American White Male Misery Is Real

A CNN profiler was speaking about the El Paso shooting, on August 6, in which 22 people were murdered by an angry white man.

She blamed the killer’s sense of white privilege. Mass murder carried out by white, young men, the “analyst” was saying, occurs because these young men cannot adjust to a changing society. They cling to the way things were, when the country was predominantly white.

In other words, the oppressor in these young white men wants to continue to oppress.

When whites commit unspeakable acts of violence, it is said to only ever come from a place of power and privilege.

When browns and blacks commit unspeakable acts of violence, it only ever comes from a place of powerlessness and deprivation.

With distressing regularity, we’re lectured that black or brown evil is a consequence of systemic oppression; white evil a result of frustration over having to relinquish the systemic role of oppressor.

For heaven’s sake: Let’s not be insensible to contradictions. Let us apply the same method, irrespective of the perp’s skin color, in uncovering the causation of crime.

It goes without saying that mass shooters all are evil, not ill. No good can come of medicalizing bad behavior. Mass shootings are “a moral-health, not mental-health, problem.”

You can’t have a color-coded theory of causation; one for whites; another for blacks and browns.

Ditto for suicide. When a white man offs himself, it’s not because he’s no longer The Boss.

Like the profiler just mentioned, other social scientists implicate a “decline in income and status” in white suicide. It’s discounted and mocked, but, however you slice it, white male misery in America is real.

Better than most media, The Economist’s writers are still no angels. They, too, dance like so many angels on the head of a pin, so as to downplay the effects of systemic hostility toward the white men of America.

The following is from a spread on the decrease of “depression among Americans reaching middle age, hitting poorly educated white men” the worst:

… thoughts of suicide were slightly higher on average amongst less-educated whites than other groups.
… heavy drinking was higher amongst whites than other groups.

… opioid abuse along with other prescription drug abuse and illegal drug use remain much higher amongst non-college educated whites. … research has shown that whites commit suicide at a higher rate than blacks and Hispanics: according to the CDC, white non-Hispanic Americans commit suicide at around three times the rate of blacks and Hispanics, with the highest and growing toll amongst older men.” [Emphases added.]

The same writers cleverly attempt to diminish the dire situation of white men in America by implying that these “poorly educated” white ingrates are, nevertheless, still “better off than women and minorities”—even as the august magazine runs a parallel piece (rightly) celebrating the closing of the “chasm in life-expectancy that once existed [between blacks and whites].”

There go those contradictions again.

Then of course, there are the solutions of shallow economic reductionism: Increase the minimum wage. Provide more generous earned income tax credits.

Another such report concedes  that … whites are dying of despair. To be precise, the most suicidal populations worldwide are American whites and Amerindians.

We’re besting China! Suicide rates are declining everywhere in the world except in America, where it is 12.8 per 100,000, “well above China’s current rate of seven.”

And, in particular, among white Americans and native Americans.

“There are parallels between the rise in suicide in post-Soviet Russia and the ‘deaths of despair’ in America, identified by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton University,” observes The Economist.

“Suicide rates among white Americans are higher, and have risen faster since 2000, than among any other group except native Americans.  … Rates among people in rural areas are higher, and have been increasing faster, than those among people in towns and cities.”

The Economist is slightly more candid than the likes of the neoconservative and lite libertarian coterie ensconced in D.C. To them, alienation brought about by mass immigration is a look-away issue.

From a tony event, far from the madding working-class, Tim Carney, a Washington Examiner correspondent, recently tweeted a partial explanation for his poor countrymen’s plight:

“The working class has lost access to the strong institutions of civil society that are the infrastructure of the good life. That’s my thesis,” puffed Carney smugly, “to explain immobility, retreat from marriage, and Trump.”

Yes, but what—and who—caused the white working class to exsanguinate socially and economically?

The answer to that lies in state-orchestrated, inorganic, top-down, institutionalized, undemocratic disenfranchisement. For what is mass, Third-World immigration, if not all of the above?

For working-class misery, neoconservatives and lite libertarians, economic reductionist all, will continue to blame everything but mass immigration, state-enforced multiculturalism, diversity (for thee but not for me), loss of community and sense of belonging.

Anything but the truth.

The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
WND.COM
August 15

* Photo courtesy of Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post