What Does it Mean to be an Appalachian?
Or why it's not what JD Vance or 20th Century ethnographers say it means
One of the challenges of this book is pinning down what it means to be an Appalachian. In the most reductive terms, it just means to be from and/or live in the Appalachian region, and by this definition, my claim to being an Appalachian is pretty hard to refute. I was born in West Virginia and I live in the Appalachian part of Tennessee. But of course it’s not as simple as that.
Both Appalachian and Jewish identities share a common problem: people who do not and cannot themselves identify as a member of the group have long sought to define what it means to be someone who can, to say “These are the defining characteristics of an Appalachian/a Jew.”
Of course, as Jews, we’re lucky because we can easily disregard these voices, at least when it comes to understanding for ourselves who we are. After all, we have Torah, Talmud, and our rabbis to help us understand Jewish habits of mind and ways of being. As Appalachians, we don’t have either the long history or the religious underpinnings of Jewish peoplehood. (Although certainly many of the ethnographers have tried to say otherwise, and included Protestantism as a defining characteristic of Appalachians.) So who does get to say what it means to be an Appalachian?
Too often, the answer is people who look down on us. In an excellent interview about JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, author Silas House says:
And I think it’s so telling that this book was pushed as an Appalachian narrative when this man is two generations removed from Appalachia. This is a Rust Belt story, but Appalachian stories, Appalachian literature, is its own genre. In early cinema, one of the most popular movie genres was “hillbilly movies.” We still have a genre of horror that’s very popular called “hillbilly horror.” So there’s a market there, in a different way, for the idea of the hillbilly, more than there is for the idea of the Rust Belt. So that alone is manipulative in that it’s sold as an Appalachian story or a hillbilly story, and if you read the book, you realize that hardly any of it is set in Appalachia. He’s saying, I guess, that generationally you can’t escape Appalachia, because here he is, his grandparents left there when they were very young, his mother never lived there, he never lived there, and suddenly, after the book came out, he’s on every news show as the representative of a region that he barely knows.
Note that not only is Vance’s book not actually an Appalachian story, but there are whole genres of film and television play on stereotypes of Appalachian people in reductive ways. And don’t even get me started on how the New York Times reports on the region, particularly when they send journalists to do “what does the common man think” pieces and it’s obvious that they searched for people who would reaffirm, rather than challenge, their ideas of Appalachian interests and political thought.
It seems to me that this has created a strange sort of feedback loop: outsiders have crafted a narrow idea of who is, and who is not, an Appalachian (often equating that “hillbilly”) and, lacking the long history and the input of sages, Appalachians have considered the possibility that perhaps only people who fit those narrow ideas are “authentically” Appalachian. Thus, when people who don’t fit that notion (poor, white, Protestant, rural, and undereducated) of Appalachian claim the identity, there can be a lot of pushback both within and outside the region and we don’t have the history or resources Jews do to insist on defining for ourselves what it means.
I’ve been deep in the weeds reading ethnographies of Appalachia this week, and it’s really dispiriting in no small part because so much of it is bigotry wrapped in good intentions. Many of the early attempts to answer the question of who is an Appalachian were undertaken in an attempt to understand—and ameliorate—the problems and poverty and poor public health outcomes in the region. As a result, they necessarily focused on a narrow swatch of the population, but the impact of that is a kind of reifying of those problems as essential elements of an Appalachian identity.
How do we expand this understanding without downplaying some of the real challenges faced by people in the region and holding on to some sense of identity beyond simply “born/live in the region?”
I’d love to know your thoughts.
I guess I share this conflict, too. I am part Jewish and part Appalachian. My mom was from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, but moved away and ended up in the Northeast, where she met my dad. I have spent my whole life living between these 2 worlds.
Yes, it is interesting how it's always the outsiders seem to try to define what a culture is really all about. Perhaps it's because they have distance from it. They are quiet, sensitive souls who feel the longing to belong, and yet are distanced enough from the culture to observe from the outside.
Their sense of alienation gives them deeper insight.
I never really considered my mother’s family to be Appalachian. I don’t think the Shenandoah Valley quite qualifies as Appalachia. It is right on the border though. My mother’s family were not poor people. My grandfather was not poor, (he had roots with the Mennonites.) My grandmother was poor, but not dirt poor. I only visited once or twice per year, but what I saw there wasn’t anything like the “Bloody Breathitt” that Vance portrays.
I read HillBilly Elegy, or most of it, I think. It was a good book. I liked how he traced the generational trauma through his grandparents and his mother. His descriptions of his mother are painful, and yet, I can see how she truly was the lost child of an alcoholic family system. Unstable relationships, drug use, outbursts of rage and threats of suicide. She had to have had BPD. So sad, too, because she was a successful nurse before the drug addiction got the best of her. It was as though her personality just disintegrated.
No, the Appalachians don't have quite the long spiritual history as the Jews, but they are similar, in the sense that their religion--Bible based Protestantism-- is deeply ingrained in their ways of thinking and their language, just like it is for the Jews. They are a people, with their own language, with a heritage, a storytelling people. In this way, I can easily equate Appalachians to Jews.
I think that a good example of an Appalachian is Tipper from “Celebrating Appalachia.” She has a blog called “The Blind Pig and the Acorn.” You should check her out. She is more like the people that I knew from Appalachia.
My father's people have lived in Wayne County area since at least the 1700s as far as I can tell. But he left home at 14 in response to the Depression, joined the military when he was old enough, and never went back. We visited occasionally (maybe four times?) in between overseas assignments. My mother was an English war bride and we visited her family about the same number of times. So although I am, well, comforted when I recognize any bits of their cultural heritages in myself, it would be so inaccurate for me to describe myself as British or Appalachian.