Chapter 40 Exercises: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story

Exercise 1: The Intersectional Analysis

The chapter argues that an intersectional analysis — one that examines how race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other categories interact — is essential to understanding Appalachian history.

a) Choose one historical moment or event described in this textbook (a coal camp strike, the Trail of Tears, the War on Poverty, the opioid crisis, or another event). Analyze that event through at least three intersectional lenses: race, class, and gender at minimum, with sexuality, disability, or immigration status if applicable. How does the event look different when viewed through multiple lenses simultaneously rather than through a single lens?

b) The chapter argues that class is the "through-line" connecting all forms of marginalization in Appalachian history. Do you agree? Write a 400-word argument either supporting or challenging this claim. If you challenge it, explain which axis of identity you consider more fundamental and why. If you support it, explain how class operates differently when combined with racial, gender, or other forms of marginalization.

c) Kimberle Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality was developed to describe the compound discrimination experienced by Black women, whose experiences fell through the gaps between racial analysis and gender analysis. Apply this concept to one specific group in Appalachian history — for example, Black women in the coal camps, Indigenous women during removal, or disabled immigrant miners. What does the intersectional analysis reveal that a single-axis analysis misses?

d) Write a 500-word essay on the question: "Who is the most invisible person in Appalachian history?" Identify a specific intersectional identity (combining at least three categories) whose experience has been the least documented and the least recognized. Explain why this person has been invisible and what it would take to make their experience visible.

Exercise 2: The Affrilachian Movement — Naming and Power

a) Read Frank X Walker's poem "Affrilachia" (excerpted in this chapter and in Chapter 28). Analyze the poem's argument: What does Walker claim about the relationship between naming and identity? What does the poem demand of its audience? How does the poem's form — its rhythm, its word choices, its structure — support its argument?

b) The chapter argues that the word "Affrilachian" was necessary because the word "Appalachian" had been racialized — constructed to mean "white." Trace this racialization through the textbook. Identify at least three specific moments or processes (from Chapters 14, 23, 35, or elsewhere) where the equation of "Appalachian" with "white" was constructed or reinforced. For each moment, identify who benefited from the racialization and who was harmed by it.

c) Research the Affrilachian Poets as a collective. Who are its members? What events has it organized? What publications has it produced? How has it changed since its founding? Use at least three sources beyond this textbook.

d) The chapter distinguishes between "inclusion" (being welcomed into someone else's story) and "self-naming" (creating your own story). Apply this distinction to another marginalized community — in Appalachia or elsewhere. How does the distinction between inclusion and self-naming change what the community demands and what it produces?

Exercise 3: LGBTQ+ Appalachians — The Politics of Visibility

a) Read the Silas House quotation in this chapter about Appalachian values and LGBTQ+ inclusion. Evaluate his argumentative strategy: Is framing LGBTQ+ rights in terms of Appalachian community values (loyalty, love of neighbor) more effective than framing them in terms of individual rights or national legal standards? Why or why not? Who is his audience, and how does his argument address that audience's concerns?

b) Research the Country Queers project (countryqueers.com or published materials). Listen to or read at least two interviews with LGBTQ+ people in rural communities. Write a 400-word summary of the themes that emerge from these interviews. How do the interviewees' experiences compare to the picture presented in this chapter?

c) The chapter argues that the experience of LGBTQ+ people in rural Appalachia is shaped by dynamics (the absence of queer infrastructure, the power of the church, the impossibility of anonymity, the strength of kinship) that differ from urban LGBTQ+ experience. Evaluate each of these dynamics. Which do you consider most significant? Are there dynamics the chapter does not mention that you would add?

d) Write a 500-word essay on the following question: Should the Appalachian narrative expand to include LGBTQ+ experience, or should LGBTQ+ Appalachians create their own parallel narrative (as the Affrilachian movement did for Black Appalachians)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? What does the comparison between the two cases reveal about the politics of identity in the region?

Exercise 4: Women's History as Central History

a) The chapter argues that "women's history is not a subcategory of Appalachian history." Review the chapters of this textbook that you have read. In how many chapters were women's experiences presented as central rather than supplementary? Create a table listing each relevant chapter, the women or women's experiences it described, and whether those experiences were presented as central to the chapter's argument or as additions to a male-centered narrative.

b) Research one of the women named in this chapter — Mother Jones, Mary Breckinridge, Judy Bonds, or another Appalachian woman activist or leader. Write a 500-word profile that focuses on her specific contributions and the ways her work challenged or reinforced the gender dynamics of her time and place.

c) The chapter describes the "invisible labor" of women in coal camp communities — the caregiving, household management, and community-building work that sustained the coal economy but was never compensated or formally recognized. Research the concept of "reproductive labor" or "care work" in feminist economics. How does this concept apply to the Appalachian context? What would it mean to value women's labor at its actual economic contribution?

d) Write a 400-word reflection on the following question: If women had been centered in the Appalachian narrative from the beginning — if the dominant story of the region had been told through women's experience rather than men's — how would the story be different? What events would be emphasized? What events would recede? What new themes would emerge?

Exercise 5: Disability and the Bodies of Extraction

a) The chapter describes disability in coal communities as "endemic" — so common that it was unremarkable. Research the rates of occupational injury and disease in the coal mining industry at its peak (early to mid-twentieth century). What were the most common injuries? What were the long-term health effects? How did the rates compare to other industries?

b) The chapter argues that disability in Appalachia resulted not only from mining injuries but from the broader conditions of poverty — inadequate healthcare, environmental contamination, nutritional deficiency. Research one specific environmental health hazard in an Appalachian community (water contamination from mining, air pollution from coal processing, exposure to chemicals from mountaintop removal). Document the health effects, who was affected, and what response (if any) was mounted.

c) The disability rights movement and the Appalachian resistance tradition (Chapter 26) share a common theme: the demand that people who have been treated as disposable be recognized as fully human. Compare these two movements. What strategies have they shared? What challenges have they faced? Where have they intersected?

d) Write a 400-word essay on what it means to call disability a category of identity rather than merely a medical condition. How does treating disability as an identity change the way we understand the history of coal mining in Appalachia? What becomes visible that was previously invisible?

Exercise 6: Community History Portfolio — Whose Stories Are Missing?

This exercise connects to the Community History Portfolio checkpoint for Chapter 40.

a) Return to your county. Review all of your previous portfolio work. Create a detailed list of whose experiences have been included in your research and whose have not. Be as specific as possible.

b) Research at least one marginalized community or experience in your county's history that you have not previously documented. This might be a Black community, an Indigenous community, an immigrant community, a women's organization, a disability-related story, or any other experience that has been absent from the dominant narrative. Use primary sources where possible.

c) Write a 300-word analysis of why the experience you researched in part (b) has been absent from your county's standard historical narrative. Is it because the community left few records? Because the records exist but have not been preserved or made accessible? Because the dominant narrative has actively suppressed or ignored the community? Because nobody has asked the questions that would reveal it?

d) Write a 500-word synthesis that answers the question: "Whose county is this?" Your synthesis should acknowledge the multiple communities that have inhabited, worked in, and been shaped by your county, and it should honestly assess whose stories have been told, whose have not, and what a more complete history would include. This synthesis is a draft of your final portfolio's concluding section.