What Happens When You Don't Own the Land

Published on Daily Yonder http://www.dailyyonder.com/
July 13, 2009

The national broadcast media rarely grapples with the interplay of concentrated wealth and power and the functioning of democracy when it attempts to explain the widespread, stubborn poverty in rural Central Appalachia.

The recent ABC 20/20 program The Hidden America—Children of the Mountains which followed for two years four children growing up in poverty in Eastern Kentucky, drew 11 million viewers. According to ABC “thousands offered to get involved and make a difference.” This wasn’t the first network spotlight on Appalachia’s children to evoke a strong reaction. Charles Kuralt’s Christmas in Appalachia, which aired in December 1964 and focused on eastern Kentucky, lit up the CBS switchboard with offers of help.

Both of these documentaries attempted to interpret a piece of the poverty puzzle by putting faces on poverty and showing how poverty is lived at the level of individual and family relationships. Inevitably unemployment, lack of education, poor health care, drug addiction, and inadequate housing are the reasons given by the networks for why there is persistent poverty in Appalachia. What they don’t attempt to explain is the century-old political/economic famework in which this individual poverty plays out. University of New Hampshire sociologist Cynthia Duncan, who has spent her career studying rural poverty, refers to this context as “these larger histories of deliberate underinvestment for control, to maintain vulnerability.”

Appalachia’s rural poor have been put under sociological and psychological microscopes many times over the last 150 years. Basically, two theories have been offered for their poverty. The culture of poverty theory directs attention inward to the capacities and habits of the poor themselves. In contrast, a structural theory focuses attention on the relationship between poverty and the corporate economy within Appalachia – especially in its coal regions. Appalachian sociologist Helen Lewis drew a sharp dividing line between the two theories by stating, "In simple terms it [the cause of poverty] is either fatalism or the coal industry."

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