coherent Appalachia culture, and I’m not a person who would make that case. I would say that what we share is that many of us have been put through the same kind of historical forces and systems of power, and that’s what we have in common and can use as the basis for a shared identity or experience.”

She’s obviously not interested in reinforcing notions of Appalachian culture, and seems to hope Appalachia will lose its distinctness, aside from a limited sense of shared history. I also wonder if she anticipates Appalachianess will melt into the broader, placeless culture of the mainstream United States, another unique region lost to the hegemony of the American Empire.

Furthermore, in an interview with NPR, she says, “I would like people to understand that Appalachia is very much part of the wider United States. There's no mysterious culture here that explains the—you know, the realities. And our stories—the story of Appalachia cannot be separated from the story of the United States and the historical forces that have shaped us.”

It’s unclear to me whether Catte views Appalachia as a distinct cultural region, or if she even hopes it will retain a sense of more localized identity. I perceive she wants people living in the region to view and be viewed more as Americans and less as Appalachians. Given the otherness Appalachians have experienced, I can understand the impulse, but I think Catte should be careful what she wishes for.

Unsurprisingly, I’m skeptical of this posture because I believe it perpetuates a trend against localism, inviting us to identify more with an abstract community (“the American people,” for example) and outsized political projects (loyalty to the American Empire, for instance).

Bluntly, it reads as anti-community to me. It encourages us to look more to faraway places than into our own neck of the woods. We should be more concerned with what’s happening in our Appalachian communities than what’s happening in places where we have even less political power or cultural influence.

There’s a vitality that comes from having a strong kinship to place, a life source that becomes vaguer and hollower the larger the borders of “a place” grow. A sense of place requires intimacy and familiarity, a standard that, perhaps, draws into question even the notion of Appalachia, given its vastness and size.

Alternatively, I’m interested in nurturing a shared sense of cultural and historical identity as Appalachians. I want to amplify a common history and shared values. But there’s an ailing tension with that. How does a place balance pluralism with common identity?

Commitment to Community as a Mark of Appalachianness

When I speak of commonality as Appalachians, I’m decidedly not referring to some essentialist qualities that allegedly determine the behavior, habits, culture, and physical traits of people living in our region, as if being Appalachian means, for instance, one is destined to be undereducated and hold antiquated views on urgent social issues, or any list of traits one could compile. 

I want a pluralistic, egalitarian, and communitarian Appalachia that also maintains a commitment to place and a healthy sense of shared culture (human and non-human, which is why I appreciate the notion of bioregion).

One can celebrate the diversity of experiences within a bioregion without denying the existence of prevailing cultures and heritages. There are things held in common among the people of Appalachia, but outlining that may take a bit of conceptual maneuvering (something I won’t do here, but may attempt in the future). 

Put simply, I would have loved for Catte to posit what she believes captures the Appalachian spirit and what sets Appalachia apart from other regions in the United States. To her, what does it mean to be Appalachian? 

Perhaps, her interviews have already provided that answer.

To be clear, I share her hopes for a more politically egalitarian vision of what Appalachians can do to right the wrongs of history, but I would also have loved for her to lean more into the distinctness of Appalachia. This mountain country is a particular place, and it would be a tragedy if it just became like every other region in the United States, dominated by a few generic metropolitan centers caught up in the consumeristic culture inherent in mainstream America. 

As Catte suggests, our shared history as a so-called “internal colony of America” is at least a starting point, but I want to strengthen notions of Appalachian identity in addition to that. I wonder if we can forge an Appalachianess that encompasses forward-looking and communitarian values fit for the twenty-first century.

At minimum, I think Appalachianess can be granted to those who are genuinely committed to the people and interests of the Appalachian community. I wonder if being Appalachian is as simple as deciding you are dedicated to the welfare and well-being of all living things within the Appalachian region.

Perhaps, Appalachia can become a vehicle for a sense of place and belonging that helps us to leave behind the dark and troubled history of racism, exploitation, and atomization so endemic to other social identities in the air.

I believe Appalachia can become a more just, equitable, sustainable, and thriving bioregion while remaining relatively distinct and sovereign. Appalachia can be pluralistic and still unify around common notions of Appalachian identity and history.

While I understand many of the difficulties and tensions inherent in that stance, I sincerely believe it. We can do a lot of good in our communities if we see ourselves first as Appalachians, then as North Carolinians/Virginians/Tennesseans/etc.—and, perhaps, then, as Americans.

At least, that’s one of the hopes here at Common Appalachian.