“When I imagine our history, I see photographs.” The term struck a chord and is now widely embraced. Walker, coined the term “Affrilachian.” It was a response to the long history of writing African Americans out of the stories we tell about Appalachia, giving a name to the Black presence in the region and raising its visibility. Twenty-five years ago, poet and scholar Frank X. Photo by Ben Shahn/Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photograph Collection Library of Congress. Washington, singers Nina Simone and Bill Withers, and writers August Wilson, Nikki Giovanni, and John Edgar Wideman-are rarely associated with it. Catte notes that when coal industry employment was at its height, in the early to mid-twentieth century, African American miners made up “20 to 50 percent of the workforce.” Even today, she writes, more people in Appalachia “identify as African American than Scots-Irish.” Yet the myth of Whiteness is so strong that even well-known Black people from the region-the educator and politician Booker T.

But in fact, African Americans, some of them enslaved, have inhabited the region since the first soldiers and pioneers drove Native Americans off of their land. Black folks, the story goes, live elsewhere. The Whiteness of Appalachia is one of its most enduring stereotypes. Somehow, the ignorance and racism of this “other America” had propelled Trump to victory, not the votes of middle-class suburbanites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas. As historian Elizabeth Catte points out in her important new book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, the myths of poverty, backwardness, and homogeneous Whiteness have made it easy to paint Appalachia as “Trump Country.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election, an entire journalistic genre emerged that ignored Trump’s support among White voters of all income levels and in all regions of the country and instead focused on White working-class voters, especially in Appalachia. Recently, myths about Appalachia have been recruited to explain the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency. In the 1960s, for instance, President Lyndon Johnson made Appalachian poverty the face of his War on Poverty, believing that voters would be more willing to support programs that seemed to be aimed at poor White people than poor African Americans. Myths about Appalachia linger in the national subconsciousness and rise to the surface when politicians and pundits find them to be particularly useful. Shaylan Clark (Washington Post interview, 2017) “When someone hears ‘Appalachia,’ the first thing that pops into their head isn’t an African American face, ever. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott/Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photograph Collection Library of Congress. “Coal miner his wife and two of their children. America is racially and ethnically diverse, while Appalachia is uniformly White, a land of hillbillies and moonshine. America is modern and progressive, while Appalachia is mired in the past.

According to this myth, America is prosperous, while Appalachia is poor. Historian Ronald Eller has pointed out that the region has long been seen as the “ other America,” defining what the nation as a whole is not. Our presence complicates other American stories, like the ones that get told about Appalachia. Abraham Lincoln put it to good use when he spoke those words at Gettysburg, rallying the Union in a time of crisis. But, as history, this foundational myth was undermined by the centrality of slavery in the economic and political life of the new nation. Our presence, for instance, makes it hard to accept the notion that the United States was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It’s a comforting myth and a useful one as well. Black folks have a gift for complicating the stories that Americans like to tell about themselves.

Two towns made marion