I live in Appalachia, not the town but the region which roughly comprises the southern Appalachian mountains in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee. The Appalachian people historically have been a source of stereotyping as being backward hillbillies. Still, I was surprised to get a number of emails the past two weeks about Bill O'Reilly's comments about the Appalachian people as being "ignorant drunks" and that "There's a culture of poverty there, a culture of ignorance." These comments were broadcast in an interview with Diane Sawyers about an ABC special on the subject. The video clip is only 3:43 minutes so please view and then read some of my reactions below:
Right off, O'Reilly asks Sawyers about why children in Appalachian mountains are poor while those in the Rockies or the Sierras aren't. Sawyers doesn't give an answer but I will. The big difference between the southern Appalachian mountains and those others is coal mining. And, mountaintop removal coal mining has devastated the local communities and the environment, entrenching the area into a cycle of poverty and despair that Reilly blames on the people. Would people in Colorado or California stand by while over 400 mountains have been blasted away and then dumped into surrounding streams, polluting the water and air? I don't think so.
O'Reilly surprisingly says something I agree with. Sawyers talks about the importance of putting computers in the children's homes, saying that is "rebuilding the infrastructure." O'Reilly responds with: "I don't want to rebuild the infrastructure. I want to leave it pristine. It's beautiful."
I agree! Let's leave the mountains in their pristine state, putting an end to mountaintop coal mining.
O'Reilly then advises that the children just move away. As one who has visited some of the poorest regions of Appalachia, I learned that many of the children do move away after high school. Those that do stay have few opportunities (it only take 7 guys to blow up a mountain). They are more likely to fall into alcoholism and drug usage, perhaps due to these poor prospects. Yet, moving away is not a longterm solution.
The solution to stopping the cycle of poverty in Appalachia lies in retooling the economy away from coal and into other clean, non-polluting industries. For instance, a door and window factory was being built near Norton, Virginia when I visited this heart of the coalfields a few years ago. That's a good thing, especially if the products could meet the new EnergyStar specifications. Then, those who buy the windows and doors could get tax credits as a result of the new stimulus package just signed into law.
The emails I have received regarding Bill O'Reilly focus on his stereotypical remarks about Appalachian parents being drunks and drug addicts. I am not outraged by these remarks as these senders are. Rather, I am saddened by O'Reilly's complete lack of understanding of Appalachia and the forces that are keeping people in poverty.
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That being said, I have another take on the comparison between Appalachia and the Rockies. The reason the Rockies are more pristine is that most of the usable land is relatively recently purchased (last 50 years or so) by the wealthy. Meanwhile, the Appalachians have been settled by families since the Indians were forcibly evicted. These small farms have been in the same families for generation. So whatever will bring in money in this poverty-stricken area - including mines, chemical plants and trailer parks - is ok since jobs here are scarce. Their other option is to sell the family farm to rich people - an alternative that is popular here in the southern Appalachians, WNC.
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The area where I live has no coal for now (still worry that the old coal mines will be reopened). So, people do sell their farms to rich people, probably a lot like where you live.
Where I live in NW Washington State the forests get cut to the ground and you can see off in the distance areas where it looks like a earthmover sized mower just ran over the mountains laying them bare. You can imagine all the devastation, erosion and the wrack and ruin on people who live nearby.
Bill Beck has a post today that I think says a great deal about the kind of thinking that results in the kind of rigid either/or thinking that has made these choices and judgments against the people left to live with the results.
Our family is of the same Scotch-Irish stock as the peoples of Appalachia. You can't tell me that different opportunities don't make a difference or that extreme poverty doesn't exact its intellectual and psychological pound of flesh. For the likes of O'Reilly to gloat and make pronouncements on top of the hardships of these people, well, he's really an asshat by choice and not by accident.
Thanks for the note about Bill Beck. I will check out his post.
You are correct, that coal mining has cursed that region. Sure, it provided jobs, but certainly not the kind of jobs that a Bill O'Reilly would ever want to have. And the companies themselves have a heritage of ecological and human exploitation that they should be ashamed of.
Still, the region has produced great men and women (my mother included). One of them was Chuck Yeager, whom my grandfather taught in high school.
That being said, there is more truth to his assertion than I am comfortable admitting. I live in East Tennessee, and my father was born in raised in coal-mining country in East Kentucky, so I am at least somewhat qualified to speak on this subject.
I dealt with this subject extensively in my book The Disappearing Cemetery, which is in essence a history of the Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled this part of America. It is impossible to condense my argument in this comment, but it is fair to say that these were tough, independent people who had little time -- and too often little use -- for education.
Sadly, that condition persists to this day. For example, my state Tennessee has the lowest percentage of college graduates of the 50 states. This is also a place where thousands of unqualified parents home-school their children to keep them from being exposed to blasphemous ideas like evolution. It would seem the Scopes Trial hasn't quite been settled yet in Tennessee -- nor in much of the rest of Appalachia.
I know the dangers of generalization, and I know that many who read this will not agree or can cite exceptions, but from my experience what I describe is all too often the rule -- and if anything, things appear to getting worse when it comes to education.
Finally -- to my liberal friends and those who disagree with my assessment, I suggest O'Reilly's assertion is simply a less kind and less gentle version of Barack Obama's observation about people who cling to guns and religion.
O'Reilly has the typical Reagan Republican view that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and if they don't, it's because they don't really want to, or they're too stupid, or lazy, or drunk. But you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you don't have any boots to begin with.
Rob St. Amant--I agree. The sound bites are what disturbed many people Thanks for your g comment.
But, as I say in my comments, this cycle of poverty and poor education can be broken by finally investing in the region instead of the historical exploitation that has continues to this day.
As far as your comment about home schooling, it is all dependent on the parents. I became acquainted with home schoolers around here who band together to provide great educational opportunities for their children. Most go on to college. But, these parents are mostly college educated so that makes a difference.
This is why his show is so successful. Easy and quick answers to complex questions. This is what Americans are used to. Instant gratification. Book 'em Dano! Case closed in 60 minutes.
These talking head news shows where people constantly interrupt one another and no one gets a chance to explain her position aren't designed to serve the people. They are designed to garner ratings.
I didn't see Sawyer's documentary. Perhaps it did justice to the issues facing Appalachia. But the abject poverty of the region is a source of national embarrassment. Any attention to the issue, including three minutes of bantering with O'Reilly, probably is a good thing.
Anyway. I like quilting, and I have a book published in 1970 called something like "Mountain Quilters" which is about a project started in Appalachia by a couple of hippie chicks from Berkeley to put the poor women to work doing something they actually knew how to do, quilting. They ended up making a go of it, and it's put forth in the book as a blueprint for other projects which could let the people of Appalachia lift themselves out of poverty.
So, here we are 40 years later, and just a couple of days ago I watched a news report about how some stunning percentage of Appalachians have no teeth at all, because they suck down Mountain Dew all day, they don't brush their teeth or floss, and they can't afford dental care.
And suddenly the optimism of the hippie chicks from Berkeley is looking pretty damn dumb. Berkeley is still full of bright, optimistic people who go to help out in places like Appalachia which are still full of dull, pessimistic people. It appears that an injection of money and energy from outside can only cause a momentary stirring which settles as soon as the outside influence is withdrawn.
Here's the difference between me and O'Reilly, though: I don't really care whether or not the situation is hopeless. Doesn't matter. I don't believe people are allowed to give up caring about each other. Giving up is not an option. Which means that if what we're doing now seems to be futile, we need to be looking at what we haven't tried yet.
The news and entertainment media have never represented us in a positive light, and they have, in fact, erroneously defined us negatively for a century, which has always been the justification, of course, for destroying our environment and our real culture; and they continue to do so--and millions of people worldwide believe them!
That is why we should go to war with the national media, in whatever way we can, to replace those insidious stereotypes with representations of who we really are--by honoring our centuries-old heritage of persistence, perseverance, courage, loyalty, language, and love of freedom nourished for generations by our Scottish, English, Irish, German, Welsh, and Cherokee ancestors.
Betty Cloer Wallace
bettycloerwallace@runbox.com
By Betty Cloer Wallace
Bill O’Reilly’s recent contemptible rant against Appalachian Americans is only the latest example of the widespread and multigenerational problem of Appalachian hillbilly stereotypes. Quite simply, O’Reilly reminded the world once again that people of the Appalachian Mountains are still the only cultural group in America that many people have the audacity to ridicule publicly as being of low intelligence, and worse.
Can you imagine if O'Reilly had made the same despicable statements about ________ in _________, or ________ in ________, or _______ in ________. (Fill in the blanks with any racial or ethnic or cultural slurs you can imagine, the more insensitive the better.)
How can we as a people ever overcome this pervasive hillbilly stereotype? Why do we continue to pull in our heads like turtles and pretend we don't care and that we will survive regardless of the outside world? Well, I do care—for myself, my family and friends, and my culture—and I don't believe that we are surviving very well or will survive in the future as a culture with a shred of honor and dignity if we do not rise up, en masse, and protest at every opportunity this kind of insensitive abuse.
We continue to loll about in our insular Snuffy Smith, Lil Abner, Mammy Yokum, Jed Clampett, grits-and-possum stereotype as if the opinion of the rest of the world does not matter, even while we are being brutalized every time someone laughs at our dialect or accent, or asks WHERE are you from, or rejects us for a job, or does not publish our writing because how could an ignorant hillbilly possibly have something to say.
A professor at the University of Colorado once said to our own Charles Frazier, "Imagine that! A hillbilly with a Ph.D.!" Even worse than the professor thinking such a misbegotten thought was that she felt entitled to publicly say it right to his face. Can you imagine her making that statement to a person of any other racial or ethnic or cultural group? "Imagine that! A ______ with a Ph.D.!"
As much as I love COLD MOUNTAIN, both book and movie, I hated the "Young Mammy Yokum" portrayal of Ruby by Renee Zellweger who won an Academy Award for it. (Frazier’s Ruby in the book had a quiet strength and wisdom, as do most native Appalachian people.) As much as I love our bluegrass music, I hated the stereotypical portrayal of ignorance in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
And, when I worked in the Alaskan Arctic, an Eskimo woman who had seen a "Songcatcher" DVD asked me why hillbillies don't fix up their houses. She thought the stage-set ramshackle buildings in that movie were really the kind in which we actually live—rather like us stereotyping Eskimos as living in ice-block igloos, the difference being that we are stereotyped as being too dumb or lazy to fix up our houses while Eskimos are stereotyped as being intelligent enough to survive in an extreme place.
In the age of global communication, this debilitating hillbilly stereotype is pervasive even internationally, and it affects us negatively on so many levels.
For the past century, companies that have considered our region for placing new enterprises have looked for local "hands" to do their low-level jobs, while bringing in management and executives (the “brains”) from outside; and now no one even considers Appalachia as a place where management would want to bring their own families to live or where intelligent local people might be available for employment.
Further compounding the problem, too many of our local governments are now made up of second-tier pseudo-leaders who are interested primarily in promoting tourism; but who, we should ask ourselves, will own the new hotels and mountaintop second-homes and assorted eateries the appointed tourist boards and self-serving chambers of commerce say we need—and who will be paying increased taxes for infrastructure to support them, and cleaning their rooms and waiting their tables and manicuring their lawns?
The local "hands," of course, are expected to do those low-level jobs. This servant mentality is deeply embedded in our history and culture and language, and all of us have perpetuated it simply by not rising up and fighting it. “He/she is a good hand to_____," we say.
Zell Miller of Georgia is the only well-known person who has ever stood up publicly to try to end this crippling multigenerational Appalachian stereotype. He single-handedly created enough flak several years ago to prevent television producers from creating a Beverly Hillbillies Reality Show that would have placed an Appalachian family in a Beverly Hills mansion and ridiculed them for a year. Can you imagine if the producers had even suggested doing the same with a Beverly _____ Reality Show? (You fill in the blank with the most insensitive racial or ethnic or cultural slur you can think of.)
The reality show producers even advertised in our local newspapers for an ignorant mountain family, all expenses paid. Can you imagine the justifiable outrage if they had placed such advertisements in the Atlanta or Birmingham or New York papers for an ignorant _____ family to send out to Beverly Hills and ridicule for a year.
While some racial and ethnic and cultural groups recently tried to get a newspaper cartoonist fired, and rightfully so, for depicting the shooting of a "stimulus plan gorilla,” O'Reilly was shooting down the future of an entire culture by perpetuating a century-old stereotype in the most egregious and offensive manner—and we ought to be outraged. We ought to care, and care deeply, because the issue is infinitely larger and more far-reaching than simply our own personal irritation with O’Reilly.
Actually, O'Reilly is small potatoes when one considers what we as a culture are up against. This negative stereotyping of our culture is becoming more focused and pronounced than ever before, simply because it has become politically incorrect to target other groups. Think of all the other minorities in this country who are discriminated against. Are any of them summarily and publicly declared to be ignorant and of low IQ? Can you name any other such group?
Other minorities may be insidiously stereotyped and discriminated against for assorted other reasons, but they are not blatantly and openly ridiculed as ignorant. And now, O'Reilly has added "immoral" and "drug-addicted" to our litany of Appalachian stereotypes, as well as our being unworthy to live in our own mountain homeland. Our children should move to Miami, he says. Oh, my.
Even "rednecks," who are everywhere and are a social class rather than a culture, are not dismissed as ignorant and inferior to other people because of intelligence. In fact, rednecks are often praised for their many independent and self-sufficient attributes, except for those rednecks who also happen to be classified as ignorant hillbillies in one-gallused overalls sleeping with their sisters and the farm animals.
Fortunately some "outlanders" do "get it" and are embarrassed by the likes of O’Reilly, but the fact remains that no one outside of an abused group can truly "feel" it without having "felt" it. No one without minority physical characteristics or other personal differences can truly "feel" that discrimination. No one outside someone with a mountain accent (or any other accent or dialect outside the prevailing norm) can "feel" a job interviewer lose interest when you open your mouth to answer a question.
O'Reilly is hate-filled, but he is not a fool. He has built an empire by spouting the poisonous hatred that millions of people want to hear. They do listen to him and are influenced by him. While he himself is not fully the issue, he is a flash point for bigotry and intolerance, and that is why he is dangerous.
Yes, O’Reilly is a catalyst, but he is not the source of our problem. We are. We are to blame for not doing everything we can to root out such ignorant O’Reilly-type bigotry, to expose it for what it is, and then to replace it by honoring who we really are—by honoring our centuries-old heritage of persistence, perseverance, courage, loyalty, language, and love of freedom nourished for generations by our Scottish, English, Irish, German, Welsh, and Cherokee ancestors.
Why can we not pick up our pine knots and go to war against this blatant, insidious destruction of our culture? It will not take care of itself, and no one else is going to do it for us.
For the past 125 years, especially during wars and periods of economic depression, people have come into our mountains to exploit us as easy targets as they irreversibly destroy our forests, scalp our mountaintops, pollute our rivers, turn our community schools into mega-institutions, raise our taxes, rape our land with roads and airports and cookie-cutter shopping malls, and ultimately pollute our DNA.
It becomes increasingly harder to identify real native mountaineers, and within a few more generations our real culture, like that of the Melungeons, may fade into oblivion long before the stereotypes disappear. Our centuries-old physical characteristics will be gone, along with our language, values, customs, ethics, and morals; and that is why it is important for writers and storytellers and videographers to work overtime now to record our rapidly vanishing culture, to record who we are.
Children in the future may be asking, "Who exactly were the hillbillies? Where did they live? Where did they come from? Where did they go?" And their mothers will respond, “You must not say that ‘H’ word. It is politically incorrect.”
Let us now pick up our pine knots and go to war—to save ourselves.
___________________
Betty Cloer Wallace resides in Western North Carolina and is a direct descendant of Roderick Shelton, first English settler in Madison County, NC. She teaches writing and literature at a local community college.
bettycloerwallace@runbox.com
2/27/09
I know you are very outraged at Bill O'Reilly's comments. I suppose I shouldn't say I am just saddened because really it is pathetic that Bill O'Reilly gets this big audience when he clearly does not know what he is talking about. Unfortunately, Diane Sawyers didn't disagree with him or provide a good retort, agreeing with him on the drug issue essentially. It was a good opportunity to link the Oxycontin problem with Rush Lindbaugh so you could say that he's not much different than the Appalachian people in that way.