Case Study 2: Elizabeth Catte and the Fight to Reclaim the Narrative

The Moment

In the months after the November 2016 presidential election, America's educated professional class had a problem. Donald Trump had carried the Appalachian region by margins that ranged from overwhelming to historic. Counties that had voted Democratic for generations — coal counties, union counties, counties that had supported the New Deal and the War on Poverty and every Democratic presidential candidate for fifty years — had swung to Trump by thirty, forty, fifty points. The professional class needed an explanation, and the explanation it reached for was J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.

Vance's book — published in June 2016, five months before the election — became the lens through which millions of Americans tried to understand what had happened. It offered a tidy narrative: these communities were trapped in a culture of dysfunction, dependency, and resentment. Their poverty was the product of their values. Their political choices were the product of their anger. The book was sympathetic in tone but devastating in implication: the people it described were, at bottom, responsible for their own suffering.

Into this moment stepped Elizabeth Catte, with a small, sharp book and a profound refusal to accept the terms of the conversation.

Who Is Elizabeth Catte?

Catte grew up in East Tennessee — in the mountains, not outside them. She earned a doctorate in public history from Middle Tennessee State University and worked as a historian and writer, eventually founding a publishing company in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. She was part of the region she was writing about. This distinction — insider versus outsider — was not incidental to her argument. It was central to it.

Catte's 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia was published by Belt Publishing, a small press based in Cleveland, Ohio, that specializes in writing about the Rust Belt and the American working class. The book was short — barely 150 pages. It was written in a voice that was scholarly but accessible, angry but precise, personal but rigorously argued. It was not a memoir. It was not an academic monograph. It was a polemic — a sustained, documented, carefully constructed argument that the national conversation about Appalachia was built on foundations of ignorance, condescension, and willful misunderstanding.

The Argument

Catte's book made several interconnected arguments, each aimed at a different component of the national narrative about Appalachia:

Against the culture-of-poverty thesis. Catte's central argument was that Vance's diagnosis — that Appalachian and working-class white poverty is fundamentally cultural — was both empirically wrong and politically dangerous. It was empirically wrong because it ignored the structural causes of Appalachian poverty that historians and economists had been documenting for decades: the extraction of mineral wealth by absentee corporations, the destruction of local economies by single-industry dependence, the failure of state and federal governments to invest in infrastructure and education, the environmental devastation that destroyed both land and health. It was politically dangerous because it provided intellectual cover for the defunding of social programs, the deregulation of extractive industries, and the abandonment of communities that needed public investment.

Catte drew on the work of scholars like Dwight Billings, Kathleen Blee, Ronald Eller, and John Gaventa to demonstrate that the structural case was not speculative or theoretical. It was documented in decades of peer-reviewed research. The poverty in Appalachia had identifiable causes — causes that operated through economic structures, legal arrangements, and political decisions, not through cultural deficiency. To ignore this research and blame the culture was not an innocent analytical choice. It was a political one.

Against the homogeneity myth. Vance's Appalachia was white, working-class, and Protestant. Catte's Appalachia was diverse — racially, ethnically, religiously, and politically. Catte documented the long history of Black Appalachians (see Chapter 6 and Chapter 12), the Indigenous presence that preceded and persisted through colonization (see Chapters 3-4 and 39), the immigrant communities that built the coalfields (see Chapter 19), and the contemporary Latino immigration that is changing the region's demographics (see Chapter 36). She also documented the diversity of political opinion within the region — the organizers, the activists, the environmental justice advocates, and the labor unionists who complicate the picture of Appalachia as a monolithic "Trump country."

Against the geography of blame. One of Catte's most pointed arguments was that Vance was not even writing about Appalachia. Middletown, Ohio — the setting of most of Hillbilly Elegy — is not in the Appalachian region as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission. It is a Rust Belt city in southwestern Ohio, eighty miles north of the ARC boundary. Vance's grandparents had migrated from Breathitt County, Kentucky, and Vance drew on their stories and his childhood visits to eastern Kentucky to construct a narrative of "Appalachian culture." But the culture he described — the culture of a deindustrialized Rust Belt town with a large population of displaced Appalachian migrants — was not the same as the culture of the mountains. To conflate the two was to engage in exactly the kind of careless generalization that the Appalachian stereotype depends on.

Against the savior narrative. Catte argued that the Hillbilly Elegy phenomenon was the latest iteration of a pattern that had been repeating since the settlement school movement of the late nineteenth century (see Chapter 14): the outsider who comes to Appalachia, identifies the problem, prescribes the solution, and builds a career on the performance of concern. Vance had positioned himself as the insider who made it out — the one who could translate the mountain world for the professional class. But his translation was filtered through the assumptions of the professional class, not the experience of the mountains. He told the audience what it wanted to hear, not what it needed to know.

The Reception

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia was reviewed widely and received with enthusiasm in the Appalachian Studies community and among the growing network of Appalachian writers, activists, and cultural workers who had been searching for a public voice to match their private frustration. The book gave language to a feeling that many Appalachian people had been carrying for years — the feeling of being misrepresented, misunderstood, and talked about rather than talked to.

The book also generated criticism. Some reviewers argued that Catte was too dismissive of Vance's personal experience — that whatever the book's analytical flaws, Vance's account of his childhood and family was genuine, and that dismissing it as politically motivated was unfair. Others argued that Catte's focus on Vance gave him more attention than he deserved, reinforcing his status as the central voice in the conversation about Appalachia rather than displacing him.

But Catte's most significant contribution was not her critique of Vance. It was her demonstration that a different conversation was possible — that Appalachian people could speak for themselves, that the scholarship existed to support a structural analysis, and that the national audience could be engaged without the intermediary of an outsider's pity or a bootstrapper's condescension. The book opened a door that has not closed.

The Broader Movement

Catte was not alone. Her book was the most visible expression of a broader movement of Appalachian self-representation that had been building for years and that accelerated after 2016.

Neema Avashia, whose memoir Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (2022) documented her experience growing up as the daughter of Indian immigrants in Huntington, West Virginia, challenged the whiteness of the Appalachian narrative by insisting that her story was an Appalachian story — that the mountains belonged to her as much as to anyone, and that the exclusion of non-white voices from the Appalachian narrative was an act of historical violence.

Silas House, the Kentucky novelist and Appalachian Studies professor, used his fiction and his public voice to present an Appalachia that was complex, diverse, and alive — a place where queer people, people of color, and political progressives existed alongside the conservative white working class that the national media insisted was the only Appalachian story worth telling. House's novel Southernmost (2018) told the story of a fundamentalist preacher who loses his church after sheltering a gay couple during a flood — a narrative that insists on the coexistence of conservative and progressive values within the same community.

Crystal Wilkinson, a Black Appalachian writer from Casey County, Kentucky, and the Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College, brought Black Appalachian experience to the center of the literary conversation. Her work — along with that of the Affrilachian Poets, the literary collective founded by Frank X Walker in 1991 to reclaim a space for Black creativity in Appalachian culture — demonstrated that the Appalachian literary tradition was far more diverse than the national audience imagined.

The Appalachian Media Institute, based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and affiliated with Appalshop (the legendary Appalachian media arts center founded in 1969), trained young people from the region to tell their own stories through film, radio, and digital media. The Institute's work represented a different model of media production — one in which the community is not the subject of the story but the author of the story.

The Stakes

The fight to reclaim the Appalachian narrative is not an academic exercise. It has material consequences.

When the dominant narrative about a region is a narrative of cultural dysfunction, the policy responses that follow are designed to fix the culture — job training programs, financial literacy courses, mentoring initiatives. These programs are not inherently bad, but they address symptoms rather than causes, and they are inadequate to the scale of the structural problems they ignore.

When the dominant narrative about a region is a narrative of structural exploitation, the policy responses that follow are different — land reform, corporate accountability, infrastructure investment, healthcare access, environmental restoration. These responses address the systems that create poverty rather than the individuals who experience it.

Catte and the broader reclamation movement are not arguing that everything in Appalachia is fine. They are arguing that the problems are real but the explanation is wrong. The problems are not caused by culture. They are caused by extraction. And the solutions require not sympathy or pity or cultural intervention, but justice — the return of wealth that was taken, the investment of resources that were withheld, and the recognition that the people of Appalachia are the experts on their own lives.

The Ongoing Conversation

The conversation that Catte opened continues to evolve. Vance's subsequent political career — he was elected to the United States Senate from Ohio in 2022 and selected as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2024 — has given new urgency to the debate about who speaks for Appalachia. Vance's political ascent has been built, in part, on the platform that Hillbilly Elegy provided — the identity of the Appalachian insider who escaped, who understands, who can explain. His critics argue that his political positions — opposition to social spending, support for corporate deregulation, skepticism toward environmental protection — are precisely the positions that would deepen the structural problems his book purported to describe.

The irony is bitter and instructive. The man who wrote the book that the professional class used to understand Appalachian poverty now advocates for policies that would make that poverty worse. The man who told America that the problem was cultural values now advances a political agenda that reinforces the structural causes his book ignored. The narrative, it turns out, was never just a story. It was a blueprint.

Discussion Questions

1. The insider question. Both Vance and Catte claim Appalachian authority — Vance through family heritage, Catte through residence and scholarship. How should we evaluate claims of insider authority when they lead to contradictory conclusions? Is there a difference between knowing a place through memory and knowing it through sustained engagement?

2. The structure vs. culture debate. Catte argues for structural causes of Appalachian poverty; Vance argues for cultural causes. Is it possible that both are partially right? If so, what is the danger of framing the debate as an either/or choice? If not, which explanation do you find more persuasive, and why?

3. The diversity argument. Catte, Avashia, and others argue that the Appalachian narrative must include Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ voices. How does the inclusion of these voices change the story of Appalachia? What is lost when Appalachia is narrated as a monolithically white region?

4. The politics of narrative. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was received differently before and after the 2016 election — read as a memoir before November 2016 and as a political explanation afterward. How does political context change the meaning of a text? What responsibilities do authors have for the political uses of their work?

5. The reclamation challenge. Catte's book is short, published by a small press, and read primarily by people who already agree with its argument. Vance's book is long, published by a major press, sold millions of copies, and was adapted into a Netflix film. What does this disparity suggest about the structural obstacles to narrative reclamation? How can counter-narratives reach audiences that are already committed to the dominant narrative?