On 'Settle In,' Emilee Hackney and Amna Nawaz discuss Appalachian stereotypes

Amna Nawaz:

Appalachia is often stereotyped as a region defined by struggling coal mine towns and substance abuse.

Writer Emilee Hackney says those portrayals don't reflect her life growing up in Southwestern Virginia. Her debut memoir, "All That's Unseen," covers growing up inside that world and the political influences that came to shape it.

I spoke to her for the latest episode of our PBS News podcast "Settle In." Here's a clip of that conversation.

You talk about hearing folks back at home as they're learning about candidate Donald Trump, President Donald Trump, about him gaining popularity in Appalachia. They like that he told it like it is, things we have heard in a lot of communities where he has strong levels of support.

Did his strength and his support in the place that you call home, did all that make sense to you at the time?

Emilee Hackney, Author, "All That's Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir": Absolutely. I mean, most of the people I knew were Trump supporters right from the very beginning, because he comes to Appalachia and he says, I'm going to help you. He pays attention.

He makes us feel seen for the first time in decades. And when you are coming from a place that's really struggling, like Appalachia often does, or at least coalfield Appalachia, you have to trust in whoever offers you hope, because what else is there? What else do you hope in?

So, yes, at first, I was like, maybe this is the way. Maybe he's actually going to help. Maybe -- yes, maybe this is right. And I write about going to a rally that he held in Southwest Virginia at Radford University and feeling just the tension of that room didn't feel right to me.

And the way that he behaved, like seeing him in person kind of turned me off from the idea of him. But if I hadn't gone to that rally, I don't know. I don't know if -- I think it would have taken me a longer time to change my opinion of him.

And, even still, when I was at Harvard, I still had conflicted feelings about him because so many people I knew back home were still so supportive of him. And he was early in his first presidency, and we have seen him do a lot of things that now I'm like, oh, my gosh, how could I ever have supported him?

But at that point, it didn't -- it hadn't gotten to that point yet. And so I had these conflicted feelings about him. And once I started really looking into his policies, or lack thereof, in one of my writing classes, in my investigative journalism class, that was what finally I guess made me move -- it -- and started to move me in a different direction.

Amna Nawaz:

You have probably seen the comparisons being made now, right, between your book and the book written by Vice President Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy," about his time growing up in Appalachia and then in Ohio.

Do you buy those comparisons? Do you agree with them?

Emilee Hackney:

He makes a lot of generalizations about Appalachia based on his own experiences, his own anecdotal experiences. And I don't feel like those are fair characterizations to make.

I think that he probably encountered a lot of what I did. So I go up to Harvard. He goes to Yale,. And he writes about being an oddity to people at Yale, to New Englanders, and I felt that way too. And I encountered this big appetite for, what is Appalachia? Like, what are people like? Everybody has a stereotype in their head.

But I think that he saw that people wanted to know more about Appalachia and those stereotypes because we were on the heels of the 2016 election. Appalachia was being talked about as being so red, so Trump-supporting. I just feel like he capitalized on that appetite.

And he saw that people wanted to know more about Appalachia, but maybe not really. They just wanted confirmation of what they already thought about it. And I think he plays into those stereotypes by using his own stories from his childhood to say, like, all of Appalachia is addicted, like, addiction is endemic, it's such a problem, it's all over, poverty, it's just so widespread.

And I just feel like that's a flattened and non-nuanced characterization of Appalachia. He cannot speak for Appalachia as a whole, as he does in his book.

Amna Nawaz:

You feel like his anecdotes, his story don't directly relate to what you experienced growing up in a different part of Appalachia? Is that fair?

Emilee Hackney:

It is.

Yes, I don't think that his story could speak for anybody else's. So in my book, I'm very careful to say this is my experience in Appalachia. It's not going to be everybody's. And I don't think that he does the same thing. He's not careful that same way.

Amna Nawaz:

And you can watch that full conversation and more episodes of "Settle In" on our YouTube page or wherever you get your podcasts.