I have read a number of articles in recent months regarding
Appalachia. These include the New York
Times piece, and the “Big White Ghetto” article. I love how writers with no history in the culture
swoop in to one community and write high profile pieces with overarching
conclusions about a region. These articles and their themes are not new. Such
stories have been written about the region since the late 1800s. All center around ignorant mountain folk who
are too lazy to work and get by taking advantage of the system.
These stereotypes have been in our popular culture for
decades. As a kid growing up in Western
Kentucky we watched the “Beverly Hillbillies,” a sitcom about poor folk who
strike it rich and how they don’t fit in in California. Al Capp’s comic strip “Lil’
Abner” told the continuing story of the poor folk of Dogpatch USA. (The irony of both shows is that the
hillbillies usually outfoxed the city folk.) Are there people living this way in
Appalachia? Well sure. Is that the defining characteristic of the
region? No. Having lived half of my life
in Central Appalachia, I know that the truth is far more complex than the stereotypes
that have been around for generations.
If you want to see those stereotypes blown to smithereens, I encourage
you to read Jim Webb’s “Born Fighting.”
He tells the story of the Scots-Irish in America through his own family’s
experience.
I am not a native to Appalachia. I live here by choice. Being a “not from here” who has lived in
small communities in multiple regions gives me a good perspective on rural
poverty vs. urban poverty. No, I will
resist the temptation to write about urban poverty based on my visits to
Norfolk, VA, Richmond, VA, Nashville, TN, St. Louis, MO and Lexington, KY. Then I would be guilty of the same arrogance
of “knowing” a place as the writer of the “Big White Ghetto.” What I will attempt is to discuss rural
poverty as seen through the eyes of someone who spent twenty years working to
reduce it, with marginal success. (I
will come back to those successes at the end of this piece.)
I know that most of the country sees Appalachia as all being
the same. This is as foolish as assuming
that every urban area is the same.
Living here, I know that not every community is the same. It is foolish to compare remote Jackson, KY to
that mecca of hipsters Asheville, NC, even though both are in Appalachia. The region has amazing diversity in
communities and qualities of life. While
the population is predominantly white, you find amazing diversity even in the
smallest coal mining communities, which have Italian, Polish, Hungarian and
African American roots. Anyone who
spends more than a few days in the region will attest to this diversity.
I grew up in a small town in the rural Jackson Purchase of
Kentucky. It is a region of small towns
and farms. It is a region of haves and
have nots that has benefited from TVA projects in the past. When my mother was a child, it was like much
of the rural south. You had rich landowners,
merchants and then the rest of the people working to get by. Sharecropping was a means of employment for
many. Growing up I saw little in the way
of poverty, since I lived in a college town and most of my relatives had moved
up economically. My glimpses of poverty
were when we visited my dad’s family in Arkansas. All I realized as a kid was that they lived
differently than we did. As I got older
I was able to make the connections that they lived differently because of
poverty and different familial expectations.
We were raised to work hard, and were expected to get college educations
and live better lives than our parent’s.
I found that my cousins had less of a work ethic, and there were no
expectations of education being a path to a different life.
When I completed school, I worked for several years in
Economic Development. I was one of those
people whose job it was to help put together projects and financing to bring
new employment to communities. My focus
was rural communities. What I found was
rural communities come with a set of challenges that are the same whether they
be in South Central Tennessee, Western Kentucky, Southside Virginia or Southwestern
Virginia. The first challenge is
remoteness. Many of these areas are not
easy to get to, or are not on major transportation routes. The second challenge is lack of or inadequacy
of needed infrastructure. Things like
water, sewer, rail, natural gas, electrical and telecommunications are either
not present or not up to modern standards.
The third challenge is lack of a skilled workforce. This is in part a result lack of educational
opportunities, lack of an emphasis on education, and the out migration of the
best and brightest looking for a better life; leaving behind a population less
educated and motivated to work. The
fourth factor is quality of life. Rural
areas, in part because of lack of resources, do not offer the level of social,
cultural and retail amenities many people demand. The cycle of poverty just makes most of these
challenges difficult to overcome.
Ironically, for those argue for self-reliance as the way to solve this, most
of these challenges are not something that can be overcome without large-scale
investment. The source of this
investment usually comes from the government in the form of grants and low
interest loans.
In my experience, successful projects could overcome some of
these challenges. Utility expansion or
extensions were not that hard to accomplish.
We could put together job-training programs to meet prospective employer’s
needs. Where we always came up short was in
eliminating the remoteness. Those kind
of improvements are decades long in coming, expensive to accomplish, and not
often politically popular. Overcoming
the amenities challenge does not happen until population and local resources
reach a certain critical mass. As for
that group of the population lacking the interest and desire to work, I have no
idea how to change that mindset. From my experience, fighting rural poverty is
the same whether we are talking about Appalachia or anywhere else in America. The only detriment that is unique to
Appalachia is the availability of level land for large-scale development.
Now let’s talk about rural successes. These successes usually combine certain
factors; access to Interstate highways, investment in necessary infrastructure
and enlightened local leadership. When
opportunities come to these communities, they have the tools to exploit the
opportunities. Some communities, like
Beckley WV have the added benefit of a powerful politician who is able to steer
key improvements and projects to them.
Others, like Blacksburg, VA have the benefit of being anchored by a
major university, which also bring inherent benefits. The greatest engine for rural economic
development has its roots in the great depression. TVA was created to control flooding, and
bring electricity to what was then a remote and backward region. Bringing flood control to the Tennessee River
Valley helped improve agriculture and the electricity brought industrial growth
and the modern world to the area.
Yes, I know that this has gone far afield from the critique
of narrow focused articles on what is wrong with Appalachia. My point is that the challenges of
Appalachia are not unique to the region, nor do they apply to the entire
region. I do not have a magic solution
for the problem of poverty and the underclass.
Careful observation of the world will show the behavior characterized in
the “Big White Ghetto” is not an Appalachian phenomenon, but a global one that
has been around for all of time. Then
again, I am not alone in that. I do
suggest that anyone who posits simple solutions to the problems of poverty, whether
urban or rural, is misinformed or intentionally misleading.
