I think it’s more a matter of the fairy-tales are just absurd on the whole. The narrative from the media and elsewhere seems to be that “success” means that you have to have “nice” versions of everything- a couple of late model cars/trucks, a big house that’s either renovated or new, nice furniture, nice clothes, etc… The kind of lifestyle that a family of four *might *be able to swing on $150,000 of gross income.
But that’s absurd, in that most people don’t bring home anywhere near six figures.
I wonder how much of it is that we’re seeing a LOT of second and third generation middle-class people now, and the post-WWII boom is over with, and the middle class is being squeezed and opportunities are fewer and harder to get, with blue-collar middle class jobs being extremely rare and college/university educations being much more common than in the past. But there’s no new cultural narrative to define/describe success to this group of people- they were raised to think that they’ll do better than their parents economically, educationally, etc… and this just may not be the case for many of them, especially since the same lifestyle that their parents had may require $100-150,000 in household income.
But you can spin that a bit differently as well. Given the prevailing myth of White Privilege, a white guy who is unsuccessful - measured against the standards being discussed here - is a guy who had the deck supposedly stacked in his favor and still failed to make it. What a pathetic loser. Meanwhile a minority in that exact situation - well, considering the type of entrenched racism and rigged system he’s up against it’s incredible that he managed to accomplish even that much. What a hero.
It’s hard for me to see how the causes under discussion would have kicked in only after 1999.
I wonder if there is some environmental element (disproportionately affecting whites, possibly for some genetic reason) that would have taken effect around then. It would be ironic, for instance, if the removal of thimerosal from vaccines provoked an unexpected decline in public health.
If you were to poll most middle-aged white people, do you think a majority would deny or accept the existence of white privilege? Given the attitudes I’ve seen in real life and on the internet, I would say most already think WP is a myth.
It doesn’t matter for this analysis if a majority of White people believe WP is a myth or not (or even if it really is a myth or not). All that is necessary, is for a majority to believe ‘the system’ isn’t specifically rigged against them, to differentiate them from Black people. Many Black people, given the attitudes I have heard, believe that ‘the system’ in the US is rigged against them. Again, it isn’t important for this analysis whether the system really is ‘rigged’ or not.
Assuming this is true, this a significant difference - a ‘failure in life’ in the face of a system specifically rigged against you, isn’t as damaging to one’s self-esteem as a ‘failure in life’ in the face of a system that is believed to be essentially fair.
In addition, even if “a majority” think it’s a myth, that still leaves a minority who think it’s not a myth. You don’t need for every single person in a given group to have a risk factor for it to impact the overall rates for that group.
Yes, but that is not what FP suggested. He posited that white people have internalized the idea that* the deck is stacked in their favor*, and thus feel like extra failures when they can’t do well. This doesn’t pass the smell test to me given how often its treated as a given that white privilege even exists. Perhaps a small percentage of the white population feels the way, but I don’t think the people keeling over from drugs and suicide are among this group.
But I agree that white people are more likely to believe idealized notions of a free and impartial society, where socioeconomic outcomes have more to do with a person’s intrinsic abilities rather than the opportunities afforded them through luck, class, and demographic membership. This belief can set them up for low self-esteem when the system informs them that they are poor, they are ugly, and only have themselves to blame for their ugly poverty.
I would say black people are pretty much used to being blamed for their poverty and all the other crap that they experience disproportionately. I agree that they are more likely to see the system rigged against them, but the more important thing is that they aren’t, as a group, emotionally invested in the idea of a “free and impartial society” like many whites are.
My theory is that people who see white privilege as a myth are also the same people who have grown up believing the system “rewards” and “penalizes” folks based on their character and worth as a human being. So when they find themselves having hard times, coping being a serious struggle. If they are blue collar, they may decide to blame the Mexicans taking their jobs. But who are you going to blame if you’re in the white collar class?
Worth noting that the people being discussed in this thread by and large are blue collar, as noted earlier in this thread, and a good deal of their problems are probably related to Mexicans (or Chinese etc.) taking their jobs.
I think an analysis of suicide trends among South African whites is helpful.
Suicide rates among white males increased after apartheid. For the first time in their lives, the toast started landing buttered side down from time to time and they were not prepared.
White privilege definitely exists but it isn’t what it used to be and just as South African whites came to realize that some of their prosperity was due solely to the color of their skin, some American whites are starting to come to the same realization.
Their expectations have not been adjusted to reflect a more equitable world and it makes them sad.
Are we to infer that, in the US, the racial situation has become substantially more equitable - akin to that in South Africa after the end of Apartheid - since 1999?
I would have thought that the big “jump” in this respect was with the Civil Rights movement. But if that were the trigger, suicide rates among Whites would be higher decades ago, not now. What of significance has happened since 1999?
South Africa and the USA are strikingly different. The post-Apartheid era in SA was marked by the election of a black president. Overnight the majority of the population became franchised. AA policies were enacted. The game changed very rapidly.
Did things really change all that much for black people after 1968? Imagine what would have happened if a black person had become president right after Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act. White folks would have lost their damn minds. They would have also lost their damn minds if overnight black people had infiltrated their workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods en mass. Instead, what happened was gradual change. White folks have gradually lost some of the advantage and black people have gradually gained some.
I think that depends. I’m in my 40s. I still like drinking with my buddies and acting immature on occassion. But I (and my friends) also have a wife and child, own several properties and hold a six figure management job. What I’m talking about are people who are still in their 30s, no serious relationships, no career prospects, in massive debt and otherwise unable to enter the world of adult responsibilities.
How many of these people can possibly exist? Honestly, this stereotype of people in their 30s always felt like Gen-Xers trying to stick it to Gen-Yers because we “sold out” but they never did. So clearly, anyone in their 30s is some weirdo with mommy issues who won’t grow up and be an adult.
I think that for many white folks what they do have internalized is the idea that the deck is built in such a way that anybody who Does Things Right (for different definitions thereof, from “works hard enough” to “graduates from college” to “belongs to the right Church”), will Do Better than the previous generations.
I remember my dad ranting about a different mythos, that of “the job for life”, pointing out that ever since industrialization began that went downhill, and in fact previously a lot of the most successful people had changed jobs multiple times (look at the jobs held by Renaissance artists, or at the bio of most famous soldiers), yet we were being sold the idea that if you ever changed jobs you were a failure. This was during the late 80s-90s downtimes, a lot of people were unemployed. He’d been unemployed during that time himself, and the two things that made him feel worse were the worry of being a 50yo job-seeker and the feeling of failure of losing his “lifetime job”.
I’m a blue collar worker. I’m white. I haven’t read the study in depth. The one thing that comes to my mind though is just how hard on the body manual labor can be.
According to many guys I have talked with, the workloads are worse than they used to be. If you are in a powerful union, the workload is much lighter and the pay is better - union influence has steadily diminished over the years AFAIK.
So, basically, to me the missing metric for me is exactly how much more wear and tear on the body are people experiencing? I think the constant pain is the underlying driver of some of these substance issues - but without any data, that is pure speculation.
Yes, and my point being that the article in the OP claims a rise in suicides as compared with other groups since 1999.
A “gradual rise” from the late 1960s on wouldn’t explain that - if the two were linked, one would predict a gradual rise over that whole time-period. The two do not correlate, at least in any obvious manner.
