Why the systems of white supremacy and privilege are crumbling down around the fearful racists!
Trump’s rise put a sudden spotlight on the troubles of white working-class Americans exposing this social and spiritual disease to the world and the great fear that many whites in America have of anyone different. Whether poor and lower middle class whites feel left behind by globalization that points out the less than 9 percent of the global population they make up and immigration that highlights the lack of trade skills most of their population is plagued with or resentful of an elite political class that seems to ignore them.
It is apparent that poor white Americans feel more disgruntled and prone to acts of violence than ever, or is it with the advent of social media allowing them to spew their ideologies online the rest of the globe is just now paying attention? How much of their pique has to do with economic factors versus matters of race or, simply, mental health? And what does it all mean for the future of American politics and its dwindling importance on the world stage! The fall from grace began for many with president Trumps calling of African nations as Sh#thole countries, Nations the west needs to maintain their standard of living because the reality is the wests survives by the exploitation of African resources and complicit nature of their aged sold out obedient leadership.
America is once again being tested by a culture of Greed and apathy towards issues of social justice and equality under the law for All Americans. The federal government is unlikely to help as they have for years lowkey instigated the economic disadvantages of the poor regardless of race to maintain a status quo that benefits only the higher economic class. Among white non-Hispanics in middle age, mortality (deaths), after having fallen for large parts of the last century, the death rate actually turned up and started to go the wrong way as in more white deaths than births.
And, with the Centers for Disease Control also redocumenting what we had done starting with the pharmaceutical driven opioid addictions and the destruction of American manufacturing, Farming, and mining, the big drivers in that trend are what we call “deaths of despair,” which are suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver disease. Partly the surprise is that it is not just men; it is men and women. Not only deaths but as black and brown incarcerations of males and females has been in a 12 year decline white numbers of incarceration are seeing a national rise especially in the numbers of white women and most crimes are in association with homelessness and addictions! And it appears to be happening all over the country. And that resonated in the political season of the rise of the Millennials highlighted in Millennial Magazine and High Soaring Millennials Magazine in multiple articles that have gone viral on social media platforms like Facebook and Black Twitter.
Two things that are relevant for thinking about why, though, are first, that this started in the late ’90s.While the US government was turning a blind eye to the role the CIA played in bringing crack into the urban areas of the country and funding military coups through shadow banks with the monies earned as discussed in the book Diary of an Economic Hitman the white middle class and rural areas were being adversely impacted as well. In the 90's Black farmers were targeted by the Federal government who in previous decades at instituted redlining with banks to marginalize black communities and disrupt a rise in black homeownership. Black farmers were excluded from most farm groups, and many white farmers were reluctant to join the attack on established politics and business for fear of retaliation weakening their position but at a slower rate enabling corporations to take over a significant part of the farming industry and developers to purchase prime farmlands cheaply resulting in the rise of GMOs and other sub par foods grown cheaply to maximize profits. So, this is not something that happened after the financial crash, for instance. It’s a much older phenomenon, before the turn of the century.
The second thing is that this is much worse for people who have a high school degree and no B.A. than it is for people with a B.A. So, we’re talking about white non-Hispanics without a college degree being active in their own demise for the illusion of being of a higher social class than melanated populations. And for a reward they were given Walmart which undercut their mom and pop businesses with cheap goods frim China! Their is also a quantifiable extreme price for those deeply engaged in the extreme white power MAGA ideologies. Primaries showing, county by county, the fraction of people who were voting for Trump or fans of the divisive Fox news propagandists media and the fraction of people who were dying of what we call “deaths of despair.” And those are very, very highly correlated in most states. So, there is correlative evidence, at least, that Donald Trump is doing very well in the same areas that are hardest hit by this. Beyond that fact that most of these folks are filled with fear about losing white privilege, it’s very hard to trace the mechanisms very precisely.
We know the working class today has a large portion that are women, and are people of color. But we also know, people in their Bubba caps and their truckers’ caps—fit into a certain stereotype: poor white working-class men and women. Educated women are clearly turned off by the rights ideology pertaining to education, abortions, women in the workforce equal pay for women, you know, blatant sexism. But not all women are feminists meaning open for women to have equal rights under the law and equal pay in the workforce. Women can often be more critical of other women.
Carol Anderson, Emory University historian and author of White Rage: presented data that shows the average income for a Trump supporter was $72,000? What does that do to the narrative that is out there that this is really the working class? Because we don’t understand the working class as having an average income of $72,000. So this goes beyond economics although that has a part in the puzzle it is something in the culture of white people which could simply be that their culture is totally based on just being white!
That suggestion was presented in Nate Silver’s study Mr. Silver uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science. The people who were actually voting for Trump in 2016, he argued, were the higher class than the people voting for [Bernie] Sanders and Clinton. So, I think our data is very imprecise here, and then, when we try to create a voting bloc and we use one term to describe them—whether it’s “the black vote” or “the women vote,” now it’s “the working class vote”—I think that can be really misleading.
When you’re talking about the angst and anxiety and feeling of being stifled and that kind of despair, what I see is that, as African-Americans advance in this society in terms of gaining their citizenship rights, that there is a wave of what I’ve been calling “white rage,” which are the movements within legislative bodies and within the judicial sector in terms of policies and laws and rulings that undercut that advancement. We saw it as mass murders, lynchings, black codes and laws to destabilize black communities, after Reconstruction, during Reconstruction. We saw it during the Great Migration with Sundown towns and false imprisonment , then with the wave that we’re looking at right now, after Barack Obama’s election and with Kamala Harris as the Vice President.
But with the economic advancement of communities of color by the sweat of their brow and their talents, as we see them refute welfare and build their own gated black communities and high performing schools free of white controlled school councils aren’t we also talking about kind of the death of white supremacy in the most literal sense of that term, that there is no longer a premium that one gets because of the color of one’s skin in terms of better wages or better social standing if you can move away from white influence?
The last resource white supremacy has is subverting the law and lawmakers as even police forces come under scrutiny for dishonorable practices being video taped for the world to examine as cops commit murder with impunity supported by the NRA, far right politicos and sensationalist Right leaning news outlets, while white communities co sign it our global allies are watching and see it as a rise in fascism much like what Nazi Germany went through and they are preparing to remove themselves from proximity to American influence which means the crash of the US economy all because of our nations refusal to let go of centuries of racial hate and fear! I mean, are we sort of seeing the death of this system writ large? So the answer doesn't lie in politics but in social justice and mental health as well as a multi-generational multi-racial spiritual cleansing of the soul of America. Because if we don't the nations fall is inevitable.
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