Chapter 35: Stereotypes, Media, and the Battle Over Appalachian Identity

"The hillbilly is one of the few ethnic caricatures still openly used in American popular culture. You can put a hillbilly on a greeting card. You can make hillbilly jokes on late-night television. You can sell hillbilly costumes for Halloween — the straw hat, the blacked-out teeth, the jug of moonshine. Try that with any other American ethnic group and see what happens." — Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, 2004

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Trace the history of Appalachian stereotypes in American media from the early twentieth century through the present, identifying the economic and political functions that these stereotypes serve
2. Analyze how media representations of Appalachia shape federal policy, funding decisions, and the self-image of people who live in the region
3. Describe the "Appalachian pity industrial complex" and its incentive structures, and evaluate the tension between "don't call us poor" and "we actually need resources"
4. Document how Appalachians are reclaiming their own narrative through social media, scholarship, and cultural production, and assess the impact of Elizabeth Catte's What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia as a turning point in that reclamation

Introduction: The Most Acceptable Target in America

Here is a test you can run for yourself. Go to any major greeting card store. Look for the humor section. You will find cards that depict barefoot, gap-toothed, overall-wearing mountain people — slack-jawed, dimwitted, incestuous, drunk. The punch line is always the same: these people are stupid. Now try to imagine the same cards featuring any other identifiable American ethnic or cultural group. You cannot, because those cards would be recognized instantly for what they are — bigotry dressed as humor. But the hillbilly card stays on the shelf. Nobody complains. Nobody protests. The laughter is not only permitted. It is expected.

This is the paradox at the center of this chapter. In an era when American culture has developed a heightened sensitivity to stereotyping — when media representations of race, gender, sexuality, and disability are scrutinized, debated, and sometimes litigated — the hillbilly remains America's acceptable target. You can mock the accent. You can joke about the teeth. You can imply the incest. You can photograph the abandoned trailer and the rusted car and the sagging porch, and you can publish those photographs in national magazines under headlines about "forgotten America," and no one will accuse you of prejudice. The hillbilly, in American culture, is not protected by the norms that have come to govern representation of other groups. The hillbilly is the last stereotype you are allowed to enjoy.

This did not happen by accident. The hillbilly stereotype — the image of the Appalachian mountain person as backward, violent, ignorant, sexually deviant, and genetically degraded — was constructed over more than a century through specific media products created by specific people for specific audiences, and it has been maintained because it serves specific functions. It justifies neglect. It makes poverty entertaining. It converts a political problem (the systematic extraction of wealth from a region) into a cultural problem (the inherent deficiency of the people who live there). As long as the hillbilly is stupid, the poverty is his own fault. As long as the poverty is his own fault, nobody has to do anything about it.

This chapter traces the construction, maintenance, and contestation of that stereotype. It follows the hillbilly image from its origins in the local color movement of the late nineteenth century (described in Chapter 14) through a century of media representations — comic strips, films, television shows, bestselling books, and viral social media posts. It examines the economic and political functions of the stereotype, the ways in which media images shape real policy and real funding decisions, and the growing movement of Appalachian people who are fighting back — not by denying the problems in their communities, but by insisting that those problems have causes, that those causes are structural, and that the people who live with them are not the punch line.

The story of Appalachian stereotypes is not a story about hurt feelings. It is a story about power — about who gets to define a region, who profits from that definition, and who pays the cost.

The Roots of the Image: From "Contemporary Ancestors" to "The Hillbilly"

The modern hillbilly stereotype has roots that reach back to the "discovery" of Appalachia described in Chapter 14. When William Goodell Frost, the president of Berea College, published his influential 1899 article "Our Contemporary Ancestors" in the Atlantic Monthly, he was not trying to demean mountain people. He was trying to raise money for his college by presenting Appalachians as quaint, premodern survivals of an earlier Anglo-Saxon America — "our contemporary ancestors," people who had been left behind by progress and who needed the help of educated, modern Americans to catch up. Frost's intentions were charitable. His framing was devastating.

By casting mountain people as relics of the past — living fossils of frontier America — Frost established the template that would govern outsider representations of Appalachia for more than a century. The mountain person was not a contemporary citizen with contemporary problems caused by contemporary economic forces. The mountain person was a curiosity, a throwback, a specimen. The mountain person existed to be studied, helped, pitied, or amused by — but never to be understood as a peer.

The local color writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Mary Noailles Murfree, John Fox Jr., and others discussed in Chapter 14 — built on this template. Their fiction presented mountain people as colorful, dialect-speaking, emotionally simple characters living in a world of feuds, moonshine, and primitive romance. The audience for these stories was urban and middle-class. The appeal was the same appeal that drives all exoticism: the pleasure of looking at people who are different from you, without having to take their reality seriously.

John Fox Jr.'s bestselling novels The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) and The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) were arguably the most influential literary constructions of the mountain stereotype in the early twentieth century. Fox presented Appalachia as a land of feuding clans and innocent maidens, where the arrival of modern civilization (usually in the form of a railroad or a coal company) was presented as progress, and where the mountain people either adapted to modernity or were swept away by it. The mountain people in Fox's novels are picturesque but ultimately passive — objects of the modern world's attention, not agents of their own history.

This literary construction — the mountain person as premodern remnant — provided the raw material for the twentieth century's most powerful stereotype-making machine: the mass media.

The Word Itself: A Brief History of "Hillbilly"

The word "hillbilly" first appeared in print in 1900, in the New York Journal, where it was defined as "a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him." The definition reads like a catalog of the stereotypes that would attach to the word for the next century and a quarter: rural, white, poor, uncouth, drunk, and violent.

The cultural historian Anthony Harkins, in his essential study Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2004), traces the word's evolution from a regional colloquialism to a national epithet. Harkins argues that the hillbilly stereotype emerged at the intersection of several anxieties in early twentieth-century America: the anxiety of urbanization (the hillbilly represented the rural world that cities were leaving behind), the anxiety of immigration (the hillbilly was reassuringly white and Anglo-Saxon at a moment when American identity seemed threatened by newcomers), and the anxiety of modernity (the hillbilly lived outside the industrial economy that was transforming American life).

The hillbilly was, in Harkins's analysis, a "safety valve" for American identity — a figure who could be mocked, pitied, or celebrated depending on the needs of the moment. When Americans wanted to feel modern and progressive, the hillbilly provided the contrast: the primitive against which progress could be measured. When Americans wanted to feel nostalgic for a simpler time, the hillbilly provided the fantasy: the premodern innocent who had not been corrupted by civilization. When Americans wanted to laugh at someone without guilt, the hillbilly provided the target: the one group whose poverty and marginalization were funny rather than tragic.

The dual nature of the stereotype — the hillbilly as both lovable and contemptible, both innocent and dangerous — would persist through every subsequent media incarnation. The same figure who was comic on The Beverly Hillbillies was monstrous in Deliverance. The same region that was pitied during the War on Poverty was demonized during the "Trump country" coverage of 2016. The hillbilly could be anything the moment required, because the hillbilly was not a person. The hillbilly was a screen onto which America projected its own anxieties.

"Li'l Abner" and the Comic Strip Hillbilly

In 1934, cartoonist Al Capp introduced a comic strip called Li'l Abner that would run in American newspapers for forty-three years and reach, at its peak, an audience of more than sixty million readers. The strip was set in Dogpatch, a fictional mountain hamlet populated by characters who embodied every stereotype the local color tradition had established: the inhabitants of Dogpatch were lazy, ignorant, superstitious, violent, and sexually confused. The men were huge and stupid. The women were voluptuous and barefoot. The economy ran on moonshine. The government was nonexistent. The humor depended on the contrast between the absurd primitiveness of Dogpatch and the implied sophistication of the reader.

Li'l Abner was, by the standards of its era, a sophisticated comic strip. Capp was a skilled satirist who used Dogpatch as a platform to comment on national politics, social trends, and cultural absurdities. The strip was often funny, and Capp's political satire could be genuinely sharp. But the vehicle for that satire was a caricature of mountain people that treated their poverty, their isolation, and their cultural difference as inherently comic. Dogpatch was funny because the people were backward. The backwardness was the joke.

The cultural impact of Li'l Abner was enormous. The strip ran from 1934 to 1977, a span that covered the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, and the beginning of the coal economy's decline. For three generations of Americans, Dogpatch was the primary frame through which they encountered the idea of "mountain people." The strip spawned a Broadway musical (1956), a film (1959), and a theme park in Harrison, Arkansas (1968-1993) called Dogpatch USA. The name "Dogpatch" entered the American vocabulary as a generic term for any impoverished, backward rural community. It is still used today.

What made Li'l Abner particularly insidious was that it presented its stereotypes as affectionate. Capp claimed to love his characters. The strip's tone was warm, even admiring, toward the simplicity and physical vitality of the Dogpatch residents. This affectionate condescension — the suggestion that the stereotype is a compliment, that mocking someone's poverty is really a celebration of their authenticity — would become one of the most durable features of media representations of Appalachia. The outsider who photographs a dilapidated barn and calls it "rustic charm" is operating in exactly the same register as Al Capp drawing Dogpatch.

The Beverly Hillbillies and the Hillbilly on Television

If Li'l Abner brought the hillbilly into the American newspaper, The Beverly Hillbillies brought the hillbilly into the American living room. The CBS television series, which premiered in 1962 and ran until 1971, was the most-watched show in America during its first two seasons. The premise was simple: Jed Clampett, a mountain man from an unnamed part of the Ozarks or Appalachians, discovers oil on his property, becomes fabulously wealthy, and moves his family to Beverly Hills. The comedy derived almost entirely from the contrast between the Clampetts' rustic simplicity and the pretensions of their wealthy California neighbors.

The Beverly Hillbillies was, in certain respects, more sympathetic to its mountain characters than the stereotypes it drew on. The Clampetts were presented as fundamentally decent, honest, and generous — their simplicity was framed as moral virtue rather than mere ignorance. Jed Clampett was wise in a folksy way that the superficial Californians around him were not. The show's satire was aimed at least as much at Beverly Hills as at the mountains.

But the show's underlying structure reinforced the stereotype even as its surface narrative complicated it. The Clampetts were funny because they were out of place — because they did not understand modern technology, modern social customs, or modern language. The comedy depended on the assumption that mountain people are fundamentally incompatible with modern life. No matter how decent the Clampetts were, they were always the ones who did not get the joke. The audience laughed at them, not with them.

Hee Haw, the country comedy variety show that ran from 1969 to 1997 (first on CBS, then in syndication), operated in a similar register. The show featured cornfield humor, overalls, hay bales, and a cast of characters who performed exaggerated versions of rural Southern and Appalachian stereotypes. Hee Haw was produced largely by and for people from rural backgrounds — its hosts, Buck Owens and Roy Clark, were legitimate country music stars — and its audience was overwhelmingly rural. But the show's humor still depended on the presentation of rural people as lovably stupid, and its format reinforced the stereotypes even as it celebrated the culture.

The cumulative effect of these shows was to establish the hillbilly as a permanent fixture in the American media landscape — a stock character as recognizable as the cowboy or the gangster, and far more durable than either. The hillbilly was not threatening (unlike the gangster). The hillbilly was not admirable (unlike the cowboy). The hillbilly was comfortable. The hillbilly was funny. The hillbilly was the character you could always laugh at without feeling guilty.

"Deliverance" and the Hillbilly as Menace

Then, in 1972, the hillbilly stopped being funny.

John Boorman's film Deliverance, based on James Dickey's 1970 novel, told the story of four Atlanta businessmen who take a canoe trip down a fictional Georgia river before it is dammed. In the mountains, they encounter local people who are portrayed as threatening, sexually predatory, and subhuman. The film's most notorious scene — the rape of one of the businessmen by a mountain man — became one of the most culturally consequential scenes in American cinema. The banjo duet between one of the Atlanta men and a mute, apparently intellectually disabled mountain boy — a scene that was improvised during filming — became equally iconic, embedding the image of the banjo-playing idiot-savant into the American cultural vocabulary.

Deliverance was a well-made, critically acclaimed film. It was nominated for three Academy Awards. It made more than $46 million at the box office. And it did more damage to the popular image of Appalachian people than any single work of art in the twentieth century.

The damage was not that the film portrayed mountain people as violent — violence had been part of the hillbilly stereotype since the feud narratives of the 1880s (see Chapter 13). The damage was that Deliverance combined violence with sexual menace, physical deformity, and a suggestion of genetic degradation — of inbreeding as the explanation for the mountain people's otherness — that tapped into the deepest anxieties of the American middle class. The mountain people in Deliverance were not lovably backward, like the Beverly Hillbillies. They were monstrous. They were what happened when civilization broke down. They were the darkness at the edge of the American project.

The cultural scholar Anthony Harkins has argued that Deliverance represented a fundamental shift in the hillbilly stereotype — from comic figure to horror figure, from object of amusement to object of fear. The mountain person was no longer just stupid. The mountain person was dangerous. And the source of the danger was not poverty or isolation but something biological — a degradation of the human stock itself.

This biological framing — the suggestion that there is something genetically wrong with mountain people — has a history that predates Deliverance by decades. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century targeted Appalachian communities for forced sterilization programs, and the pseudo-scientific rhetoric of "degenerate" families and "defective" gene pools circulated through American social science for generations. The Jukes and Kallikak family studies — fraudulent case studies that purported to demonstrate the hereditary nature of poverty and criminality — were used to justify the institutionalization and sterilization of people from mountain communities. Deliverance did not invent the idea of the genetically degraded hillbilly. It gave that idea its most powerful and enduring visual expression.

The consequences were immediate and lasting. In the years after Deliverance, tourism in the rural communities where the film was shot collapsed. People in those communities reported being treated with suspicion and hostility by outsiders who associated them with the characters in the film. The phrase "squeal like a pig" — from the rape scene — became a verbal weapon used against Appalachian people across the country. Even today, more than five decades after the film's release, Appalachian people report hearing the phrase directed at them as an insult, a joke, or a threat.

"Justified," "Ozark," and the Complicated Televisual Hillbilly

The twenty-first century brought more complex media representations of Appalachia — but complexity is not the same as accuracy, and even sympathetic portrayals carried the old stereotypes in their DNA.

Justified (2010-2015), the FX television series based on Elmore Leonard's fiction, was set in Harlan County, Kentucky — this textbook's anchor community (see Chapters 15-17 and 32). The show's protagonist, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (played by Timothy Olyphant), was a Harlan native who had left for the wider world and come back to enforce the law among the coal-country criminals he had grown up with. Justified was sophisticated television — well-written, well-acted, and attentive to the economic devastation of the coalfields. Its villains were complex. Its dialogue was sharp. Its visual portrayal of eastern Kentucky was often beautiful.

But Justified was still, at bottom, a show about crime in the mountains — about drug dealers, corrupt officials, family feuds, and violence. The show's coal country was a place where everyone was either a criminal, a law officer, or a victim. The people who worked regular jobs, raised families, went to church, volunteered at the fire department, and tried to hold their communities together — the vast majority of the people in Harlan County — were largely invisible. The show acknowledged economic despair, but it used that despair as backdrop for crime drama, not as the subject of its inquiry.

Ozark (2017-2022), the Netflix series about a Chicago financial advisor who launders money for a drug cartel in the Missouri Ozarks, operated in a similar register. The show was set in a different mountain region — the Ozarks, not Appalachia — but it drew on the same reservoir of stereotypes: rural people as violent, lawless, and trapped. The locals in Ozark were threats, victims, or props for the urban protagonists' moral drama. The landscape was beautiful and menacing. The message, however unintentionally, was the same message Deliverance had delivered fifty years earlier: the mountains are where civilized people go to discover what happens when the rules break down.

The problem with these shows is not that they are badly made. They are often excellent television. The problem is that they are the only stories being told. When the only narratives available about a place are narratives of crime, drugs, poverty, and violence, those narratives become the definition of the place — even if any individual narrative includes nuance and complexity. The cumulative effect of Justified and Ozark and Deliverance and the hundred other films and shows that use mountain settings for stories of darkness is to construct Appalachia, in the national imagination, as a place defined by its pathologies.

A useful thought experiment: imagine the same creative energy directed at stories about Appalachian nurses, teachers, community organizers, farmers, artists, and small business owners. Those stories exist. They are just as dramatic as crime stories, because the struggle to sustain a community in the face of economic devastation, political neglect, and cultural contempt is one of the great dramas of American life. But those stories do not get made — or when they do, they do not get promoted, because the national media market has decided that the audience for mountain stories is an audience that wants pathology.

"Hillbilly Elegy" — The Book That Became a Lightning Rod

No single text of the twenty-first century generated more debate about Appalachian identity than J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, published in 2016.

Vance's book was a memoir of growing up in Middletown, Ohio — a Rust Belt town where his grandparents had migrated from Breathitt County, Kentucky, as part of the great Appalachian out-migration described in Chapter 20. The book described Vance's chaotic upbringing with an addicted mother, his rescue by his fierce grandparents (Mamaw and Papaw), his escape through the Marines and Yale Law School, and his reflections on why so many people in communities like his seemed unable to improve their circumstances.

Hillbilly Elegy was a publishing phenomenon. It sold millions of copies. It was reviewed in every major publication. It was adapted into a Netflix film directed by Ron Howard (2020). And after the 2016 presidential election, in which Donald Trump carried Appalachian and Rust Belt communities by enormous margins, the book became the text that educated, liberal Americans turned to for an explanation. Hillbilly Elegy was how the American professional class tried to understand "Trump country."

The book's appeal was its apparent authenticity — Vance was "one of them," a person who had grown up in the culture he was describing. He had credential and credibility. He had been poor. He had seen addiction and violence up close. He had escaped through the bootstrapping narrative that Americans find irresistible. And his diagnosis of the problem — that the dysfunction in Appalachian and working-class white communities was fundamentally cultural, rooted in bad values, learned helplessness, and a refusal to take personal responsibility — was exactly what many affluent Americans wanted to hear.

The cultural diagnosis absolved everyone of structural responsibility. If the problem was culture — if the people in Middletown and Breathitt County and Harlan County and McDowell County were poor because they had bad habits, because they did not work hard enough, because they were addicted to welfare and victimhood — then the solution was for those people to fix themselves. No policy change was required. No corporate accountability was necessary. No reckoning with the century of extraction described in Part IV of this textbook was demanded. The poverty was sad, but it was essentially self-inflicted.

This was, in updated language, the same "culture of poverty" thesis that Oscar Lewis had articulated in the 1960s and that had shaped (and ultimately undermined) the War on Poverty described in Chapter 23 — the idea that poor people are poor because of their culture, not because of the structures that surround them. It was the same logic that William Goodell Frost had deployed in 1899 when he described mountain people as "our contemporary ancestors" who needed to be modernized. It was the same logic that every generation of outsiders had used to explain Appalachian poverty without examining its causes: the problem is the people, not the system.

The critical responses to Vance's book, and the broader movement they represent, are examined in detail in Case Study 2 of this chapter.

Elizabeth Catte and the Fight to Reclaim the Narrative

The backlash against Hillbilly Elegy within Appalachia and Appalachian Studies was swift, passionate, and, for many people, long overdue.

The most prominent response came from Elizabeth Catte, a public historian and East Tennessee native whose 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia became the essential counter-narrative to Vance's account. Catte's book was short, sharp, and angry — written in the voice of someone who was tired of watching outsiders and self-appointed representatives explain her region to the nation.

Catte's central arguments were devastating in their clarity:

First, Vance was not writing about Appalachia. He was writing about Middletown, Ohio — a Rust Belt town that is not in Appalachia. His grandparents had migrated from eastern Kentucky, but the culture Vance described was the culture of urban dislocation and intergenerational trauma, not the culture of the mountains. To treat one family's experience of addiction and dysfunction as representative of an entire region containing 25 million people was a staggering act of generalization.

Second, the "culture of poverty" explanation that Vance advanced had been thoroughly debunked by decades of social science research. The poverty in Appalachia had structural causes — the broad form deed, the extraction of mineral wealth by absentee corporations, the deliberate suppression of labor organizing, the failure to invest in infrastructure and education, the environmental devastation of mountaintop removal, the collapse of the coal economy. To ignore these structures and blame the culture was not just intellectually lazy. It was a political act — an act that served the interests of the same extractive forces that had created the poverty in the first place.

Third, Vance's book erased the diversity of Appalachia. The region Vance described was entirely white, entirely working-class, and entirely defined by dysfunction. The Black Appalachians, the Indigenous communities, the immigrant populations, the thriving artists and entrepreneurs and activists and educators who populate the region were absent from his account. Vance's Appalachia was a monolith of white despair — a characterization that was useful for a particular political narrative but bore little resemblance to the complex, diverse reality.

Catte's book was not the only response to Vance. The Appalachian scholars Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee had been arguing for structural explanations of Appalachian poverty since their groundbreaking 1999 study The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. The historian Ronald Eller had documented the systematic underdevelopment of the region in Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (2008). The journalist Steven Stoll had traced the deep history of land dispossession in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (2017). Catte was building on a rich tradition of structural analysis.

But Catte's book landed differently because of its timing, its tone, and its audience. Published in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, when the national media was saturated with patronizing coverage of "Trump country," What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia spoke directly to the condescension that many Appalachian people felt radiating from every major newspaper and cable news channel. The book was angry in a way that academic scholarship rarely permits itself to be, and that anger resonated with people who were tired of being told who they were by people who had never lived where they lived.

The "Appalachian Pity Industrial Complex"

Catte's critique pointed to something larger than one bestselling book. It pointed to a pattern — a system — in which outsiders build careers, raise funds, and win prestige by performing sympathy for Appalachia, while the people in Appalachia themselves remain the objects rather than the agents of their own story.

The writer and activist Neema Avashia, a West Virginia-raised daughter of Indian immigrants, coined a name for this system: the "Appalachian pity industrial complex." The phrase describes the network of journalists, filmmakers, nonprofit organizations, academic researchers, and political commentators who produce content about Appalachian suffering for consumption by audiences outside the region. The suffering is real. The coverage is often well-intentioned. But the incentive structure rewards a particular kind of story — the story of despair, of decline, of people who need to be saved — and it systematically excludes other kinds of stories: stories of resistance, innovation, community building, joy, and agency.

The pity industrial complex operates through several mechanisms:

The poverty tourism cycle. National journalists parachute into Appalachian communities for short reporting trips, usually during election seasons or after natural disasters. They photograph the most visually dramatic signs of poverty — abandoned buildings, rusted-out cars, people who look the way the national audience expects poor people to look. They interview a handful of residents, often selecting for quotability rather than representativeness. They file their stories, win their awards, and leave. The community gets a few days of national attention and nothing changes.

The nonprofit intermediary. National philanthropic organizations fund programs in Appalachia, but the funding flows through intermediary organizations that are often headquartered outside the region and staffed by people with no personal connection to the communities they serve. The intermediaries have an institutional incentive to emphasize the severity of the problems — you do not raise money by telling donors that things are getting better. The result is a feedback loop in which the worse the story sounds, the more money flows, and the more money flows, the more incentive there is to tell the worse story.

The academic extraction. Researchers from outside the region conduct studies in Appalachian communities, publish papers about what they find, build careers on that scholarship, and return nothing to the communities that made the research possible. This pattern — which Appalachian scholars call "drive-by research" — mirrors the broader extraction pattern that has defined the region's history (see the recurring theme of "The Extraction Pattern" throughout this textbook). The resource being extracted is not coal or timber. It is stories.

The pity industrial complex creates a paradox that Appalachian people navigate constantly. On the one hand, the region genuinely needs resources — federal funding, healthcare investment, economic development, infrastructure repair. Documenting the severity of the problems is a necessary step in securing those resources. On the other hand, the constant drumbeat of despair-based narratives reinforces the stereotype that Appalachian people are helpless, pathetic, and incapable of solving their own problems. The tension between "don't call us poor" and "we actually need help" is not a contradiction. It is the condition of living in a place that the rest of the country has decided is a problem.

Ruin Porn: The Aesthetics of Abandonment

One of the most visible manifestations of the pity industrial complex is the phenomenon that scholars and critics call "ruin porn" — the practice of photographing and sharing images of abandoned, decaying, or visually dramatic spaces of poverty and decline, stripped of their historical context and presented as objects of aesthetic contemplation.

In the Appalachian context, ruin porn takes familiar forms: the abandoned coal tipple overgrown with vines. The collapsing company store with its paint peeling off in photogenic layers. The trailer with the caved-in roof. The empty main street of a town that used to have five thousand people and now has five hundred. The school bus rusting in a field. The church with the trees growing through its steeple.

These images circulate by the thousands on social media platforms, photography websites, and in the pages of national magazines. They are beautiful, in the way that decay is sometimes beautiful — the textures, the colors, the interplay of nature and human construction, the melancholy of time passing. They are also, for the people who live near these places, an act of profound disrespect.

Ruin porn strips the built environment of its human story. The abandoned coal tipple is not just a picturesque ruin. It is the place where someone's grandfather worked for thirty years, breathed coal dust until it killed him, and earned wages that were paid in scrip at a company store that charged twice the market price (see Chapter 16). The collapsing company store is not just a photogenic artifact. It is the place where a family went into debt that took generations to escape. The empty main street is not just a composition exercise. It is the visible evidence of an economic collapse that destroyed a community — a collapse with specific causes, specific beneficiaries, and specific victims.

When a photographer from New York or Los Angeles travels to Appalachia, photographs these ruins, and posts them without context — without the history, without the names, without the economic analysis — the photographer is performing the same act of extraction that the coal companies performed a century ago. The resource is different. The pattern is the same. Something of value is taken from the community. Nothing is returned.

The scholar Roger Guy has written about the relationship between ruin photography and the political economy of Appalachian representation. Guy argues that ruin porn functions as a visual ideology — a way of seeing that naturalizes poverty by presenting it as an aesthetic phenomenon rather than a political one. When you look at a photograph of an abandoned building and feel melancholy, you are being invited to experience poverty as a mood, not as a condition with causes and consequences. The photograph aestheticizes what should be politicized. It converts outrage into nostalgia.

The Hillbilly as Political Tool

The hillbilly stereotype does not exist in a vacuum. It does political work, and it has been used by actors across the political spectrum to serve their own interests.

On the political right, the hillbilly stereotype has been instrumentalized as a symbol of authentic, white, working-class America — the "real American" who has been betrayed by liberal elites, environmental regulations, and government overreach. This is the framing that powered the "War on Coal" rhetoric described in Chapter 32 — the argument that regulations designed to reduce carbon emissions were really an attack on the Appalachian way of life. The coal companies that funded the "War on Coal" campaign were not defending mountain culture. They were defending their profits. But the hillbilly stereotype — the image of the simple, hardworking mountain person who just wants to be left alone — provided the emotional fuel for a political movement that served corporate interests.

On the political left, the hillbilly stereotype has been used to explain political outcomes that liberal Americans find distressing. When Appalachian counties vote for candidates who promise to cut social programs, liberal commentators reach for the hillbilly image — the ignorant poor person who votes against their own interests because they are too stupid, too racist, or too culturally conservative to know better. This framing, like the conservative version, treats Appalachian people as objects rather than agents — as people who are acted upon by political forces they do not understand, rather than people who make choices based on their own assessment of their circumstances.

Both framings share the same fundamental assumption: that Appalachian people need to be explained by people who are smarter than they are. Both framings deny Appalachian people the dignity of being understood on their own terms. And both framings serve the interests of people who are not Appalachian — conservative politicians who need a sympathetic mascot for deregulation, liberal commentators who need a foil for their own cosmopolitan values.

The scholar John Gaventa, whose work on power and powerlessness in Appalachian communities has been foundational to Appalachian Studies (see Chapter 26), argued that the most insidious form of power is the power to define what counts as a problem and what counts as a solution. In Appalachia, that definitional power has been exercised almost exclusively by outsiders — by the coal companies that defined "prosperity" as mining employment, by the federal government that defined "development" as highway construction, by the national media that defined "Appalachia" as a place of poverty and cultural dysfunction. Reclaiming the narrative means reclaiming the power to define.

How Stereotypes Shape Policy

The relationship between media stereotypes and government policy is not abstract. It has material consequences that can be measured in dollars, hospital beds, and miles of broadband cable.

Consider the following dynamic: Federal funding for a region depends, in part, on the national political will to allocate that funding. National political will depends, in part, on how the region is understood by politicians and voters outside the region. How the region is understood depends, in part, on how the media represents it. The chain is not perfectly linear — many other factors intervene — but the link between representation and resource allocation is real and documented.

When the dominant media narrative about Appalachia is a narrative of cultural dysfunction — when the national audience believes that Appalachian poverty is caused by bad values rather than bad policy — the political case for investment weakens. Why build broadband infrastructure for people who will not use it? Why fund job training for people who do not want to work? Why invest in healthcare for people who will not take care of themselves? The stereotype provides the answer to every investment question: don't bother. They will just waste it.

The historian Ronald Eller has traced this dynamic across multiple decades of federal Appalachian policy. Eller shows that the War on Poverty's mixed results in Appalachia (see Chapter 23) were not primarily a consequence of the programs being poorly designed. They were a consequence of the programs being designed around a stereotype — the assumption that Appalachian poverty was a cultural problem that could be solved by cultural intervention (education, socialization, exposure to middle-class values) rather than a structural problem that required structural intervention (land reform, labor rights enforcement, corporate accountability, infrastructure investment).

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), created in 1965, has invested billions of dollars in the region over six decades. Much of that investment has been productive — highways, water systems, health clinics, educational programs. But the ARC's mandate has been shaped from the beginning by the assumption that Appalachia's problem is "underdevelopment" — that the region is behind and needs to catch up — rather than that the region has been actively underdeveloped by extractive economic practices. The difference matters enormously. If the problem is underdevelopment, the solution is development. If the problem is extraction, the solution is stopping the extraction and returning the wealth. The stereotype of the backward mountain person supports the first diagnosis. The structural analysis supports the second.

Self-Image and the Internal Stereotype

Perhaps the deepest damage done by the hillbilly stereotype is the damage done to the people it purports to describe.

When you grow up in Appalachia and you see your people represented in the national media as stupid, backward, violent, and incestuous, that representation becomes part of your self-understanding — not because you believe it is true, but because you know that everyone else believes it. You learn, from childhood, that your accent marks you. You learn that the place you come from is a punch line. You learn that the normal, complicated, beautiful life you are living — the same mix of love and struggle and boredom and joy that defines life everywhere — is invisible to the wider world, replaced by a cartoon version that bears no resemblance to your experience.

The sociological literature on stereotype threat — the phenomenon in which people perform worse on tasks when they are reminded of negative stereotypes about their group — has been applied primarily to racial and gender contexts. But the dynamics are directly applicable to Appalachian experience. When a young person from eastern Kentucky arrives at a state university and hears their classmates make hillbilly jokes — when they realize that their accent, their vocabulary, their cultural references mark them as objects of amusement — the psychological effect is measurable. Some people respond by shedding their identity. They lose the accent. They stop mentioning where they are from. They perform the version of themselves that the wider world will accept.

Others respond with defiance — embracing the stereotype, performing it, daring the world to laugh. The country music tradition has a long history of this strategy: Dolly Parton, who grew up in a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, has spent her career playing with hillbilly stereotypes, simultaneously inhabiting and subverting them with a brilliance that is often underestimated because the performance is so effective. "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap," Parton once said — a line that contains, in eight words, a complete analysis of the politics of Appalachian self-representation.

But both responses — assimilation and defiance — are responses to an imposed identity. Neither is free. The person who sheds their accent has paid a price. The person who performs the stereotype has accepted a frame. The goal of the narrative reclamation movement is a third option: the ability to be Appalachian without explanation, without apology, and without performance — to be from the mountains the way someone from Boston is from Boston, as a fact rather than a statement.

Social Media and the Reclamation of the Narrative

The most powerful tool in the reclamation of the Appalachian narrative has been, perhaps paradoxically, the technology that was supposed to make regional identity obsolete: the internet.

Before social media, the representation of Appalachia was controlled by a small number of gatekeepers — television networks, film studios, publishing houses, and national newspapers. If those gatekeepers chose to tell the story of Appalachian poverty, poverty was the story. If they chose to tell the story of Appalachian violence, violence was the story. Individual Appalachian people had no mechanism for reaching a national audience with their own accounts of their own lives.

Social media changed that equation. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter/X gave individual Appalachian people direct access to national and international audiences, bypassing the traditional media gatekeepers entirely. And Appalachian people used that access to do something that no amount of academic scholarship or public advocacy had been able to accomplish: they showed the world what their lives actually looked like.

The Appalachian TikTok community — loosely organized around hashtags like #Appalachian, #Appalachia, #AppalachianTikTok, and more specific tags tied to particular states and communities — has produced an extraordinary body of content that ranges from the educational to the personal to the political. Young Appalachian creators make videos about their families, their food, their landscapes, their accents, their history, and their frustrations with how the outside world perceives them. The tone varies enormously — some creators are funny, some are earnest, some are angry, some are wistful — but the cumulative effect is to present a picture of Appalachian life that is more complex, more diverse, and more human than anything the national media has ever produced.

Some of the most powerful Appalachian social media content is explicitly educational. Creators post videos about Appalachian history, dialect, food traditions, and ecological knowledge. They correct misinformation — explaining, for instance, that "Appalachian" is pronounced with a short "a" in the third syllable (appa-LATCH-un), not a long "a" (appa-LAY-shun), and that how you pronounce the word tells people from the region whether you have ever actually spent time there. They share primary source documents, family photographs, oral histories, and personal testimony. They do, in short, what this textbook does — they tell the story of the region from inside the region, with the authority of lived experience.

Other content is more personal and more political. Young people from Appalachian communities talk about the experience of leaving home for college and encountering stereotypes for the first time. They talk about the anger of watching their communities represented as pathetic or dangerous on national television. They talk about the complicated feelings of loving a place that the rest of the country seems to despise. They talk about coming back.

The social media reclamation is not without its complications. The platforms that enable Appalachian self-representation are owned by corporations that profit from engagement, and engagement is driven by conflict, emotion, and spectacle — dynamics that can incentivize the performance of identity rather than its authentic expression. Some Appalachian creators have built large followings by performing exaggerated versions of mountain identity — leaning into the accent, the overalls, the "country life" aesthetic — in ways that hover uncomfortably between reclamation and self-stereotyping. The line between taking ownership of a stereotype and reinforcing it is thin, and social media is not a medium that rewards subtlety.

But the overall trajectory is clear. For the first time in the history of the region, Appalachian people have the tools to tell their own stories at scale, without the permission or the mediation of outsiders. The stories they are telling are more complex, more diverse, and more honest than anything the national media has produced. The reclamation is incomplete — the old stereotypes are durable, and they will not be dislodged by TikTok videos alone. But something has shifted. The narrative is no longer the exclusive property of people who do not live here.

The Tension: "Don't Call Us Poor" vs. "We Actually Need Resources"

The reclamation movement faces a genuine dilemma that cannot be resolved by clever framing alone.

Appalachian communities face real, urgent, material problems. The rural hospital closures described in Chapter 38. The opioid crisis described in Chapter 33. The economic devastation of the coal economy's collapse described in Chapter 32. The housing affordability crisis described in Chapter 36. The broadband gap. The water infrastructure deficiencies. The mental health access desert. These problems are real. They require resources. And securing resources requires making the case that the problems are severe — which means, in practice, telling the story of Appalachian hardship to people outside the region who control the funding.

But every time an Appalachian advocate describes the severity of the opioid crisis or the scope of the hospital closures or the depth of the economic distress, that advocate risks reinforcing the stereotype — feeding the narrative of Appalachian dysfunction, confirming the national audience's assumption that the mountains are a place of pathology and despair. The advocate is trapped between the need to document suffering (in order to secure resources) and the need to resist the framing of suffering as identity (in order to preserve dignity).

This is not a problem that Appalachia faces alone. Every marginalized community in America navigates some version of this tension — the need to describe injustice without being defined by it, the need to demand resources without accepting the narrative that accompanies them. But the tension is particularly acute in Appalachia because the stereotype is so deeply embedded and because the region's political alignment (overwhelmingly Republican in recent elections, as described in Chapter 34) means that many of the politicians who represent Appalachian communities have an ideological commitment to minimizing the role of government — making them reluctant to advocate for the very resources their constituents need.

The most effective Appalachian advocates have found ways to navigate this tension by insisting on a causal framework — by telling the story of Appalachian hardship in a way that centers causes rather than symptoms. The opioid crisis did not happen because Appalachian people are weak. It happened because pharmaceutical companies deliberately targeted a vulnerable population (see Chapter 33). Rural hospitals are not closing because mountain people do not deserve healthcare. They are closing because of policy decisions about Medicaid reimbursement rates and state-level refusals to expand Medicaid coverage (see Chapter 38). The economy did not collapse because mountain people are lazy. It collapsed because a century of extractive industry left nothing behind when it left (see Chapter 32).

This causal framing — suffering exists, and here is why — is the alternative to both the pity narrative (suffering exists, and isn't it sad) and the denial narrative (suffering is exaggerated by outsiders who hate us). It is the framework that this textbook has followed throughout: Appalachian history is not a story of pathology. It is a story of extraction. The people are not the problem. The system is the problem. And the people have been fighting the system for generations.

The "Discovery" Narrative in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 14 described how outsiders "discovered" Appalachia in the late nineteenth century — how the local color writers, the settlement school reformers, and the mission workers constructed the region as a problem to be solved by educated, modern Americans who knew better. That discovery narrative has repeated itself in every generation since. The War on Poverty in the 1960s was a rediscovery. The "Hillbilly Elegy" moment of 2016 was another rediscovery. Each time, the national media announces that Appalachia exists, expresses surprise at the conditions it finds, generates a burst of sympathetic coverage, and moves on — leaving the region in essentially the same condition it was in before the cameras arrived.

The pattern is so reliable that Appalachian people have a grim joke about it: "We're about to get discovered again." The joke contains a deep truth about the relationship between media attention and meaningful change. Media attention feels like concern, but it is not the same as concern. It is a commodity — a product that media organizations create and sell to audiences who consume it and then turn to the next story. The community that was "discovered" does not benefit from the discovery. It was not lost. It was ignored. And attention is not the same as investment.

The twenty-first-century version of the discovery narrative has a new wrinkle: the "Trump country" safari. After the 2016 election, national journalists — overwhelmingly based in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles — traveled to Appalachian communities to understand why people had voted the way they had. The resulting coverage was often condescending, sometimes sympathetic, and almost always framed around the assumption that the journalist needed to explain these strange people to a sophisticated national audience. The mountain community was the zoo. The journalist was the guide. The audience was the visitor, peering through the glass.

The writer Sarah Smarsh, who grew up in rural Kansas and has written extensively about media representations of poverty, described this phenomenon as "poverty voyeurism" — the practice of treating poor people's lives as spectacles for the entertainment and edification of people who are not poor. Smarsh's critique, directed at media coverage of rural America broadly, applies with particular force to Appalachia, where the tradition of outsider voyeurism stretches back more than a century.

From Stereotype to Scholarship: Appalachian Studies as Counter-Narrative

The academic field of Appalachian Studies emerged in the 1970s as a deliberate counter-narrative to the stereotypes that dominated public understanding of the region. The field was born from the convergence of several movements: the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, the environmental movement, and the student activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Its foundational commitment was that the people of Appalachia deserved to have their history told accurately — not as a story of cultural deficiency, but as a story of structural exploitation and persistent resistance.

Helen Lewis, a sociologist who spent decades teaching and organizing in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia, is widely regarded as the "mother of Appalachian Studies." Lewis's work insisted on a structural analysis of Appalachian poverty — an analysis that centered the role of absentee ownership, extractive industry, and deliberate underdevelopment rather than the culture of the people themselves. Her 1978 essay collection Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (co-edited with Linda Johnson and Donald Askins) applied the framework of internal colonialism to the region, arguing that Appalachia's relationship to the American economy was structurally similar to the relationship between a colony and its imperial power.

The Appalachian Studies Association (founded in 1977 as the Appalachian Studies Conference) provided an institutional home for this work, hosting annual conferences, publishing the Journal of Appalachian Studies, and building a network of scholars, activists, and community workers committed to rigorous, respectful, community-engaged research on the region.

Appalachian Studies has produced a body of scholarship that directly challenges every major component of the hillbilly stereotype. The homogeneity myth is challenged by work on Black Appalachians (William Turner, Edward Cabbell), Indigenous Appalachians (the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians scholarship), and immigrant Appalachians (see Chapter 19). The cultural deficiency thesis is challenged by structural analyses of poverty (Billings and Blee, Eller, Gaventa). The isolation myth is challenged by work demonstrating Appalachia's deep integration into national and global economies since at least the mid-nineteenth century. The violence myth is challenged by historical work showing that Appalachian violence rates are not fundamentally different from comparable regions and that much of the "violence" described in popular accounts was actually labor resistance (see Chapter 17).

This scholarship matters because it provides the intellectual foundation for the narrative reclamation that Catte, Avashia, and others are conducting in the public sphere. You cannot effectively challenge a stereotype without an alternative account of reality, and Appalachian Studies provides that account — detailed, documented, peer-reviewed, and rooted in the experience of the people it describes.

PRIMARY SOURCE: Media Representations of Appalachia

Source A — New York Times photo essay caption, 2014: "In Appalachia, poverty is a way of life. Generations have lived and died in these hollows, hemmed in by mountains and limited by circumstance."

Source B — Social media response from an Appalachian resident, 2014: "I have a master's degree. My neighbor is a nurse practitioner. The woman down the road runs a nonprofit that provides free legal services to domestic violence survivors. We all have indoor plumbing. We also have opioid addiction, hospital closures, and a broadband gap that makes remote work impossible. But the Times didn't photograph the nurse practitioner or the lawyer or the school teacher. They photographed the trailer with the satellite dish. Because that's the picture that sells."

Source C — Appalachian TikTok creator, 2022: "Every time national media 'discovers' Appalachia, it's the same article. Same photos. Same shocked tone. 'Oh my goodness, there are poor people in America!' Yeah. There are. And there are also teachers and engineers and artists and farmers and nurses and people who are just living their lives. But you only come here when you want to feel sorry for us. That's not journalism. That's tourism."

Discussion: These three sources span a decade of Appalachian media representation and response. What assumptions does Source A make about Appalachian communities? How does Source B challenge those assumptions while still acknowledging real problems? How does Source C frame the relationship between media attention and meaningful change? What does the evolution from Source A to Source C suggest about the changing dynamics of representation?

COMMUNITY HISTORY PORTFOLIO CHECKPOINT — Chapter 35

For your selected Appalachian county:

Media Representation Audit: 1. Search for your county in the archives of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and your state's largest newspaper. What stories have been written about the county in the last twenty years? How is the county described? What images are used? Whose voices are quoted? Whose voices are absent?

2. Search for your county on social media platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram). What stories do residents of the county tell about themselves? How do these stories differ from the newspaper coverage you found in step 1?

3. Has your county been featured in any films, television shows, books, or documentaries? If so, how was it represented? If you can identify residents of the county who have seen these representations, what was their reaction?

4. Write a 500-word analysis of the gap between how your county is represented by outsiders and how it is represented by its own residents. What accounts for the gap? What would a more accurate representation look like?

This checkpoint builds toward the modern portrait section (Chapters 32-38) of your final county history.

Conclusion: The Story Is Not Finished

The hillbilly stereotype is more than a century old. It has been constructed through specific media products, maintained through specific economic and political incentives, and challenged through specific acts of resistance and reclamation. It has shaped federal policy, influenced funding decisions, and damaged the self-image of millions of people who were born into a caricature they did not create.

But the caricature is not the reality. The reality is the twenty-five million people who live in the Appalachian region — people whose lives are as complex, as diverse, as funny, as painful, as ordinary, and as extraordinary as the lives of people anywhere. The reality is the teacher in McDowell County who arrives early to make sure the school's heat is working. The reality is the nurse practitioner in Harlan County who drives forty-five minutes to the nearest hospital because the one in her town closed. The reality is the young person in Asheville who is building a business and fighting the gentrification that threatens to push her family out of the neighborhood where they have lived for three generations.

These people do not need to be discovered. They do not need to be pitied. They do not need to be explained. They need to be heard. And increasingly — through the tools of digital media, the rigor of Appalachian scholarship, and the sheer persistence of people who refuse to be caricatured — they are being heard.

The battle over Appalachian identity is, in the deepest sense, a battle over the question of who gets to tell the story. For more than a century, the answer has been: outsiders. That answer is changing. The story is being reclaimed. And the reclamation is not an ending. It is a beginning.