On Appalachia and Its Stereotypes
By 
Just for the sake of talking about something different today, I enjoyed this short essay by the writer Chris Offutt about spending his career battling the stereotypes of Appalachia, including by that utter fraud J.D. Vance.
Every ten or fifteen years, a popular narrative enters the American consciousness that denigrates Appalachian culture. In 1963 Harry Caudill published Night Comes to the Cumberlands, a nonfiction account of the plundering of Appalachia’s natural resources. Caudill eventually came to blame the people of the hills for their own misfortunes and worked in secret with a notorious eugenicist on a plan to sterilize Appalachians. Disconsolate and bitter, he took his own life, but not before contributing further to the negative stereotypes that would prevail in popular culture of the 1970s and 80s: Deliverance and its infamous depiction of hill people as violent, sexually deviant, and stupid; TV shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazzard reinforcing gentler versions of the stereotypes. The most recent addition to these false accounts of Appalachian life is the widely read book Hillbilly Elegy, the author of which grew up in the decaying Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio. Nevertheless, he blames his personal difficulties on the culture of Appalachia.
The ongoing dismissal of Appalachians as “lazy, dangerous, and dumb,” is the same method of denying humanity that has been applied to African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and wave upon wave of immigrant to this country.
Stereotypes function as weapons to shame people, to alienate them from so-called mainstream culture. At the same time, behind every stereotype lurks a complicated archetype, and it is precisely those archetypes I have always strived to examine.
My 1992 book of short stories, Kentucky Straight, was the product of my own quest as a young writer for work that depicted the world I knew. All the books I found set in the hills were from the 1930s through the 1950s. My Appalachia—post Vietnam, post War on Poverty, post-completion of the Interstate system—was very different. I was disappointed not to read about my hills in fiction. In the grandiose fashion of a naïve and ambitious youth, I vowed to provide future young writers of Appalachia with a literature to call their own. I have stuck to that task for over thirty years.
My work has been a prolonged effort to counteract the supreme bigotry toward people from Appalachia. My characters may not be formally well-educated, but they are all very smart. They might lack access to what we think of as a basic standard of living but are resourceful, diligent, and follow a strong moral code. The complex culture of the hills is inhabited by people who are products of the rugged terrain, tough and determined, as smart and loving as anyone else in the wider world.
Talk about anything other than the nation’s collapse. For the sake of your sanity.