My white brothers and sisters, believe me when I tell you that I love and care about you. Because I care, I will tell you things that you may not like. On occasion, I have been moved to write you an open letter. I always do this with concern and care. For example, after the horrific mass shooting in Charleston, I wondered when and if my white brothers and sisters would confront the plague of gun violence in their community. Such worries were met with deflection, denial and anger. Because I love my white brothers and sisters, I will try again.
In rapid succession, over the last few days and weeks, The New York Times, “60 Minutes,” and MSNBC have featured stories about the heroin epidemic that is ravaging the “heartland.” These stories were accompanied by new research that shows how the middle-aged white working class and poor are now dying at extremely high rates as compared to other groups.
Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.
The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.
My brothers and sisters in White America, do these facts scare you? They probably should.
My grandmother grew up under the wicked regime of Jim and Jane Crow. Like many other black Americans she escaped to a northern American city during the Great Migration that occurred after World War II. I remember her telling me that the average white person wouldn’t survive being black for even a day. They would die from stress and anxiety.
I believe that she may have been exaggerating. But her observation does get to something real about the way white privilege manifests. Research suggests that the average white American has no basic idea about how white racism and white supremacy impact the day-to-day lives and life chances of non-whites. In fact, social psychology experiments have shown that white folks believe that not having access to television is a far greater hardship than being black. This absurdity is compounded by the belief, demonstrated in recent surveys, that in the Age of Obama, “discrimination” against white people is now a bigger problem in the United States than racism against people of color.
In all, white privilege is a system that gives unearned advantages to white people because of their perceived racial group membership. Those unearned advantages in turn nurture and cultivate a deficit in coping skills. (This is not a function of race, but rather of power. Men likely have worse life coping skills relative to women, and straight people less so than those in the LGBT community.) This should not be a surprise. White America was built upon stolen land, income, labor and wealth, taken from First Nations, African-Americans and other people of color. More recently, the modern white American middle class was created through transfer payments and government subsidies such as the G.I. Bill and VA/FHA housing programs, opportunities that were systematically denied to black and brown Americans. Racism (and sexism) in the American labor force meant that jobs which earned a living wage were deemed the near exclusive province of white men.
And now white people — and white working class men in particular — are suffering an identity crisis, as their perceived birthright is being taken away from them.
Of course, the facts undermine any claims of relative disadvantage compared to people of color. Poor and working class white people possess much more wealth and assets than do black and Latinos who are nominally “middle” or “upper class.” By implication, poor and working class whites have greater financial security than people of color in the same economic cohort. Nevertheless, it is the perception of white insecurity and suffering that matters, not empirical reality. Those who have historically been privileged will feel like equality is oppression.
White America — its poor and working classes in the throes of depression and hopelessness about the future, and killing themselves, intentionally or otherwise — must now summon up in itself the very same “personal responsibility” that the right so often uses to disparage the suffering of the black and brown poor. While globalization is most certainly pushing the white poor and working classes even further into a category of expendables, this same group of people must acknowledge their own complicity with such an outcome.
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