Appalachia — and Food — for Me, Not Thee

When Bobby Kennedy was a senator from New York State in the mid-1960s, he got the south/western-most rows of counties in New York, contiguous with central Pennsylvania, included as part of Appalachia in a particular federal program. One of those was the county I grew up in. This entitled us to certain monies, which — given the rates of rural poverty where I lived — I'm sure we needed.

I don't think it was wrong to call my home county part of Appalachia. There is literally a town in my county named Appalachin, and there are multiple roads whose names end in "Hollow." People were living in school buses.

Here's a map of the various boundaries of Appalachia. As you can see, that particular federal designation, marked in yellow, is the most wide-ranging:

None of them, however, reach the place where J.D. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio. Which is why I was thinking about definitions of Appalachia today, as were a bunch of other people.

Attorney Lyra, Esq. posted on Twitter with her thoughts on Vance and rural white people:

JD Vance and that Hillbilly Elegy bullshit always reminds me of when I had an internship at a rural  food bank and I constantly had to deal with impoverished white people complaining to staff anytime they perceived a non-white food bank client as undeserving.

It was bizarre, really pretty sad, because all our clients were in dire straits. The white clients relied on us just as much. Also 90+ percent of our donations were grocery store foods a day or two away from expiring so there was never any shortage.

So we were usually like begging people to take more because we had so many of most of our items and only a day or two to give them out, but we’d still have white clients coming up to us complaining about how much a non-white person was taking.

And they’d like keep track of how long non-white people had been coming, even when *they’d* been using the food bank just as long. I had the following conversation like three times a week:

White client: “that guy over there has been coming here for two months now.”

Me: “Okay, well you’ve been coming for six months.”

White client: “Yes but I have a disability.”

Me: “How do you know he doesn’t have one?”

White client: “Well he doesn’t look like he has one.”

Me: “Neither do you, man.”

Or I had to explain all that shit was just not our problem. “We have more food than we can give out, we wouldn’t turn a millionaire away, why do you even care?”

They literally couldn’t imagine just unconditionally helping people, it was so exhausting. A whole lot of people would rather food go in the garbage than go to a “lazy” person, and by lazy they always mean non-white.

And these white people were otherwise very sweet and kind, which made it all the more taxing. I am certain none of them thought of themselves as racist. The math to them was “white person who needs help equals unfortunate victim, non-white person who needs help equals lazy.”

This is what Heather McGhee calls drained-pool politics in her book The Sum of Us, and with every day that goes by in Donald Trump's America, they try to prove her right.