the fixation on the white working class in appalachia and rural america broadly is weird. You have situations like the WV poultry industry which is mostly worked by Central American and Ethiopian migrants, making them the local industrial working class, but no one seems to care.

instead, people are interested in bygone radicalism generations dead. leftists are more interested to talk to trump voters than find jobs in meat packing or orchards and salt them for unionization

I suppose my main point is that the above mentioned workers experience an appalachian subjectivity to the nth degree and are a major factor in the class composition save the generational grievances, but don’t really get to be “appalachian”

there’s an easy narrative that industry leaves and the remaining population is ripped off, but that’s not always the case, something needs to exist to fill a productive void.