Elizabeth Catte
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Articles by Elizabeth Catte
Who’s to Blame for White Poverty?
Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right Arlie Russell Hochschild New Press, $30.99 (cloth) White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy Reverend Dr. William J.
What to Read Next: Appalachia Edition
What to Read Next: Appalachia Edition One of the most intriguing and misunderstood regions in our nation is Appalachia. With books like Hillbilly Elegy and Appalachian Reckoning presenting their sides of what the world should understand about Appalachia and its people, we know this area is top of mind. This list has a few of our favorite Appalachian stories, from the poignant to the magical and beyond. Please enable javascript to add items to the cart.
J.D. Vance’s Appalachian Graveyard
This article was originally published at In These Times and is reprinted here with permission. In May, two months before his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate for the Republican ticket, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance described his political awakening to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. It was 2018, and Vance was closing in on the two-year mark of his tenure as America’s hillbilly whisperer.
J.D. Vance’s Appalachian Graveyard
In May, two months before his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate for the Republican ticket, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance described his political awakening to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. It was 2018, and Vance was closing in on the two-year mark of his tenure as America’s hillbilly whisperer.
An Ordinary Day in Charlottesville
This essay is excerpted from Pure America, available for pre-order from Belt Publishing. By Elizabeth Catte In 1916, Charlottesville’s Daily Progress reported on the city’s recent Halloween parade, finding one particular moment most enjoyable: “a gay battalion of Ku Klux Klan came thundering down from the heights of the Midway, recalling other days.
Read These Stories Instead of Watching Hillbilly Elegy
Eleven stories of community, exploitation, and resilience in Appalachia Today, Hillbilly Elegy, the film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s 2016 book of the same name, arrives on Netflix. The critical consensus is that it’s not worth your time.
8 books you should read instead of 'Hillbilly Elegy'
The Guardian Steve Dalkowski: the life and mystery of baseball's flame-throwing what-if Many believe the lefthander was the fastest pitcher to ever take the mound. But his career – and life – went off the rails before he could make an impactSteve Dalkowski, a career minor-leaguer who very well could have been the fastest (and wildest) pitcher in baseball history, died in April at the age of 80 from complications from Covid-19.
How Mutual Aid Provides a Path to the Future
Elizabeth Catte on Sustaining Each Other Through the Pandemic I keep thinking about a man named Tony Sizemore, whose partner Birdie Sheldon was the first person in Indiana to die of Covid-19 in March, when deaths were fewer and victims more likely to be memorialized as individuals rather than joined as statistics to a growing number that now stands at more than 100,000.
The Holy Game
Big spectacle games are made for professions of faith, and holy language is exactly the right fit. Denver Broncos quarterback and outspoken man of faith Tim Tebow may have lost his chance for this year’s Super Bowl ring three weeks ago, but if you think that was a season-ender for the holier voices of football, brother, you don’t know this game.
State of the Nation: Court of Public Opinion
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State of the Nation: The Media and Other Matters
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State of the Nation: Voters and Parties
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State of the Nation: Tax and Spend
While we have you... ...we need your help. You might have noticed the absence of paywalls at Boston Review. We are committed to staying free for all our readers. Now we are going one step further to become completely ad-free. This means you will always be able to read us without roadblocks or barriers to entry. It also means that we count on you, our readers, for support. If you like what you read here, help us keep it free for everyone by making a donation. No amount is too small.
State of the Nation: How to Vote
While we have you... ...we need your help. You might have noticed the absence of paywalls at Boston Review. We are committed to staying free for all our readers. Now we are going one step further to become completely ad-free. This means you will always be able to read us without roadblocks or barriers to entry. It also means that we count on you, our readers, for support. If you like what you read here, help us keep it free for everyone by making a donation. No amount is too small.
Eliminating the Danger
Apr 1, 2000 1 Min read time What can we do to prevent a nuclear catastrophe? During the Cold War, US/Soviet conflict moved the hands of the nuclear clock preilously close to midnight. That war is over now, and the Soviet Union is gone. But nuclear danger is not. Instead, a new set of threats has emerged over the past decade: proliferation and testing, new efforts to build missile defenses, and a nearly complete collapse of the arms control framework constructed in the early 1960s.
Finding the Future in Radical Rural America
When my grandfather was a child, his stepfather would bring him along as he sold moonshine to poor working men in southwestern Virginia coal country. The men adored my grandfather, who was not yet even school age, for his talent mocking Democrats. He told me this story on a few occasions to explain, I think, the inevitability of his later affiliation with the Republican Party.
Radical and Queer in Rural America
In recent years there has been an explosion in rural queer organizing. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. There is a faux truism in the United States that queer folks do not fare well in the countryside. As Elizabeth Catte says, “Rural spaces are often thought of as places absent of things, from people of color to modern amenities to radical politics.” LGBTQ people could easily be added to that list.
Class Matters
We need more honesty about how class shapes the lives of everyone. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. Elizabeth Catte is right that the media treated Donald Trump voters as a group needing to be explained. Pundits in search of a grand narrative found it in J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). It helped that Vance had escaped the great rural unknown to attend Yale Law School and work in Silicon Valley.
The Radical History of Appalachian Women Activists
Appalachian women fought for labor and health rights. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. Elizabeth Catte notes that women’s grassroots leadership has been fundamental to progressive movements in Appalachia. She offers illustrations that range from Florence Reece penning the ballad “Which Side Are You On?” during a 1930s labor struggle, to teachers in Mingo County, West Virginia, leading the state’s teacher strike.
Selling Progress in Appalachia
The left cannot ignore strong conservatism on social issues. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. A man wearing a canvas shirt tucked into blue jeans walks through the tall grass, clicks a break-action shotgun, and fires a round. “I approve this message,” he says. The camera zooms in on the target as it explodes in the distance.
Finding the Future in Radical Rural America — Final Response
What we talk about when we talk about the working class. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. In discussing the potential of the left in rural spaces, we have uncovered an equally thorny topic: What, and who, do we mean when we talk about the working class?
Finding the Future in Radical Rural America
Image: Mother Jones rallying the coal miners in Eskdale, West Virginia. WikiMedia. It's time to rewrite the narrative of “Trump Country.” Rural places weren't always red, and many are turning increasingly blue. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. When my grandfather was a child, his stepfather would bring him along as he sold moonshine to poor working men in southwestern Virginia coal country.
Legacies of Resistance
The work is happening—people just have to support it. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. Since 2016 the number of people who want to chat with me about rural communities, particularly in the South, has dramatically increased.
Left Behind
Rural America no longer has “plundering bosses.” This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. Elizabeth Catte has provided a powerful corrective to conventional wisdom about rural America. Too many urban progressives view rural America as outside their “bubble.” This is not only condescending but wrong. Like other Americans, rural Americans have always known their own interests, and rural progressives have a strong track record of organizing to protect them.
Don’t Blame Capitalism
Obama reorganized our markets to push wealth upward. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. Elizabeth Catte’s essay on the left-wing tradition in Appalachia is not so much a political argument as a beautifully written reflection on an important cultural tradition of dissent. She is part of a trend of thinkers and organizers who have come to reject capitalism per se as an immoral system that must be overthrown. I believe in market systems and commerce.
The Last Steep Ascent
Genuine change-makers are rising down South. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. I grew up queer in a white working-class North Carolina clan during the 1970s, that moment in history when the backlash to civil rights and feminism and unionism was beginning to gather itself into the regressive forces that became Republicanism and Democratic Clintonism.
Why Institutions Drive Change
U.S. leftists have a particular weakness for romanticizing our past. This forum is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. Historical memory is both a powerful and perilous thing. It can inspire you to emulate the great deeds of your forerunners. But it can also offer the balm of false comfort when what you really need is a stiff shot of reality. U.S. leftists may have a particular weakness for romanticizing our predecessors.
Appalachia Can’t Breathe
My first encounter with black lung, the miners’ disease, came when I was a small child visiting relatives in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia. It was so long ago I do not remember their faces. But I remember the sound of their labored breathing, which is to say I remember the sound of death. This is how you die of black lung. You are born by chance into a world where a mineral is more valuable than your body. From a young age, you learn to equate work with danger but also brotherhood.
The Hard Road to Fascism
The United States is at a turning point in its history. Some intellectuals and journalists have compared the destruction of Saddam Hussein with the fall of the Berlin Wall or even the collapse of the Soviet Union. Others—looking to the origins of the Cold War rather than its end—have compared the momentous political and economic changes now underway with the period between 1946 and 1948, when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union broke down.
Two-State Head, One-State Heart
Image: flickr / Alisdare Hickson For a two-state solution to succeed, Israeli Jews must first forswear their righteous narrative of moral superiority. Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor Yossi Klein Halevi HarperCollins, $24.99 (cloth) After decades of violence and diplomatic failure, even holding meaningful conversations across the Israeli-Palestinian divide has become a challenge.
Forget "Trump Country." Rural Socialism Exists.
Image: Mother Jones rallying the coal miners in Eskdale, West Virginia. WikiMedia. It's time to rewrite the narrative of “Trump Country.” Rural places weren't always red, and many are turning increasingly blue. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s Winter 2019 issue Left Elsewhere. When my grandfather was a child, his stepfather would bring him along as he sold moonshine to poor working men in southwestern Virginia coal country.
What a Way to Make a Living | Southern Foodways Alliance
Lessons from Dolly by Elizabeth Catte I claim an inheritance to an intellectual project that has sustained several generations of Appalachian writers: to write about my home not only as a living, breathing region with a distinct history and traditions, but also as an idea. The most forceful claim to this inheritance came in 1978, in a work by Henry Shapiro called Appalachia on Our Mind.
Trump’s Foreign Policy Isn’t the Problem
It reflects, like a funhouse mirror, a twisted image of U.S. imperialism. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s Fall 2018 issue Evil Empire. Order your copy today! After two years of President Donald Trump, critics and commentators are still struggling to make sense of his foreign policy. Despite some hopes that he might mature into the role of commander in chief, he has continued to thumb his nose at most mainstream academic frameworks for analyzing and conducting foreign policy.
After 'Hillbilly Elegy' Response, Author Elizabeth Catte Says There's Hope in Appalachian Politics
The nine-day teachers’ strike in West Virginia made headlines across the country, and some are wondering what the events mean for state’s political landscape. How did a widespread labor strike, a practice normally associated with Democrats, happen in a state that voted so heavily for Donald Trump? We wanted to take a step back to explore how politics have been changing here over the past generation.
Book review: One woman's story of poverty and hard work in America's fly-over country
"Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth" by Sarah Smarsh; Scribner; 290 pages Sarah Smarsh is a fifth-generation Kansan, a daughter of the working class and a successful journalist still marked by the shame of growing up poor. In her memoir, "Heartland," Smarsh shows us through the fate of her own family how the working class became the working poor.
Memoir tells the story of a Midwestern life
Sarah Smarsh is a fifth-generation Kansan, a daughter of the working class and a successful journalist still marked by the shame of growing up poor. In her memoir, Heartland, Smarsh shows us through the fate of her own family how the working class became the working poor. She takes us through the welfare cuts of the Reagan administration that stigmatized her working mother and through the modern housing crisis that ruined her father’s construction business.
Virginia: Dodging ‘racial demagoguery,’ and the redistricting fight to come
Ahead of the November 6 elections, CJR invited writers to spotlight stories that deserve closer scrutiny, in their states and beyond, before voters cast their ballots. Read other dispatches from “States of the Union” here. Last November, Democrats swept Virginia’s statewide offices, electing a record number of women and people of color to the House of Delegates. The election put Virginia, often seen as a bellwether for the rest of the country, at the crest of a potent blue wave.
Ida Tarbell and the Spirit of Reform
How Ida Tarbell came to write The History of the Standard Oil Company—her landmark 1904 muckraking exposé that directly contributed to the dismemberment of a corporate behemoth and the public downfall of an industry titan—is a fraught subject. In one version of the investigation’s origin story, the account preferred by John D.
Book review of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh is a fifth-generation Kansan, a daughter of the working class and a successful journalist still marked by the shame of growing up poor. In her memoir, “Heartland,” Smarsh shows us through the fate of her own family how the working class became the working poor. She takes us through the welfare cuts of the Reagan administration that stigmatized her working mother and through the modern housing crisis that ruined her father’s construction business.
How Fallout 76 Can Help Us Rebuild West Virginia
In the post-apocalyptic video game, millions of players will imagine an Appalachia reborn from the ashes. It is easy to bring down a mountain if you use brute force. Ten percent of West Virginia’s mountains have met this fate, pulverized by coal companies into particles so small that those living or working in proximity breathe them in.
The Preston Model for Economic Revival
Councillor Matthew Brown, head of the Preston City Council and Democracy Collaborative Senior Fellow for the Promotion of Community Wealth Building in the United Kingdom, sits down with the Next System Project to discuss his the strategy that Preston is pursuing to build community wealth as a path to economic development. Subscribe to the Next System Podcast via iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, or RSS.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia
In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working-class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region.
55 Strong: In Conclusion
From the conclusion to 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike, out now from Belt Publishing. We all remember our favorite teachers. We tuck their small acts of kindness away in basements or in attic boxes: red-penned lines of encouragement, our worth acknowledged. We remember their handwriting and the wooden, waxy smell of their classrooms. Many of us continue to do good work in their names, and this is especially true of individuals who later became teachers themselves.
The Mothman Is Your Friend
Behold the vampire coal barons, who suck the marrow from the earth! Behold the sirens gorged on profit, their voices filled with credential, leading us into danger and sickness! Behold the Jekylls and Hydes, plunderers who transform into reputable gentlemen for the statehouse! Behold: these are the monsters of West Virginia. I come to you with a petition to exempt one from their number, the Mothman of Point Pleasant. Mothman is not a monster; he is one of us.
Jessica Salfia and Emily Hilliard present 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers' Strike
What compelled West Virginia's teachers to strike? How did they organize? What were teachers and allies doing during the strike? And how is the West Virginia labor movement celebrating its victory? 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers' Strike answers these questions and offers unique, on-the-ground insight into this historic strike.
Appalachia isn't all white, all poor, all passive
Appalachia is back. No, I don't mean the trends like the latest Old Crow Medicine Show album or Whole Foods stocking wild ramps on their shelves. I mean another wave of media fixation with interpreting Appalachia and its "issues": the rural roots of the opioid epidemic, President Donald Trump's consistently strong regional popularity, continuing rhetoric about a perceived "war on coal" and so on.
Bloody Gina
Last month President Donald Trump signaled another shuffling of key posts: Rex Tillerson was shown the door, CIA boss Mike Pompeo was offered the position of Secretary of State, and the CIA’s second-in-command, Gina Haspel, was proposed to lead the agency. Haspel has subsequently been in the media limelight, and this week will be further scrutinized during her Senate confirmation process, during which senators are sure to question her record on torture and extralegal detention.
Testing the Waters in Texas
Image: atmtx Whoever figures out how to save Texas might just save the rest of us in the process. God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State Lawrence Wright Knopf, $27.95 (cloth) A Thirsty Land: The Making of an American Water Crisis Seamus McGraw University of Texas Press, $27.95 (cloth) The future of the United States looks a lot like today’s Texas, or so suggest two recent, unflinching books about the perils and promise of the nation’s most controversial state.
Addressing the Systemic Challenge at the Heart of Escalating Inequality and Environmental Destruction
I want to begin by thanking the conference organizers for extending an invitation to address you during your important annual deliberations. I come before you today not as an expert on environmental matters, but as someone who has devoted his professional life to social justice concerns, in particular addressing economic and social inequality in the United States and in the Global South.
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