Stereotyping Of Native Appalachians And How To Fight It

On several occasions in this blog, I have written about prejudice toward Appalachia and Appalachian Americans as well as ignorance by many people toward the entire history, geography, literature, music, overall culture, and sociology of Appalachia.  That mass ignorance often extends to even large portions of the native Appalachians.  At least since February 2018, I have been reading the work of native Appalachian author Pearl S. Buck, specifically the "Good Earth" trilogy.  I wrote my first post about Buck and her work in March of 2018 which was a review of her greatest novel, "The Good Earth".  It is an absolute masterpiece and, to a degree, overshadows the other two novels in the trilogy, "Sons" and "A House Divided", although either of them would have been considered a capstone to the careers of many lesser writers.  Although Buck was born in West Virginia and attended college in Virginia, she spent her childhood and much of her entire life in China.  Many students of literature do not even speak of her as having been Appalachian.  But if you read her work closely, you will find many aspects of life in Appalachia which seem to have been transplanted to her work about China such as family graveyards, familism, and paternal control of family units.  I have to admit that I do not know enough about Chinese Culture, which is incredibly diverse and complex, to speculate about it to any degree.  

But this blog post will focus on one aspect of the book, "A House Divided", which seems to have been taken directly out of Appalachian Culture.  The protagonist of the novel, Wang Yuan, the grandson of Wang Lung, the protagonist of the first novel, "The Good Earth" and the son of Wang The Tiger, the protagonist of the second novel, "Sons", has been living in a generally unnamed foreign country for six years in order to go to school, presumably college, and to escape possible execution by the authorities as a suspected revolutionary.  During this six year period, Wang Yuan's character gradually, via a series of four clearly delineated steps, develops a strong sense of national pride about China and a hatred toward foreigners.  To quote the book, "He walked and talked among these foreigners and saw himself no longer as one Wang Yuan, but he saw himself as his people, and as one who stood for his whole race in a foreign alien land."  When I read that sentence, I was instantly reminded of some of my own experiences in my teenage years when I graduated from high school and ventured out on my own into the greater United States outside my native Kentucky and Appalachia.  I will always remember an occasion when I was on a winter quarter exchange to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, one of greatest, historically liberal northern colleges which was coeducational from its birth and racially integrated since 1835.  During that period at Oberlin, I met and was "befriended" by a student who had grown up in nearby Cleveland only thirty-five miles away.  This student invited me, one weekend during my stay at Oberlin, to attend a family dinner at his home.  We were required to ride mass transit together to his home and I was required to return to the campus alone via the same means after the meal.  To say the least, I was somewhat unprepared having spent my entire life in Floyd and Knott Counties in Kentucky where mass transit still does not exist even today.  I was also only seventeen years old and markedly untraveled.  But the part of the event which got the best of me was not the return on mass transit but the encounter with his parents themselves.  So help me God, they could not decipher my Knott County accent and, on several occasions during the meal, they would stop me and ask me to say again some word which I thought the entire world must know, and once or twice actually asked me to spell these words.  The home was not extravagant by today's standards but was clearly more fancy than most I had ever seen.  But the part that got to me the most and which I have still not forgotten fifty years later was that I instantly realized that I saw myself as my "people, and as one who stood for [my] whole race in a foreign land".  I was the poor Appalachian boy from Eastern Kentucky who had been brought home by their son for show and tell.  That experience had a formative effect on my subsequent development of my everlastingly strong and unyielding sense of pride, otherness, and identification as an outspoken Appalachian on a mission to protect, defend, perpetuate, and propagate my culture wherever I have gone for the intervening fifty years. It also helped me to reach the commitment to never deliberately lose my Appalachian accent.  But I have to admit that by virtue of travel and extensive education, I have inadvertently lost some of the accent and no think that I sound much like most of the native Knott countians who have lived their entire lives there.  I have never yielded or wavered in those effort to protect, propagate, and defend my culture during my travels from the Mid-Hudson of New York to the deserts of Southern Arizona or from Winnipeg, Ontario, Canada to Nogales, Mexico and South Florida.  I believe that Pearl S. Buck wrote that section of the novel describing Wang Yuan's commitment to his protection and propagation of the Chinese culture from the viewpoints of both a woman born and educated in Appalachia and as a woman who was reared in China and required to come to that "foreign land" of Virginia to be educated.  

Later in the book, Wang Yuan confronts two other young Chinese students whom he feels have belittled the Chinese people and their country in a stage performance before an audience of primarily American students.  During that confrontation, Wang Yuan says, "It is not true love of country to hold one's own up for cause of laughter to a people always too ready for such laughing at us."  Once again, Pearl S. Buck, through this character expressed exactly what I have felt on many occasions as I have seen native Appalachians belittle our people, our culture, and our history.  I have no tolerance for those who do this or for those who, in what they mistakenly describe as pride, call themselves and the rest of us "hillbillies" or "rednecks" with absolutely no knowledge of the true origins of the term "redneck" in that greatest battle of native Appalachians against outside interests at the Battle of Blair Mountain in Logan County West Virginia, or of the creation and propagation of the term "hillbilly" in prejudice, vilification, and belittlement .  Recently, a person I like a great deal and respect for his work in the health care professions brought up the television personality Ernie "The Turtle Man" Brown, Jr. as something or someone to be enjoyed and admired.  Instantly, I informed this man, a nearly lifelong resident of Breathitt County Kentucky, one of the most stringently Appalachian of Kentucky Counties even to this day, that I believe that "The Turtle Man" is just a con artist and idiot making money by making the rest of us Appalachians look like idiots.  I also asked the man I was talking to if he was aware of Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, one of the best documentary film companies in America.  This man, who has spent nearly his entire life in Appalachian Eastern Kentucky only sixty-five miles or so from Whitesburg, Kentucky, and had also never heard of one of their most important films, "Strangers And Kin: A History Of The Hillbilly Image". I told him and I firmly believe that every native of Appalachia should be required to see this film in school before they complete the third grade.  It would also be an excellent idea to require it again in high school.  It is an excellent educational tool about and an indictment of the stereotyping of Appalachian people which has taken place at least since West Virginian sought and achieved statehood in 1863.

Whatever effort and expense might be necessary to fight and end stereotyping of Appalachia and Appalachian people would be money and time well spent for the future of the region.  Appalachian children who were able to grow up without the prevalent sense of inferiority would be more likely to achieve better educations, better careers, and better lives.  Self esteem based on accurate knowledge of their powerful heritage would serve to enhance their sense of self-worth, pride, and self acceptance.  I urge all my readers to find a copy of "Strangers And Kin..." and watch it at least once with your entire family.  Internalize the information it contains and use that information to protect your culture for the rest of your life.