Appalachian Mountaineers Stereotypes

Historian Henry Shapiro has argued that depictions of Appalachian mountaineers reveal more about those participating in the creation of those depictions than it does about those being characterized. In no way is this truer than in discussions of Appalachian whiteness. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, novelists, social scientists, and social reformers of various stripes used the racial identity of the mountaineer to advance a host of social and political agendas. Nevertheless, present-day scholars have been hesitant to interrogate race in the Appalachian context. When studies have focused on race they have often served to reify the image of Appalachia as a predominantly white region inhabited by a people of pure Scotch-Irish

The most popular examinations of Appalachian whiteness deal with the stereotypes of “poor white trash” or “the hillbilly.” Although they position the inhabitants of Appalachian as a people apart, that is separate and different from mainstream urban industrializing America, those arguments often hedge on class instead of racial differences. When people of color are included, they are only useful in as much as they provide a point of juxtaposition that allow whites to define themselves against what they are

The first section covers the period between 1870 and 1900 and details the creation of the myth of Appalachian whiteness. In this period regional reconciliation and nativist anxieties gave racial purity of the mountaineer new meaning. This section details how myths about Appalachia’s racial past, particular in regards to the absence of slavery, served to construct the region as racially pure and deserving of the uplift efforts of northern reformers. The second section examines the discourses that fashioned the mountaineer as possessing a tainted whiteness through an exploration of the popular discourses surrounding the “hillbilly” and the “tri-racial isolate.” These discussions were rooted in early twentieth century concerns over national health, race purity, and the nature of social change and isolation, By illustrating how the discourses on white and tri-racially mixed Appalachians aligned between 1900 and 1920, I hope to show how both helped to fashion the racial identity of the other. The final section examines the eugenic family studies taking place during this same period. In locating the roots of rural white degeneracy in mixed-blood ancestors, these eugenic studies illustrate the truly porous and often arbitrary of U.S. racial