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

"I was taught to be proud to be Appalachian, and I was. But I was also taught that Appalachian didn't include me." — Frank X Walker, "Affrilachia" (2000)

"Every time somebody tells the story of Appalachia like it's only one story, they're making a choice. And that choice has consequences. Somebody gets seen, and somebody disappears." — Appalachian Studies scholar, panel discussion, East Tennessee State University, 2019

Learning Objectives

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

1. Synthesize the intersectional threads running through all previous chapters — race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration — into a comprehensive analysis of who has been included in and excluded from the dominant narrative of Appalachian identity
2. Center the voices of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, LGBTQ+, and disabled Appalachians, analyzing how each group's experience has been rendered invisible by the region's dominant story
3. Analyze why telling a single "Appalachian story" is always a political act — a choice about who gets included and who gets erased, with real consequences for power, resources, and recognition
4. Evaluate the Affrilachian movement and other identity-reclaiming projects as acts of resistance that expand what "Appalachian" means

Introduction: The Problem of the Single Story

This textbook has told many stories. Geological stories that span hundreds of millions of years. Indigenous stories that stretch back ten millennia. Stories of settlement, enslavement, extraction, labor war, poverty, resistance, culture, and survival. Stories of coal and timber and railroads. Stories of music and language and faith. Stories of opioids and politics and reinvention.

Now, in this chapter, we must reckon with a question that has been running beneath all of those stories, sometimes visible, sometimes submerged, but always present: Whose stories are these? Who has been included in the narrative of Appalachian identity, and who has been erased? Who gets to say what Appalachian means, and who gets told that the word does not apply to them?

The answer, for most of the region's recorded history, has been straightforward and wrong. The dominant narrative of Appalachian identity is the story of white, Protestant, Scots-Irish mountain people — hardscrabble, independent, suspicious of outsiders, rooted in the land, living in hollows and on ridgetops, speaking a distinctive dialect, making music, mining coal, and enduring poverty with a stoic dignity that outsiders alternatively romanticize and mock. This is the Appalachia of the hillbilly stereotype (Chapter 35), of the local color writers (Chapter 14), of the War on Poverty photographers (Chapter 23), of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and every television show that has ever set a story in the mountains.

It is not that this story is false. White, Protestant, Scots-Irish people did settle in these mountains. They did develop a distinctive culture. Their history is real and worth telling. This textbook has told it in detail, across many chapters.

The problem is not that this story is told. The problem is that it is told as the only story. The problem is that the Appalachian narrative has been constructed — deliberately, over more than a century — as a white narrative, and that this construction has erased the Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people who have always been part of these mountains. The erasure is not accidental. It is structural. And it has consequences.

This chapter names the erasure. It traces the threads that run through the entire textbook — threads of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration — and weaves them together into a synthesis that insists on a fundamental truth: Appalachia has never been one thing. It has never been one color, one faith, one language, one experience. The fight over who gets included in the region's story is the fight over who the region belongs to, and that fight is not over.

Black Appalachia: The Longest Erasure

The erasure of Black Appalachians from the regional narrative is perhaps the most consequential act of historical violence committed against the region's own people.

This textbook has traced the Black Appalachian experience across many chapters. Chapter 6 documented slavery in the mountains — not the plantation slavery of the Deep South but a form of bondage adapted to the mountain economy, where enslaved people worked small farms, tended livestock, labored in salt mines and iron furnaces, and lived in conditions that, while different from the cotton South, were slavery nonetheless. Chapter 12 traced emancipation in the mountains — the establishment of Black churches, schools, and community institutions in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the beginning of the systematic dispossession that would strip Black Appalachians of the property and political power they had briefly gained during Reconstruction.

Chapter 16 documented Black life in the coal camp towns — the segregated but functional communities where Black miners and their families built churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and a social world within the constraints of a system designed to exploit their labor. Chapter 19 described how Black miners worked alongside immigrant miners in the coalfields, and how the coal companies deliberately used racial and ethnic division to prevent labor solidarity. Chapter 20 traced the Great Migration out of Appalachia — the millions of Black and white Appalachians who left the region for industrial cities in the mid-twentieth century, carrying their culture with them and transplanting it in places like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.

Chapter 28 introduced Crystal Wilkinson and the literature of Black Appalachia — the emergence of a literary tradition that insisted on the existence and the complexity of Black mountain life. And throughout the textbook, in chapter after chapter, the "Whose Story Is Missing?" prompts have asked readers to consider whose experiences were absent from the narrative being presented.

Now it is time to pull those threads together.

The construction of Appalachia as a white region was not accidental. It was a project — undertaken by local color writers in the late nineteenth century, reinforced by early twentieth-century social scientists, codified by mid-century poverty warriors, and perpetuated by contemporary media. The local color writers who "discovered" Appalachia for northern audiences in the 1870s and 1880s (Chapter 14) described the mountain people as a homogeneous white population — remnants of the original Scots-Irish settlers, isolated from the progress of civilization, living in a frozen colonial past. Black people appeared in these accounts rarely if at all, not because they were absent from the mountains but because their presence was inconvenient to the narrative. A region portrayed as the last preserve of pure Anglo-Saxon stock could not also contain people of African descent.

The social scientists who followed — the settlement school workers, the public health researchers, the sociologists who studied mountain communities in the early and mid-twentieth century — reinforced this erasure. When researchers described "Appalachian culture," they described white culture. When they documented "Appalachian poverty," they documented white poverty. When they proposed solutions for "Appalachian problems," they proposed solutions for white communities. Black Appalachians were simply not part of the analytical framework.

The War on Poverty (Chapter 23) cemented the equation of Appalachia with whiteness in the national imagination. When Lyndon Johnson visited eastern Kentucky in 1964 to launch his antipoverty campaign, the photographs showed white families — white children in shabby clothes, white men sitting on porches, white women in frame houses with sagging floors. These photographs became the iconic images of Appalachian poverty, and they created an association between Appalachian identity and white poverty that persists to this day.

The irony is that Black poverty in Appalachia was, by every measurable indicator, worse than white poverty. Black Appalachians earned less, owned less property, had less access to education and healthcare, and faced the additional burden of racial discrimination on top of the economic exploitation that all mountain people endured. But their poverty was invisible — not because it did not exist but because the narrative had no place for it.

Then and Now

Then (1964): The War on Poverty's iconic photographs of Appalachian hardship show exclusively white families. Black Appalachians, who constitute roughly 6 percent of the regional population and experience poverty rates higher than their white neighbors, are absent from the images that define the national understanding of the region.

Now (2025): The Affrilachian Poets, Black Appalachian Studies programs, and a growing body of scholarship and creative work have made Black Appalachian identity visible in academic and literary circles. But the popular image of Appalachia remains overwhelmingly white, and Black Appalachians continue to report the experience of being told — by both white Appalachians and Black Americans from other regions — that "Black" and "Appalachian" are mutually exclusive categories.

The Affrilachian Poets: Naming a People

In 1991, a young Black writer from Danville, Kentucky, looked at the word "Appalachian" and saw that it did not include him. Not because he did not live in Appalachia — he did. Not because his family had not been in the mountains for generations — they had. But because the word, as the culture used it, meant white. It described a place, a people, a culture, and an identity that had been defined, for more than a century, in terms that excluded Black people.

The writer was Frank X Walker. And his response was to create a new word.

"Affrilachian" — a blend of "African," "Appalachian," and the suffix "-ian" — named something that had existed for centuries but had never had institutional language: the experience of being both Black and Appalachian, of belonging to both identities simultaneously, of refusing the false choice between them.

Chapter 28 introduced Walker and the Affrilachian Poets in the context of Appalachian literature. This chapter returns to them in a different context — as a case study in what happens when a marginalized community names itself, when people who have been told they do not exist assert their existence in terms they create.

Walker's word did something that decades of scholarship and activism had not accomplished: it gave Black Appalachians a name. Not a label applied from outside — not "Black people who happen to live in Appalachia" or "African Americans in the mountain South" — but a self-created, self-claimed identity that fused the two halves of their experience into a single word. You did not have to choose. You could be Affrilachian.

The Affrilachian Poets — a collective that grew up around Walker's word, including writers like Crystal Wilkinson, Kelly Norman Ellis, Ricardo Nazario y Colon, Mitchell L.H. Douglas, and others — produced a body of poetry that excavated Black Appalachian experience from beneath the layers of erasure. Their work was angry, tender, precise, and beautiful. It described the experience of growing up Black in the mountains — the double invisibility of being unseen by white Appalachia (which did not acknowledge your existence) and by Black America (which did not recognize your home as theirs).

Walker's poem "Affrilachia" captured the paradox in lines that have become foundational:

I was taught to be proud to be Appalachian, and I was. But I was also taught that Appalachian didn't include me.

The Affrilachian movement did not create Black Appalachian identity. Black people had been in the mountains for centuries — as enslaved people, as free people of color, as coal miners, as farmers, as churchgoers, as musicians, as writers. What the movement did was create a name for that identity, a word that could be spoken, printed, taught, organized around, and used to resist the erasure that had rendered Black Appalachians invisible in the very land where they lived.

The naming mattered. It mattered because names create categories, and categories create visibility. Once "Affrilachian" existed as a word, Black Appalachian Studies could exist as a field. Conferences could be organized. Courses could be taught. Anthologies could be published. Grants could be written. A community that had existed for centuries but had been invisible to institutional structures suddenly had a name that those structures could recognize.

Indigenous Survival: Still Here

Chapter 39 told the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in detail — the survival, the sovereignty, the economic transformation, the cultural revitalization. This chapter places that story in the broader synthesis.

The dominant narrative of Appalachian history treats Indigenous people as prologue. They appear in the first chapters — the noble Cherokee, the skilled hunters, the builders of mounds — and then they disappear, removed by the Trail of Tears, replaced by settlers, relegated to the past tense. "The Cherokee used to live here" is the standard formulation, and it accomplishes a neat trick of historical erasure: by putting Indigenous presence in the past, it absolves the present of any obligation to reckon with it.

But the Cherokee did not disappear. The Eastern Band remained in the mountains, farming the same soil, speaking the same language, maintaining the same ceremonies. Other Indigenous communities — the Monacan, the descendants of Shawnee and Yuchi and Creek peoples, the mixed-heritage communities classified and reclassified by state bureaucracies — persisted throughout the region. The Indigenous story of Appalachia is not a prologue. It is a continuous thread running from the first chapter of this textbook to the last.

The erasure of Indigenous Appalachia serves the same function as the erasure of Black Appalachia: it simplifies the narrative to serve the interests of those who benefit from the simplification. If Appalachia is a white region settled by white people on empty land, then there are no land claims to adjudicate, no treaties to honor, no sovereignty to respect, no history of dispossession to confront. The erasure of Indigenous presence is not just a failure of historical accuracy. It is a political act that protects the status quo.

Immigrant Appalachia: The Diversity That Built the Coalfields

Chapter 19 documented the wave of European immigration that transformed the coalfields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Greeks, and others who came to the mountains to dig coal. Chapter 36 documented the contemporary wave of Latino immigration — the Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and others who came to work in the poultry processing plants and meatpacking facilities of the modern Appalachian economy.

Both waves of immigration challenge the narrative of Appalachian homogeneity. The coalfields of 1910 were among the most ethnically diverse places in the American South — towns where a dozen languages were spoken, where Orthodox churches stood next to Baptist chapels, where Italian bread baked in the same ovens as corn pone. This diversity was real and consequential. It shaped the labor movement (Chapter 17), the cultural landscape (Chapters 27 and 30), and the political dynamics of the coalfields for generations.

But the dominant narrative absorbed this diversity by whitening it. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Italian and Hungarian miners are, today, simply "Appalachian" — their immigrant origins folded into the white mountain identity, their ethnic distinctiveness dissolved into a generalized whiteness. The process of becoming Appalachian was, for European immigrants, also a process of becoming white — of trading ethnic identity for racial identity, of exchanging the specificity of "Italian" or "Hungarian" for the generality of "white." This transformation was not inevitable. It was a choice, conditioned by the racial hierarchy of the American South, and it came at a cost — the loss of the ethnic particularities that had distinguished immigrant communities from native-born Appalachians.

The contemporary wave of Latino immigration cannot follow the same path. The European immigrants of 1900 could, over generations, become white. The Latino immigrants of 2000 face a racial hierarchy that does not offer them that option — at least not on the same terms. Their skin color, their language, their immigration status, and the political climate surrounding immigration create barriers to incorporation that earlier immigrants did not face. Whether Latino Appalachians will be absorbed into the regional identity — whether "Appalachian" will expand to include them, as it expanded to include the descendants of Italian and Hungarian miners — is one of the most important questions facing the region in the twenty-first century.

Women's Appalachia: The Labor That Held Everything Together

Women have been present in every chapter of this textbook — farming, raising children, keeping house, nursing the sick, burying the dead, organizing labor actions, writing literature, making music, preserving foodways, teaching school, running churches, and doing the thousand forms of unpaid and underpaid labor that held Appalachian communities together while the men went into the mines.

And yet the dominant narrative of Appalachian identity is overwhelmingly male. The iconic Appalachian figures are men: the frontiersman, the coal miner, the union organizer, the feudist, the moonshiner, the mountain man. Women appear in this narrative as wives, mothers, and victims — waiting at the mine mouth, mourning at the graveside, enduring with silent strength. This characterization is not false — Appalachian women did wait, and mourn, and endure — but it is radically incomplete.

Chapter 9 documented women on the frontier — the agricultural labor, the household production, the medical knowledge, the community-building work that women performed in the settlement era. The chapter argued that frontier survival depended on women's labor as much as on men's, and that the gendered division of labor in mountain communities was not a matter of male dominance and female subordination but a pragmatic allocation of essential tasks.

But the story of women's Appalachia extends far beyond the frontier. In the coal camp era (Chapter 16), women managed households under conditions of extraordinary difficulty — stretching company-store scrip to feed families, maintaining cleanliness in company houses built without running water, nursing miners injured in the pits, and creating community in towns designed for the extraction of labor rather than the sustaining of life. Coal camp women were not passive. They organized. They participated in strikes — sometimes by marching on picket lines, sometimes by feeding strikers, sometimes by confronting scabs and strikebreakers with a ferocity that alarmed company managers and impressed journalists.

Mother Jones — the legendary labor organizer who roused miners across the coalfields (Chapter 17) — was the most famous woman in Appalachian labor history, but she was not alone. Women organized the Brookside Strike of 1973-74 in Harlan County, Kentucky, documented in Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning film Harlan County, U.S.A. Their militancy — blocking roads, confronting armed company guards, sustaining the strike when the men wavered — was essential to the strike's outcome.

The settlement school movement of the early twentieth century was led primarily by women — educated women from outside the region who came to the mountains to establish schools, clinics, and community centers. Mary Breckinridge, who founded the Frontier Nursing Service in eastern Kentucky in 1925, brought professional healthcare to communities that had never had a doctor. The settlement school women were complicated figures — their work was genuine and their impact was real, but their assumptions about mountain culture were often condescending, and their institutions sometimes reproduced the class and racial dynamics they claimed to oppose.

In the modern era, women have led many of Appalachia's most significant movements. The anti-mountaintop-removal movement (Chapter 24) was driven in large part by women — women like Judy Bonds of Coal River Mountain Watch, who fought against the coal companies that were literally blowing up the mountains above her community. The community health worker movement, the environmental justice movement, the education reform movement — women have been at the center of Appalachian activism in every generation, even when the histories written about that activism have centered men.

The synthesis point is this: women's history is not a subcategory of Appalachian history. It is not a special topic, an add-on, a chapter to be included for the sake of completeness. Women's labor — paid and unpaid, acknowledged and invisible, domestic and public — has been the foundation on which Appalachian communities have survived. Without women's work, the coal camps would have collapsed, the strikes would have failed, the churches would have closed, the children would not have been educated, and the communities would not have endured. Any story of Appalachia that marginalizes women's experience is not just incomplete. It is wrong.

LGBTQ+ Appalachians: Visibility and Invisibility in the Hollers

Of all the erasures in the Appalachian narrative, the erasure of LGBTQ+ people is perhaps the most total — not because queer people have not existed in the mountains (they have always existed, everywhere) but because the structures of visibility that allow marginalized groups to be seen have been, until very recently, almost entirely absent in rural Appalachian communities.

The dominant image of Appalachian culture is heterosexual, patriarchal, and rooted in conservative Protestant religious values that have historically condemned homosexuality. The mountain man, the coal miner, the frontiersman — these iconic figures of Appalachian identity are defined by a masculinity that leaves no room for queerness. The mountain woman — the loyal wife, the strong mother, the keeper of hearth and faith — is defined by a femininity that is equally constrained. Within these categories, there is no space for people whose gender identity or sexual orientation does not conform to the heterosexual norm.

But the absence of space in the narrative did not mean the absence of people. LGBTQ+ Appalachians have always existed. They have existed in every hollow and on every ridgetop, in every coal camp and every church congregation, in every schoolhouse and every family. They have existed in silence, in secrecy, in the carefully managed performance of heterosexual normalcy that survival required. The cost of that performance — the psychological cost of hiding who you are in a community that knows everything about everyone — is difficult to overstate and has rarely been documented.

The writer Jeff Mann, a gay man from Hinton, West Virginia, has written extensively about the experience of being queer in rural Appalachia. His poetry and memoir explore the tension between love of place and the impossibility of being fully oneself in that place — the ache of belonging to a landscape that does not acknowledge a fundamental part of who you are. Mann's work is not a rejection of Appalachian identity. It is an insistence that Appalachian identity must expand to include him.

Silas House, one of Appalachia's most celebrated contemporary writers (Chapter 28), has been a prominent advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in the region. House, who is gay, has written and spoken about the need for Appalachian communities to extend the values they already hold — loyalty, community, love of neighbor — to their LGBTQ+ members. His activism has been particularly significant because of his stature within the Appalachian literary and cultural world: House is not an outsider critiquing the region. He is a beloved insider asking the region to live up to its own values.

The Country Queers project, launched by journalist and oral historian Rae Garringer in 2013, has documented the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in rural America, including Appalachia. The project's interviews reveal a complex picture: stories of rejection and violence, but also stories of acceptance, community, and belonging. Some LGBTQ+ Appalachians describe their communities as hostile and unforgiving. Others describe finding acceptance in unexpected places — in families that chose love over doctrine, in churches that interpreted their faith more broadly than the official position suggested, in friendships that survived the revelation of difference.

The visibility of LGBTQ+ Appalachians has increased dramatically in recent years, driven by broader cultural shifts, the growth of LGBTQ+ media representation, and the courage of individuals who have chosen to live openly in communities where openness carries risks. Pride events have been held in Appalachian towns — small events, sometimes contested, but present. LGBTQ+ student organizations have formed on Appalachian college campuses. Social media has connected queer Appalachians who might otherwise have experienced their difference in total isolation.

But the picture remains mixed. Rural communities in Appalachia are, on average, less accepting of LGBTQ+ identities than urban areas. Conservative religious institutions — which remain central to community life in much of the region (Chapter 29) — often maintain official positions that condemn homosexuality, even when individual congregants are more tolerant in practice. The absence of legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals in many Appalachian states means that discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations remains legal and, in some places, common.

The synthesis point is this: LGBTQ+ Appalachians are not an anomaly. They are not an exception to the regional culture. They are part of the regional culture — part of the families, the churches, the workplaces, the schools, the communities that constitute Appalachian life. Their invisibility in the regional narrative is not evidence of their absence. It is evidence of the narrative's failure.

Disability and Industrial Injury: The Bodies That Coal Took

There is a story about Appalachia that is told in bodies.

Chapter 21 documented the human cost of coal — the black lung disease that suffocated miners over years and decades, the cave-ins that crushed them in seconds, the explosions that killed dozens at a time. But this chapter asks a different question: What happened to the survivors? What happened to the men who came out of the mines alive but broken — missing fingers, missing hands, missing legs, bent and twisted by decades of crawling through seams too narrow to stand in, coughing with lungs that could not clear themselves of the dust that had accumulated over a lifetime?

The answer is that they lived in their communities, visible reminders of the cost of extraction, and they were largely invisible in the narratives told about those communities. Disability in Appalachia was not exceptional. It was endemic. In the coal counties, a man missing a limb or wheezing with black lung was not unusual — he was normal. The landscape of disability was so pervasive that it disappeared into the background, unremarkable because it was unremarked upon.

The coal companies treated injured workers as disposable. Workers' compensation, where it existed at all (and in many coal states, it was fought by industry for decades), was inadequate to sustain a family. Injured miners were replaced by healthy ones. The companies had no obligation to the men whose bodies they had consumed and no interest in the communities where those men lived out their diminished lives.

The women of the coal camps — again, the invisible labor force — took care of the disabled. They nursed husbands whose lungs were failing. They adapted households to accommodate wheelchairs and crutches. They stretched inadequate disability payments to cover food and medicine. They did this work without recognition, without compensation, and without any acknowledgment from the companies whose operations had created the need.

Disability in Appalachia was not limited to mining injuries. The poverty of the region (Chapter 23), the inadequacy of healthcare (Chapter 38), the prevalence of environmental hazards — contaminated water from mining operations, air pollution from coal processing, the toxic legacy of mountaintop removal (Chapter 24) — produced elevated rates of chronic illness, developmental disability, and physical impairment across the population. The bodies that bore these costs were disproportionately the bodies of the poor, the Black, and the Indigenous — the people least able to protect themselves from the hazards that the extractive economy created.

The disability rights movement — which emerged nationally in the 1970s and 1980s and culminated in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — had particular resonance in Appalachia, where disability was not an abstract category but a lived reality for a significant portion of the population. But the intersection of disability with Appalachian identity has been largely unexplored in the scholarly literature, and the voices of disabled Appalachians are among the least heard in the regional conversation.

Class: The Through-Line

If there is one constant in all of these stories — the one thread that runs through every community, every identity, every chapter of this textbook — it is class.

Black Appalachians were oppressed by race, but they were also oppressed by class. Women were constrained by gender, but they were also constrained by class. Immigrants were marginalized by ethnicity, but they were also marginalized by class. LGBTQ+ Appalachians were rendered invisible by heteronormativity, but they were also rendered invisible by class. Disabled Appalachians were excluded by ableism, but they were also excluded by class. Indigenous Appalachians were dispossessed by colonialism, but they were also dispossessed by class.

The extraction pattern described throughout this textbook — outside capital extracting wealth from the land while leaving communities with the costs — is fundamentally a story about class. It is a story about who owns and who works, who profits and who pays, who makes decisions and who lives with the consequences. Coal companies did not exploit Appalachian communities because the communities were white or Black, male or female, native or immigrant. They exploited them because the communities were poor and the companies were powerful.

This does not mean that race, gender, sexuality, and disability are secondary to class. They are not. The experience of a Black coal miner in 1920 was different from the experience of a white coal miner in 1920 — not just because of economic exploitation but because of the additional burden of racial discrimination, segregated housing, separate facilities, and the constant threat of racial violence. The experience of a woman in a coal camp was different from the experience of a man — not just because of shared poverty but because of the additional burden of gendered expectations, domestic labor, and the absence of legal or economic autonomy. The experience of a disabled miner was different from the experience of an able-bodied miner — not just because of shared economic vulnerability but because of the additional burden of physical limitation in a world designed for able bodies.

The intersections matter. Race and class intersect. Gender and class intersect. Disability and class intersect. Sexuality and class intersect. The people who have been most invisible in the Appalachian narrative are not those who experience one form of marginalization but those who experience multiple forms simultaneously — the Black, disabled, female, queer, immigrant, Indigenous, poor Appalachians whose compound marginalization places them at the furthest edges of the region's story.

The analysis this chapter demands is intersectional — a term coined by the legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the way that multiple forms of oppression combine and interact. An intersectional analysis of Appalachian history does not ask whether race or class is more important. It asks how they work together. It asks whose experience falls through the gaps between single-axis categories. It asks who is visible when we look at Appalachia through one lens and who becomes visible only when we look through multiple lenses simultaneously.

Why the Single Story Is a Political Act

Telling a story about Appalachia is always a political act. Every narrative choice — what to include, what to exclude, where to begin, where to end, whose voice to center, whose voice to silence — is a choice with consequences. These consequences are not abstract. They determine who receives recognition, who receives resources, who receives sympathy, and who receives blame.

When the War on Poverty defined Appalachian poverty as white poverty, it directed resources toward white communities and away from Black ones. When the media defines Appalachian culture as white culture, it renders Black, Indigenous, and immigrant Appalachians invisible to the institutions — funders, policymakers, academics — that might address their needs. When the hillbilly stereotype defines Appalachian people as ignorant and backward, it justifies the extraction of their resources and the neglect of their communities. When the LGBTQ+ experience is excluded from the Appalachian narrative, it tells queer young people in the mountains that they must choose between their home and their identity.

The fight over who gets to tell the Appalachian story is not a cultural debate. It is a material struggle — a struggle over whose needs are recognized, whose labor is valued, whose presence is acknowledged, and whose future is funded.

Consider a concrete example. When the Appalachian Regional Commission distributes economic development grants, it relies on data about the region's population, its needs, its economic conditions. That data is shaped by narratives. If the dominant narrative says Appalachia is white, then the data collection instruments may not capture the specific needs of Black, Indigenous, or immigrant communities. If the dominant narrative says Appalachian culture is static and traditional, then the grant programs may not support cultural innovation or new voices. If the dominant narrative says Appalachian poverty is the result of cultural deficiency rather than structural exploitation, then the programs may focus on changing the people rather than changing the structures. The story we tell about Appalachia determines the policies we create for it, and the policies determine who benefits and who does not.

J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (2016) — the bestselling memoir that became, for many Americans, the definitive account of Appalachian life — illustrates the point. Vance's story was personal, compelling, and influential. But it was also a particular kind of story — a story of white poverty, individual responsibility, and cultural dysfunction that reinforced existing stereotypes while presenting itself as an insider's corrective to those stereotypes. The book's enormous success shaped how millions of Americans understood Appalachia, and that understanding had political consequences: Vance's narrative was invoked to justify policies that emphasized personal responsibility over structural change, cultural reform over economic redistribution.

The people missing from Vance's account — the Black Appalachians, the Indigenous communities, the immigrant workers, the women whose labor sustained the families Vance described, the queer people whose existence was not acknowledged — were rendered even more invisible by the book's dominance of the national conversation. When one story becomes the story, everyone not in it disappears.

Appalachian Studies: The Field That Emerged from Activism

The academic field of Appalachian Studies emerged in the 1970s, born not in the ivory tower but in the communities where scholars and activists worked side by side. Its founders were people like Helen Lewis, a sociologist at Clinch Valley College (now the University of Virginia's College at Wise) who insisted that scholarship about Appalachia must be connected to the region's social justice struggles. Lewis and her colleagues rejected the detached, "objective" approach of earlier Appalachian scholarship — the approach that had produced studies describing mountain people as specimens to be analyzed rather than agents of their own history.

The Appalachian Studies Association, founded in 1977, became the institutional home for scholars who shared this commitment. The Association's annual conferences brought together academics, community organizers, writers, musicians, and activists to discuss the region's past, present, and future. The field's founding documents were explicit about their politics: Appalachian Studies was not merely about studying the region. It was about changing it.

The field has evolved significantly since its founding. Early Appalachian Studies scholarship focused heavily on economic exploitation — the coal companies, the timber barons, the extraction pattern. This work was essential and remains foundational. But it was also, in hindsight, limited — focused primarily on the experiences of white, male, working-class Appalachians to the exclusion of the communities this chapter has described.

The expansion of Appalachian Studies to include race, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration has been a central project of the field since the 1990s. Scholars like Barbara Ellen Smith, whose work on race, gender, and labor in the coalfields opened new analytical perspectives, and William H. Turner, co-editor of Blacks in Appalachia (1985), one of the first scholarly collections focused on Black Appalachian experience, challenged the field to live up to its own inclusive aspirations.

The Affrilachian movement, the growth of Black Appalachian Studies, the emergence of queer Appalachian scholarship, the expansion of Indigenous Appalachian research, and the increasing attention to immigrant communities have all pushed the field toward a more comprehensive and honest reckoning with the region's complexity. The field is not there yet. Power dynamics within Appalachian Studies — who gets hired, who gets published, who gets invited to speak, who sets the agenda — continue to reflect the broader inequalities the field purports to study. But the trajectory is toward inclusion, and the voices demanding inclusion are louder and more numerous than they have ever been.

The Question That Will Not Resolve

Whose Appalachia?

The question will not resolve. It cannot resolve, because the region is not one thing and has never been one thing. Every attempt to define Appalachian identity — to say "this is what Appalachian means" — is an act of inclusion and exclusion simultaneously. To say that Appalachia is white is to erase everyone who is not. To say that Appalachia is diverse is to risk flattening the distinct experiences of its many communities into a mushy multiculturalism that obscures more than it reveals.

The answer is not a definition. The answer is a practice — the ongoing, never-finished practice of listening to every voice that speaks from these mountains, of insisting that no single story can represent the whole, of demanding that the narratives we tell about the region include the people who have been left out.

Consider what this textbook itself has done. It has tried — across forty chapters — to tell a story of Appalachia that includes the communities typically left out. But it, too, has made choices. It has centered certain stories and left others in the margins. It has devoted more pages to some experiences than to others. It has been shaped by the sources available, the scholarship published, and the perspectives of its authors. This textbook is not the complete story of Appalachia. No textbook could be. The question is not whether the story is complete — it never will be — but whether the storyteller is honest about what is missing and committed to filling the gaps.

The students reading this chapter are part of that work. The Community History Portfolio that has run through this textbook — asking students to research one Appalachian county across all of these themes — is an exercise in asking whose stories have been told and whose have not. The final portfolio will be an exercise in telling a more complete story, one county at a time. That is how the narrative changes: not through a single act of correction but through the accumulated work of many people, each insisting that one more voice be heard, one more experience be recorded, one more community be seen.

This is not a comfortable position. It requires holding contradictions. It requires accepting that the coal miner and the coal miner's Black neighbor, the frontier woman and the Cherokee woman she displaced, the Baptist preacher and the queer kid in his congregation, are all Appalachian — and that their experiences are different, sometimes irreconcilably different, and that the difference matters.

But comfort has never been the point. Accuracy is the point. Justice is the point. And the truth about Appalachia — the truth this entire textbook has been building toward — is that the region's history is richer, more painful, more complicated, and more beautiful than any single story can contain.

Primary Sources

Primary Source Excerpt — Frank X Walker, "Affrilachia" (2000):

"Hills and hollers / are establishing shots / in the establishing story / of these establishing people / who established themselves / in the most un-established landscape / imagination could muster... / We are Affrilachian, / and that is not a misspelling."

— From Affrilachia (Lexington: Old Cove Press, 2000).

Primary Source Excerpt — Silas House, public remarks at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, 2013:

"I am from Appalachia. I am gay. Those two things are not in conflict. The values I was raised with — loyalty, community, love of place, love of neighbor — those values don't have an asterisk next to them that says 'except for the queer ones.' I refuse to accept that they do. And I believe the mountains are big enough to hold all of us."

Primary Source Excerpt — Helen Lewis, "Participatory Research in Appalachia," 1986:

"We cannot study Appalachia as if it were a specimen under glass. The region is not an object to be analyzed from a safe distance. It is a place where people live, struggle, and resist. Our scholarship must be accountable to those people, not just to our colleagues. If our work does not serve the communities we study, then what is it for?"

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

Chapter 40 Portfolio Checkpoint: Whose Stories Are Missing?

This is the most important checkpoint in the portfolio. Return to the county you have been studying and ask: whose stories have you not told?

1. Review all of your previous portfolio work. Whose experiences have been centered in your county's story? Whose experiences have been absent or marginalized?

2. Specifically consider: Are there Black communities in your county's history? Indigenous communities? Immigrant communities? What has been the experience of women beyond the roles assigned to them in the standard narrative? Are there LGBTQ+ people in your county's story — and if their stories are not in the written record, what does that absence tell you?

3. Research at least one marginalized voice from your county's history. This might be a Black church, an immigrant community, a women's organization, a disability rights effort, or any other experience that has not been part of the dominant narrative. Use primary sources where possible — oral histories, church records, local newspapers, community archives.

4. Write a 500–700 word analysis of whose story your county tells and whose story it does not. Why are certain experiences included and others excluded? What would a truly complete history of your county look like? Who would need to be added, and what would change if they were?

This checkpoint prepares you for the final portfolio assembly in the capstone, where you will be asked to produce a county history that is honest about both what is known and what has been erased.

Chapter Summary

Appalachia has never been one thing. It has never been one color, one faith, one language, one gender, one experience. The dominant narrative — the story of white, Protestant, Scots-Irish mountain people — is not false, but it is catastrophically incomplete. It erases the Black Appalachians who have been in the mountains since the era of slavery, the Indigenous peoples who have been there for ten millennia, the immigrants who built the coalfields, the women whose labor held every community together, the LGBTQ+ people who have always existed in every hollow, and the disabled workers whose broken bodies testified to the cost of extraction.

The Affrilachian Poets named the erasure and created a word — "Affrilachian" — that made Black Appalachian identity visible. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians maintained a sovereign presence that refused to let Indigenous Appalachia be relegated to the past tense. Women organizers from Mother Jones to Judy Bonds led movements that shaped the region's history. LGBTQ+ writers like Jeff Mann and Silas House insisted that queer Appalachians are part of the regional story. The field of Appalachian Studies, born in activism, has expanded — unevenly, incompletely, but genuinely — to include voices that its founders did not always hear.

Class remains the through-line — the one form of marginalization that connects all of these experiences. The extraction pattern described throughout this textbook is fundamentally a class story. But class does not operate alone. It intersects with race, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration status to produce compound forms of marginalization that fall hardest on those who are most invisible.

Telling the Appalachian story is always a political act. Every narrative choice — what to include, what to exclude, whose voice to center — has consequences for who is seen, who is valued, and who receives the recognition and resources they need. The fight over whose Appalachia is not a cultural debate. It is a material struggle with real stakes.

The answer to the chapter's title question — Whose Appalachia? — is not a name or a category. It is a commitment: the commitment to telling the story whole, with all its contradictions, all its pain, and all its people.

Key Terms

Affrilachian — A term coined by Frank X Walker in 1991, blending "African," "Appalachian," and "-ian" to name the experience of being both Black and Appalachian. The term gave institutional visibility to a community that had existed for centuries but lacked recognized language.

Affrilachian Poets — A collective of Black Appalachian writers, founded around Frank X Walker's coinage, including Crystal Wilkinson, Kelly Norman Ellis, and others, whose work excavated Black Appalachian experience from beneath layers of erasure.

Intersectionality — A term coined by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the way multiple forms of oppression (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability) combine and interact, producing compound marginalization that single-axis analysis cannot capture.

Appalachian Studies — An academic field emerging from 1970s activism, committed to scholarship that serves the region's communities. Founded by figures like Helen Lewis, the field has expanded from its initial focus on economic exploitation to include race, gender, sexuality, disability, and immigration.

Country Queers — An oral history project launched by Rae Garringer in 2013, documenting the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in rural America, including Appalachia.

Racial erasure — The systematic removal of non-white people from the dominant narrative of a region, community, or institution. In Appalachia, racial erasure has rendered Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities invisible in the story the region tells about itself.

Extraction pattern — The recurring dynamic, traced throughout this textbook, of outside capital extracting wealth from Appalachian land and labor while leaving communities with the costs. The extraction pattern is fundamentally a class dynamic that intersects with race, gender, and other forms of marginalization.

Appalachian Studies Association — The professional organization of Appalachian Studies scholars and community practitioners, founded in 1977, which hosts annual conferences and publishes the Journal of Appalachian Studies.

Helen Lewis — Sociologist and activist widely regarded as a founder of Appalachian Studies, who insisted that scholarship about the region must be connected to social justice and accountable to the communities it studies.

Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones) — Legendary labor organizer active in the Appalachian coalfields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose activism on behalf of miners made her one of the most famous women in American labor history.

Judy Bonds — West Virginia activist who led the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining as executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch, receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2003.

Silas House — Acclaimed Appalachian writer and LGBTQ+ rights advocate whose work and activism have insisted that Appalachian values of community and loyalty must extend to queer Appalachians.

Jeff Mann — Gay writer from Hinton, West Virginia, whose poetry and memoir explore the tension between love of Appalachian place and the constraints that rural communities impose on queer identity.

Barbara Ellen Smith — Scholar whose work on race, gender, and labor in the Appalachian coalfields expanded the analytical framework of Appalachian Studies beyond its initial focus on class and economic exploitation.

William H. Turner — Co-editor of Blacks in Appalachia (1985), one of the first major scholarly collections focused on Black Appalachian experience, and a foundational figure in Black Appalachian Studies.