A Corner: The Wages of Whiteness is Early Death

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/11/t...rly-death/

Quote:The white working class has never had it easy in American history. It’s been viciously exploited, disrespected, deceived, divided, repressed, and otherwise and generally abused from the United States’ colonial origins through the present day. If you want to glimpse some of what I mean, read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Harriet Arnow’s stunningly beautiful and tragic novel The Dollmaker – a harrowing tale of an Appalachian family’s migration from Kentucky to Detroit during World War II. And listen to the following passage from the great U.S. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs’ statement to a federal judge readying to sentence him for violating the Sedition Act in 1918:

“At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day…I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.”

Quote:Most, if not all the workers Debs was thinking about in this oration were certainly Caucasian.

Why hasn’t the U.S. working class risen up to destroy the capitalist system and the pitiless masters who have treated the laboring masses with murderous contempt? Part of the answer lay in the way that American capitalism has encouraged the white majority of workers to, in historian David Roediger’s words, “define and accept their class position by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not blacks.'” By W.E.B. DuBois’ account in 1935, anti-black racism grants lower and working-class whites a “public and psychological wage” – a false and dysfunctional measure of status used to compensate for alienating and exploitative class relationships. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1968, racialized capitalism has given its Caucasian proletarian prey the “satisfaction of…thinking you are somebody big because you are white.”

[size=24pt]allyuh want to see what a real, absolute blood and guts system of slavery looks like ::confused::  check this out:[/size]

Quote:The “wages of whiteness” (Roediger’s phrase) have not been paying off for any working class peoples, Caucasians included, across the long neoliberal era, Since 1979, productivity has increased eight times faster than pay in the U.S. If the U.S. minimum wage, currently pegged at a pathetic $7.25 an hour, had kept up with productivity it would more than $18 today. Between the late 1980s and today, the average American CEOs pay went from being 59 times higher than the typical U.S. worker’s pay to 301 times higher. Since 1979, the average hourly wage of the nation’s bottom 30% of wage “earners” has risen less than 1% while the top 95th percentile saw a 41% increase.

During Barack Obama’s first term in office, 95% of the nation’s income gains went to the top 1%. Such are fruits of neoliberal, so-called “free market” capitalism – substantive material injury beneath the wounded pride that many white Americans have felt over the presence of a black family in the White House (no small symbolic anomaly for the psychological wage of white privilege, real and imagined).

[size=18pt]AND ALLYUH PLEASE NOTE:  LOOK AT THE PROMINENCE OF THE NAME [size=24pt]OBAMA [size=18pt]IN THE EXECUTIVE OF THE EXPLOITATIVE MIX..THE MAN WHO HAS FACILITATED THE GREATEST INCREASE IN THE EXPLOITATION OF HUMANITY IN FAVOR OF THE RICH....IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY.

YESSSSS....obama!  GIGGLES BWOY![/size][/size][/size]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health....html?_r=0

Quote:middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.

That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

Quote:The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.