ELIZABETH CATTE'S What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is the vindication every Appalachian has been craving in the wake of the media’s seemingly endless examination of so-called “Trump Country.” For any native Appalachian like me, reading this slim volume is at once a breath of fresh air and the blueprint you always wished for to respond when someone snidely expresses surprise that you have all your teeth and a good pair of shoes.
Catte divides her book into three sections. First, she provides an overview of why Appalachia is more diverse and less monolithically conservative than the media has portrayed. Second, Catte offers a direct refute to the Trump Country literary genre. The author concludes her work with a powerful description of her Appalachian home’s core values, contrasting Appalachians’ longstanding commitments to social justice and cohesive community against outsiders’ efforts to both “save” the region’s people and extract its resources without just compensation or stewardship.
Catte frankly describes her mission in writing this book as providing “critical commentary about who benefits from the omission of [diverse Appalachian] voices ... and openly celebrat[ing] the lives, actions, and legacies of those ignored in popular commentary about Appalachia.” Though Catte powerfully delivers information supporting both objectives, many commentators construct a feud between Catte and J.D. Vance, author of the blockbuster book Hillbilly Elegy. Catte critiques Elegy for universalizing his Appalachian experience and framing Appalachia as an American “other” while using an enduring myth about race to paint Appalachians of all backgrounds as inferior to those living outside the region. (For a quick overview of this myth, check out Michael Harriot’s “When the Irish Weren’t White” on The Root.)
Reducing Appalachia to a literary feud tragically obscures the timeliness and poignancy of Catte’s core argument. Though Catte spends a significant portion of the book constructing a counter-image of Appalachia and its people, the book’s most important takeaway is its discussion of how Americans in power construct and propagate false images of the “other,” dividing marginalized populations against each other and disrupting our ability to create a society committed to the common good. In this way, Appalachia can serve as an illustrative companion to contemporary volumes in theology and Christian-informed social analysis, such as Will Willimon’sFear of the Other and Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness.
To a native Appalachian now living in a large, distant city, the book is an appetizer to a main course of telling Appalachia’s true and diverse history and contextualizing it within a faith-based framework. To those who have not deeply considered the region, however, the book’s arguments bring a jarring reality check to what it means to be marginalized in the U.S. and how the face of marginalization may be more diverse than once thought.
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