"The Lies We're Told About Appalachia": Stereotypes, The Media, LBJ's War On Poverty

"The Lies We're Told About Appalachia," Ivy Brashear, Yes! Magazine, Winter 2020. Excerpts, Ed.:

Granny Hazel taught me how to feed the chickens.. It wasn’t until years later that I learned she killed those chickens by twisting their necks with her bare hands to feed her family. This gentle, kind woman did what she had to do, just like countless Appalachian women before, during, and after her time. Granny Hazel was a complex, fully realized person, as are all Appalachian people. But, because of the images propagated about the region by media and Hollywood, most only know Appalachia as one thing. Either the kind granny teaching her granddaughter to feed the chickens, or the necessary violence that is killing your own animals to eat them.

Stories about Appalachia, who tells them and who gets to claim them, matter a great deal when it comes to understanding the place and people more fully. And that understanding is critical, because without a deeper and more complete understanding of Appalachia, it will be hard for its people to build a brighter future that crosses lines of division and works toward parity between race and class.
Appalachia has been portrayed in various oversimplified and negative ways throughout modern history. Scholars such as Meredith McCarroll point out that the common stereotypical images of the region that most people know today came from the War on Poverty era of the mid-1960s. The images were voraciously mined by media makers shortly after President Lyndon Johnson stood on Tom Fletcher’s porch in Martin County, Kentucky, to declare his administration would fight tirelessly to end American poverty.

- When a place and its people are cast as lesser, it makes it a whole lot easier to justify taking everything from them.



- President Lyndon Johnson, on the porch of Tom Fletcher's cabin, listens to Fletcher describe some of the problems in Martin County, KY, in 1964. Appalachia stereotypes came from common images from the War on Poverty era of the mid-1960s when President Lyndon Johnson and Ladybird Johnson visited Kentucky. https://www.npr.org/tags/126932899/appalachia

These images—of an all-white populace, depressed-looking men hunched over from years working in the mines, dirty-faced and barefoot children, and women in shift dresses, holding a baby in one arm, cooking over a wood stove with the other—have defined Appalachia for at least two generations. In her new book, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film (University of Georgia Press, 2018), McCarroll tells us these images are buttressed by generations of images that came before: the lazy, shiftless, oftentimes violent hillbilly man and his over-sexualized wife with their many underfed children.
That these images have now shifted to be more about the out-of-work but noble coal miner, is nothing new; this trend of “rediscovering” Appalachia happens every 20–30 years, right about when the nation needs an explanation for some kind of major shift in economy or politics. But what McCarroll asks us to do is to dig a little deeper and ask why these images are the ones being taken out of the hills in the first place.



- A highland pasture near Maggie Valley, North Carolina

“One of the most effective means of controlling a people is controlling their image,” McCarroll writes. The stories being told about Appalachians were not made or controlled by them. They had little say in what images the rest of the country saw, and how those images would shape policy, grantmaking and the local economy for generations. What they did have control over, though, was fighting back. The powerful might have had a vested interest in keeping the people in check and the nation in the dark through the black and white images they sent out through TV and newspapers, but what they never really anticipated was that Appalachian people then and now have a vested interest in their place, their families, and their communities. And they never would have anticipated that it would be the women leading the charge.

From Paint and Cabin Creeks in West Virginia to Brookside in Harlan County, women have been on the frontlines of every labor struggle the mountains have known. Jessica Wilkerson, in To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice ( 2018) shows how women cared for their children and their male relatives who were disabled in the mines, or they stood on the picket lines when the men weren’t allowed to. They started clinics when they were needed..They organized across racial lines, like Edith and Sue Ella Easterling did at the Marrowbone Folk School, ..they even went to work in the mines in the 1970s and ’80s as a way to seek equality in the workplace.
Women, people of color, young people, and queer people have held this place together, and held it up, making sure we kept our eyes on the importance of working together to address the challenges we face, as Wilkerson points out.

And yet, their names will rarely, if ever, be seen in print, on TV, or in the movies. Children will not learn about their efforts in school. It’s a whole lot easier to keep Appalachia in an easily digestible box than it is to make the story more complex, and in so doing, more real...

More, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/building-bridges/2019/11/12/the-lies-were-told-about-appalachia/

- Article also published in Common Dreams, SEE Comments, "The Lies We're Told About Appalachia. The old exploitative images are indelible: out of work, White, needy. They obscure the region’s diversity and long tradition of activism." https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/12/15/lies-were-told-about-appalachia

- Writer Ivy Brashear is MACED’s Appalachian Transition Director. Her work focuses on shifting the narrative of Appalachia as a critical aspect of just economic transition. She holds a BA degree in Journalism & Appalachian Studies from Eastern Kentucky University, and a MA in Community & Leadership Dvmt. from the Univ. of KY. She also teaches Feature Writing & Storytelling at EKU, and is a freelance journalist featured in Huffington Post, Spotlight on Poverty & Opportunity, Yes! Magazine & Scalawag. Ivy is a native of Viper, KY where her family has lived for 5 generations.



- The Appalachian Region, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia