I was down in Virginia and West Virginia this past weekend to visit my partner's family, which was gorgeous and relaxing and full of new friends, and all the things a weekend in the country should be.
I also got to see a little bit of the recent development in WV (mostly due to people who work in DC moving further and further out), which reminded me of a piece I wrote for a forthcoming book about anti-poverty work in Appalachia.
The Poverty Initiative here at Union is a group of students, teachers, poverty scholars, and friends working to end poverty. Yes, we set our sights pretty high—but we believe that's the only way we can ever truly end poverty. "Charity" and other ways of alleviating poverty are important, but in the long run only maintain the ideologies that divide people based on their income and perceived social class.
Anyway. We took an immersion trip in January '07 to the Appalachian region—mostly WV, some of Ohio, some of Tennessee. This was an incredibly powerful experience for me, particularly the opportunity to look at rural poverty from an analytical, anti-poverty perspective, when most of my previous anti-poverty activism had taken place in downtown Providence, RI, and some in New York.
This piece, called Gentrification—in Appalachia?, is my reflection on the connection between urban class/development structures and rural ones. We spend so much time feeling disconnected from one another—urban from rural, rich from poor, students from the "real world," white folks from everyone else—but these divisions are all in our minds. The only way we're ever going to make any progress towards anything is if we begin to recognize how very interconnected we all are across whatever psychological boundaries we've built up for ourselves.
NB: Mountaintop Removal is a coal-mining technique that has become common in the past few years and is widespread in WV. It consists of systematically blowing up chunks of mountain, sorting through the rubble for a small amount of coal, and then dumping the remainder into the valleys. The result is that mountains and valleys are leveled into a barren wasteland; it will take 3,000 years for these sites to rebuild enough topsoil for anything to grow on them.
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