When systemic problems become too large to ignore, when socialists start gaining millions of votes, for example, or when black people riot and rebel in the streets, the news media is forced to provide some explanation. And in doing so, they typically give us fractured glimpses of reality. But rarely do they piece together the entire picture. Consider four separate news stories from last year.
The first is the continuing crisis of the
opioid addiction crisis in this country. There are two million people addicted to opioids in the United States, a disproportionate number of whom are white. From 2009 to 2014, almost half a million people have died from opioid overdoses, a fourfold increase since 1999.
A second story, briefly in the news, reported on the decline in life expectancy for white women. It is unprecedented for life expectancy to reverse in a so-called first-world country. In the United States peer countries, life expectancy is actually growing. Why is life expectancy for working-class white women in decline? Drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol abuse.
In Chicago, the story has been the rise in shootings and murders in the city’s working-class black neighborhoods. In 2016, there were 4,379 people shot in Chicago, and 797 people killed. The overwhelmingly majority of both were African-American.
The news media’s nonsensical explanations for the violence include retaliation. But that is only matched by the nonsense offered by elected officials, which includes the absence of role models and poor parenting. What is almost never offered as at least part of the answer is how Chicago has the highest black unemployment rate of the nation’s five largest cities at 25 percent, that nearly half of black men aged 20 to 24 are neither in school nor employed, that Chicago has the
third-highest poverty rate of large cities in the US, and that it is the most segregated city in the country.
Finally, there is the story of the shrinking of the so-called middle class. In the 1970s, 61 percent of Americans fell into that vague but stable category. Today, that number has fallen to 50 percent. It is driven by the growing wealth inequality that exists in this country.
In the last year alone, the one percent saw their income rise by seven percent, and the .1 percent saw their income rise by 9 percent. In general, the richest 20 percent of US households
own 84 percent of the wealth in this country, while the bottom 40 percent own less than one percent.
The media would have us believe that this is a story primarily about the Rust Belt and disgruntled white workers. In fact, it is also a story about 240,000 black homeowners, who lost their houses to foreclosures in the last eight years. It is also a story about urban school closures and the decimation of employment for black educators. Thousands of black teachers have been fired in the last decade.
These four prominent stories reported on over the last several years are often told separately, reinforcing the perception that different groups of ordinary people in this country live in their own world and have experiences that are wholly separate from each other. But what would happen if we put these stories together, and told them as a single narrative about life in this country?
If we told them together, it could allow us to see that the anxieties, stresses, confusions, and frustrations about life world today are not owned by one group, but are shared by many. It would not tell us that everyone suffers the same oppression, but it would allow us to see that even if we don’t experience a particular kind of oppression, every working person in this country is going through something. Everyone is trying to figure out how to survive, and many are failing.
If we put these stories together, we would gain more insight into how ordinary white people have as much stake in the fight for a different kind of society as anyone else.
We wouldn’t so casually dismiss their suffering as privilege, because they do not suffer as much as black and brown people in this country. In fact, we might find that the privileges of white skin run very thin in a country where nineteen million white people languish in poverty.
Apparently, the wages of whiteness are not so great that they can stop millions of ordinary white people from literally drinking and drugging themselves to death, to escape the despair of living in this “greatest country on earth.”
