Whiteness

View from a Canadian.

You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you don’t notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire.

  Guardian

The article may contain truths, but that final statement brings every single word of it into question. British tolerance??? Ask any Arab. Or black. Or even the Irish.

For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: The white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to dying off in shocking numbers.

I did not know that. Are we dying from being poisoned by our own toxic intolerance?

The Case and Deaton report, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century, describes an increased death rate for middle-aged American whites “comparable to lives lost in the US Aids epidemic.” This spike in mortality is unique to white Americans – not to be found among other ethnic groups in the United States or any other white population in the developed world, a mysterious plague of despair.

Oh, not poisoned by our toxic intolerance, but death by despair.

In one way, it was easy to account for all this white American death – “drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis” according to the report.

[...]

[I]t was the economy or it was demography or it was godlessness or it was religion or it was the breakdown of the family or it was the persistence of antique values or it was the lack of social programs or it was the dependence on social programs.

[...]

If you believe the [...] report, white people are victims of their own privilege – literally. Their cherished right to own guns, and the vast increase in the ownership of weaponry, means that their suicide attempts are more effective. They have more access to opioids because doctors are more likely to trust white people with them. They have the money to make themselves lonely and drink.

[...]

Case and Deaton call it “an epidemic of pain”.

Despair.

On the I-94 [in Illinois], you do find yourself asking: what the fuck is wrong with these people? I mean, aside from the rapid decline of the middle class obviously. And the rise of precarious work and the fact that the basic way of life requires so much sedation that nearly a quarter of all Americans are on psychiatric drugs, and somewhere between 26.4 and 36 million Americans abuse opioids every day. Oh yes, and the mass shootings. There was more than one mass shooting a day.

[...]

And you know what Americans were worried about while all this shit was raining down on them? While all this insanity was wounding their beloved country? You know what their number one worry was, according to poll after poll after poll?

Muslims. Muslims, if you can believe it.

Quite right. We have given up on fixing any of the real problems. And our "leaders" and "journalists" don't talk about those things.

Truly, we're not very bright. We're descended from the English.

But this article was written about a campaign trail trip, and this may be the crux of it...

The vagueness of American politics is what astonished the outsider. It’s all about feelings and God and bullshit.

[...]

The fundamental difference between the Trump and Sanders crowd[s is] that the Sanders’s crowd has more money, the natural consequence of the American contradiction machinery: rich white people can afford to think about socialism, the poor can only afford their anger.

Indeed, poverty prevents harmony, and the American two-party political system absolutely depends upon that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.