By Carl Keith Greene / Staff Writer

Eleven million people, the most viewers of ABC television’s 20/20 since 2003 saw its program, “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” said Ron Eller, a professor of southern history at the University of Kentucky, Wednesday at Union College as he responded to the program’s depiction of Appalachia.

The program was hosted by Kentuckian Diane Sawyer, who followed the lives of four children of the mountains.

He called his presentation Stereotypes and Inequalities: Responding to A Hidden America.

Eller was one of the Appalachia experts ABC used for information about the region. “ABC flew me to New York City and I spent more than two-and-a-half hours with Diane Sawyer on tape talking about the problems of the region, some issues and solutions and those kinds of things. As everyone knows, just a tiny little part of that made it into their final production.”

He opened his presentation by reading from the introduction of Harry Caudill’s 1962 book, “Night Comes to the Cumberlands.”

A portion of what he read was: “Idleness and waste are antipathetic to progress and unless the Cumberland plateau is to remain an anchor dragging behind the rest of America, it and the rest of the southern Appalachians must be rescued while there is yet time.”

Since then, Eller said, the likes of Diane Sawyer, Charles Kuralt, Dan Rather, Rory Kennedy and dozens of other journalists have hoped to shock the nation with images of poverty in Appalachia.

“Shock journalism, of course, often utilizes stereotypes and paints entire regions and communities of people with unfair and inaccurate generalizations. Appalachia and Kentucky have certainly suffered an inordinate share of this kind of stereotyping. And we have understandably become defensive” He added.

“This was clearly the case a couple of weeks ago in the 20/20 program A Hidden America: The Children of the Mountains,” Eller said.

The program elicited more than 2,000 responses on ABC’s internet blog. “Many,” he said, “critical of the images that it drew of the region, others disappointed that it did not delve more deeply into the causes of problems or illuminate some of the programs working to address them. Universally, critics believed that Appalachia had been stereotyped again.”

He said that stereotypes persist because they are useful, not because they are accurate. He said stereotypes have political power and often mask some kind of self-interest. He added, “They are used by those in power to justify some action usually some exploitation of those who have little power.”

Eller explained that many of the stereotypes emerged about African Americans from the time when Europeans decided to use the Africans in the slave trade. “There is a connection between the stereotyping of people and the use of those people by those in power. The same is true with what scholars call the idea of Appalachia. The origins of the idea of Appalachia created stereotypes that helped to justify the exploitation of the land and people of this region for modernization and profit for the rest of America.”

He explained, “In modern times those same images have been used to blame the persistent poverty of Appalachia on the land and on the culture. You know, ‘This land is not flat, and that’s a problem. The mountains themselves isolate the region. The problem is their people. It’s the culture, it’s their value system’.”

Eller said his family migrated out of the mountains in the 1950s, along with 3.5 million other people, into the midwest because there were no jobs here.

He said a few weeks after the family had arrived there a high school teacher told him, “that she recognized something in me. She told me, ‘Ron you can make something out of yourself. You have some talent. But if you’re ever going to make something out of yourself, you have to become somebody different from who your people are’.”

He said she meant that he was to learn to speak and dress properly and lose the mountain accent, learn to listen to the right kind of music and learn to comb his hair in the right way and learn to become different from who his people were because, “everybody knows those mountain people are kind of lazy and ne’er-do-well.”

“That’s what we refer to as the idea of Appalachia,” he said.

He said those same ideas are used to blame poverty on the land, the culture of the people of the region, rather than on the basic social injustice and structural inequality of the economic and political system itself.

“Stereotypes allow us to blame the victim,” he said.

“Now stereotypes can also be positive. We create stereotypes about ourselves that give us pride in who we are. In recent years we have come to take a lot of pride in being from the mountains, in our Appalachian heritage, in our music, in our culture, ties to the land and the beauty in our place.”

That same pride can also lead us to ignore the negatives in our culture and the injustices around us.”

He said, “Stereotypes can be used by local elites to displace responsibilities for the problems and the inequalities in our own communities. It’s easier and convenient to blame outsiders for creating negative stereotypes of us than to address the realities of persistent poverty and the continued exploitation of the land and the people.”

The professor continued, “When you hear a mountain leader blame the stereotypes on outsiders and blame our problems on outsiders you should ask yourself, ‘Is that leader trying to displace their own responsibility for the things in our own communities?’.”

About the 20/20 program, Eller said, “It remains to be seen whether or not this latest expose on Appalachian poverty has any lasting impact on the lives of the four young people who were profiled. But it has stirred much debate, much reaction, and in that regard I think it’s already been an unqualified success. I’ve not seen anything that has stirred debate and discussion and the dialogue related to this place in the last three decades as what we’ve seen in response to the 20/20 program. But it remains to be seen whether or not it can produce action, action to address the deeper problems of the region action both from agencies and governments outside the mountains, and action from within the region itself.

“The program has placed Appalachia back on the public agenda. Whether we are able to respond differently from how we’ve responded in the past is yet to be determined. That part, of course, is up to us.

“But to turn the 20/20 images into a positive response, to make something good out of something bad, we must move beyond the stereotypes and beyond our defensive reaction to them.

“The problem of stereotypes is not whether they are true or false, but what reality they hide and how the stereotypes narrow our vision of that reality.

“The stereotypes of Appalachia, the idea of Appalachia have prevented us in understanding that the problems of the mountains are not different from those of the larger society, but are in fact intertwined with the challenges facing the rest of the nation as a whole. Appalachia, as I argue in my most recent book, Appalachia is not the other America. There are no easy solutions to poverty and inequality in Appalachia unless we confront some of the fundamental challenges facing America today, problems of building a sustainable economy, assuring social equity, protecting the land and the environment, valuing family and community, respecting diversity, acknowledging civic duty and responsibility and placing people over profit. In that respect we are all Appalachians and the hidden America is all around us.”

He said the idea of Appalachia has hidden the history of how change has come to the mountains and in so doing hide the fundamentally inequality and false assumptions about the way we have defined progress and development in America as a whole.

“It has hidden the fact that we have used the resources of Appalachia, the natural resources and the human resources of these mountains, for a lifestyle that is based on gluttony, irresponsibility and the absence of concern for others.”

He said that because of the nation’s dependence on the coal that is mined in the area, “We have assumed that part of our country can be used as a sacrifice area in order to sustain and provide comfort for other parts of the country.”

He continued, “We have assumed that the slices of the national pie don’t need to be redistributed if we can just keep making that pie ever larger and ever larger. Those people who we choose not to invite to the national barbecue we shut off to reservations, ghettos, rural places in the Mississippi delta and remote hollows in Appalachia. But the energy crisis, the challenges of global warming, the crash of financial markets, the rise of world terrorism and the crash of our recent economy, may have forced us to reconsider those basic American assumptions.

“We live in a time of crisis, and opportunity. Since World War II we have believed that consumption, concentration and technology produce the good life. When the nation rediscovered poverty in Appalachia in the 1960s, we lost a war on poverty and the special Appalachian Regional Commission tried to make Appalachia look just like the rest of the country.

“Rather than address the structural problems that had created the consistent inequalities of Appalachia, absentee land ownership, political corruption, inadequate taxation, single industry economies, environmental destruction and inappropriate land use, we attempted to address the poverty of things in the mountains and used our public resources to build roads and industrial parks, consolidated schools, centralized health services and other infrastructure to make Appalachia look modern.”