No Country For Middle-Aged White Men
Scott Greer – The Daily Caller
It’s the only group that is completely ineligible for affirmative action. Every white person has white privilege. Life is said to be on “easy mode” for those lucky folks with pasty skin.
If that were true, then what explains why so many of the supposedly privileged are addicted to drugs, take their own lives and have dismal economic prospects?
This Princeton survey is just another devastating piece of evidence against the notion that white privilege underlies our society….
This is a serious problem, but the Princeton researchers only discovered it by accident and our leaders don’t seem too concerned with it.
Then again, maybe this morbid development is why so many Americans are embracing the call of political populism and supporting outsiders like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Chris Skidmore, 39, and unemployed,sits on a bench at the North Hills Mall in Raleigh, North Carolina on March 19, 2010.(AP)
America’s White Working Class Is a Dying Breed
Harold Meyerson – The Washington Post
Death rate increases in the modern world are so rare that economists and public health scholars have been groping for equivalent instances. “Only HIV/AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” Deaton told the New York Times….
In recent decades, however, the stories of the white working class have grown relentlessly grimmer.
David O’Bryan uses the computer to search for jobs in Barre, Vermont in tis Sept 4, 2009 file photo. (AP)
The offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and the increasing substitution of machines for humans in the production process took a huge toll.
As Andrew J. Cherlin points out in “Labor’s Love Lost,” his study of the disintegration of the working-class white family, the share of blue-collar jobs in the U.S. economy declined from 28 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2010.
Work in the service or retail sectors was no bargain, either: As research by Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates, the real median hourly wage for white men with no more than a high school diploma declined from $19.76 in 1979 to $17.50 in 2014.
Working-Class–White Deaths Are a Cultural Problem
David French – National Review
I grew up on the edge of the “Big White Ghetto” that my colleague Kevin Williamson described so beautifully early last year. I’ve seen the decline with my own eyes…
As a culture, we make living hard and dying easy. It’s hard to buckle down in school and stretch to make it through community college. It’s hard to start at minimum wage and work your way up. It’s hard to stick with a marriage when times are difficult, the rent check is precarious, and you’re fighting every single night. And it’s hard to say no to forgetting your pain in a bottle, or with a pill, or in another person’s arms. In the end, people live with just enough religion to haunt their consciences and not enough faith to change their lives.
There is no simple path out of despair. There is no government fix — though the government would do well to stop causing so much harm.
Demonstrators line the steps of the State Capitol for a tax day protest in the this April 15, 2005 file photo in St. Paul, Minn. (AP)