The Progressive Left among which I count myself, has shone a spotlight on the evils of racism, especially against African-Americans. Very few people now deny the long historical record of brutality, and a large majority even recognize the continuing injustices in the present day. But that focus has blinded us to the real suffering of whites and males.
This burst into our consciousness – or should have burst – two years ago when Deaton and Case found that between 1999 and 2014, the death rate among white adults with a high school education rose by twenty-two percent. They trace the causes mostly to suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” Deaton commented. If those words aren’t enough, here’s a picture:
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The liberal response has been largely unsympathetic. We haven't paid much attention to this study or this group. Hillary Clinton largely ignored them in 2016. We often dismiss them as ignorant and uneducated. We would never say that about any other group – immigrants or blacks or muslims – because that would be victim-blaming. But we generally don’t see undereducated white males as victims: we see them as the beneficiaries of centuries of racism. Yet they apparently don’t feel like beneficiaries of anything, and they’re dying.
We do offer them money – we say our welfare-state programs will protect them from poverty. Then we are baffled when they don’t embrace us. Like Robert Frank in his popular book, we cannot figure out “What’s the matter with Kansas?” But we should know: money without respect is no balm. We do know that abstractly: the watchword of liberalism is respect. But we have this hole in our sight.
Conservatives don’t seem to have the answer either. Most of the hot spots of white mortality are in conservative, Republican areas – West Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas indeed, much of the West.
William Julius Wilson, perhaps the most important sociologist of black poverty of the past half century, made this point long ago: whatever the answer is, it has to include everyone. Solutions targeted at blacks will never work, because they divide the society, creating resentments that lead to exclusion rather than inclusion. Whites need to be included in the solutions.
