I try not to complain about all the anti-Appalachian prejudice I run across, but I was reading a novella last night and ran smack into the nastiness about how Appalachians have trouble walking like normal people because we spend all our lives walking on hills. - ThreadSky

gracehill.bsky.social • 43 days ago

I try not to complain about all the anti-Appalachian prejudice I run across, but I was reading a novella last night and ran smack into the nastiness about how Appalachians have trouble walking like normal people because we spend all our lives walking on hills.

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tonysarris.bsky.social•43 days ago

A lot of historians trace these perceptions back to the genteel planter class of colonial Virginia who dissed poorer settlers who moved to NC to get a little plot of land of their own. They were considered "swamp dwellers" & "hillbillies". "Rednecks" arose from union-busting coal mine owners.

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

Yep! I’m working my way through White Trash at the moment—good stuff, even if I find it more centered on outside perceptions, then interior reactions to this perceptions.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313197/white-trash-by-nancy-isenberg/

tonysarris.bsky.social•43 days ago

Great book. Another one (sorry if you are already familiar with it) is https://www.amazon.com/What-Getting-Wrong-About-Appalachia/dp/0998904147 Good info I wasn't aware of before, although I did find it a bit too academic at times.

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

Yes! Funnily enough, I found it not quite academic enough for my taste. 😂 You might like Deer Hunting with Jesus, which pulled zero punches.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7150/deer-hunting-with-jesus-by-joe-bageant/

tonysarris.bsky.social•43 days ago

Thanks for the reference! I'm not an academic in this field at all, but am interested in history, especially NC history, and it's relationship to sociology & politics.

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

Neither am I! Sometimes I feel like I’m choosing these readings in self-defense 😂

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

It’s incidents like this that makes me want to say that folks should keep stories about us out of their mouths. We’re a real place, with real people, not a fantasy setting to play in. Clearly too many people cannot be bothered to pay even lip service to the idea of treating us like ordinary humans.

chandrathan.bsky.social•43 days ago

Sad. But I grew up waking in those hills and I just had a hip replacement at 42. So maybe there’s something to it!

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

That’s hilarious

kimberlysr.bsky.social•42 days ago

Word. The other thing I find annoying is an author trying to recreate the dialect while the speaker says something completely ignorant because people from Appalachia are too dumb to live.

keithroysdon.bsky.social•43 days ago

I first heard this 50 years ago from, of all people, a bozo in a dunk tank at a county fair in Indiana, trying to prompt my dad and uncles from Tennessee to buy tickets to try to dunk him.

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

It’s so old, and so awful, and yet apparently people cannot give it up!!

keithroysdon.bsky.social•43 days ago

They absolutely do not. It’s just one tool they can use to dehumanize us.

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

I hadn’t thought about it like that, but you’re absolutely right!!

keithroysdon.bsky.social•43 days ago

Three years ago today, I used this old 1940s insult to the Appalachian South to cite attitudes even then.

gracehill.bsky.social•43 days ago

oof! I hadn’t heard that one, but yes, absolutely

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