Thursday, April 13, 2023

4.8 Racism's Effects in Black and White

Racism's Effects on People Racialized as Black


Racism and Segregation

The 2020 Census shows that the USA is diversifying faster than previously predicted.  From USA Facts, this graphic shows the racial makeup of the USA in 2020:


Explore where different races live in the U.S. using Justice Map here.
What trends can you identify?

1.  Did you grow up in a segregated neighborhood?  What were the demographics and geography  of where you grew up?  How do they compare to the nation overall?

There is quite a bit of segregation in the U.S.A., even in areas that seem to be diverse (like Chicago) there is a large amount of segregation.

Some of the segregation is a result of institutional policies like redlining and sadly, the criminal justice system.  Look at this analysis (from Patheos 2018) of the racial dot map.  

 The effects of segregation have long-lasting impact including:

Segregation in rental market This 2018 research by economists Early, Carrillo, and Olsen finds that discrimination causes black renters to pay substantially more than whites for identical homes in identical neighborhoods; the amount of the exploitation is greater the more white the neighborhood.


NY's Amsterdam News highlights school segregation in this article: Where School Segregation is Still Happening across the U.S.  The article highlights research from U of Southern California's Segregation Index.



2.  Hypothesize at least one way how segregation might contribute to economic, health or educational disparities.

Choose one of the areas below to focus on: Economics, Medicine or Law
Then examine the evidence and answer the question that follows.

Racism and Economics

As we have mentioned earlier in the semester, there are multiple audit studies that show that race is a factor in preventing some Americans from interviewing for potential jobs.

University of Chicago School of Economics and Labor Market
Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan published a study of implicit bias and the labor market in The American Economic Review (2004) called Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination?

Labor Market and Felonies
From the NY Times, When a Dissertation Makes a Difference shows not only how unconscious bias can play a role in hiring in a most inequitable way, but also how sociology can make a difference that influences policy.  
As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Devah Pager studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.

Pager's dissertation is called The Mark of a Criminal Record (2003) was an audit study of the Milwaukee area labor market.  She also published in a follow-up study (2010) in the American Sociological Review  which was a more qualitative study using fieldwork.

The Economic Policy Institute (2016) found that the wage gap among different races is growing more as the inequality, in general, grows.  The report lists key findings as well as policy suggestions.




The Guardian analyzes the EPI report here.  Some notable findings include: the wage gap is worse than in 1979, and that college graduation does not mitigate the disparity as black college graduates earn 10% less than their white cohorts. 

Inequality.org published a report on racial inequality showing that the disparity is not just income but also wealth and homeownership.



Racism and Health/Medicine
Social factors play an important and well-documented role in health outcomes.  Race is especially correlated to health outcomes because racial inequalities are so stark and have persisted for so long.  Please examine all of the evidence below that race affects health outcomes.

The Annals of Epidemiology (2019) published this meta-analysis of the effects of daily stresses as a result of racism, also known as the "weathering hypothesis."  The analysis finds that having to weather the stress of racism has a cumulative effect on individual resulting in lower life expectancies and worse health outcomes.

American Academy of Pediatrics (2019) published this statement about how childrens and teens can be harmed by racism and what doctors and healthcare providers should do to improve health outcomes.
Racism Impacts Your Health, a 2018 article from The Conversation documents a literature review of the myriad ways that racism impacts health outcomes for minorities including: higher systolic blood pressure, increased blood pressure and higher rates of hypertension. 
The American Journal of Epidemiology (2007) found a link between racism and breast cancer summarized by the National Institute of Health. 
The American Public Health Association study of hypertension/heart disease published a link between racism and heart disease in the American Journal of Public Health (2012) 
This study published in the journal of Ethnicity and Disease shows that African-Americans experience worse health outcomes than African immigrants!  Lower hypertension among 1st gen African immigrants compared to multigenerational Americans who are black shows that the stress of growing up in the United States where racism against Americans who are black has a real effect - it's not simply genetics (although possibly epigenetics). 
This 2010 fact sheet from the Center for American Progress shows disparities in health for all races including who has health coverage, chronic diseases and causes of death for African Americans/Blacks, Hispanics, Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Asian Americans.  
A 2016 report on life expectancy from PBS reveals that Americans who are black have a shorter life expectancy from the moment they are born.  The disparity continues throughout life so that African Americans live about 4 years shorter than white Americans on average.
NPR reported (2018) on a Center for Disease Control study published in JAMA Pediatrics of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the effects on health.  Those identifying as black or Latino and those with less than a high school education or an annual income below $15,000 were more likely to have more ACEs. 
 This article reported in the NY Times (2018) shows that Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery!


Racism and Legal System/Punishment
From the ASA an explanation about her ethnography on Youtube:



From Stanford University Press, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve published a scathing account of Racism in Chicago's Cook County Courthouse.  Van Cleve spent ten years researching the Cook County Courthouse, the largest courthouse in the United States.  She is currently a sociology professor at Brown University.

Embedded below is an interview with Dr. Van Cleve on PBS:

Here is a bookreview from the ASA:  

There are three central aspects to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s argument in Crook County: her focus on professionals, her detailing of racial abuses, and her critical analysis of racism and racial injustice as embedded within court culture. Perhaps the most essential is her inverted lens on the court professionals. Rather than focusing on the impacts of an unjust criminal system on the Black and Brown individuals who pass through it, Gonzalez Van Cleve instead highlights the ways these injustices are carried out by the very professionals tasked with upholding and administering fair and just due process. In turning the lens on criminal justice professionals, Gonzalez Van Cleve articulates how systemic racism is managed, perpetuated, practiced, and understood by those “doing” colorblind racism, particularly in how they carry out unchecked racialized court abuses.

And here is an essay that Dr. VanCleve tweeted during the unprecedented pandemic of 2020-21:

https://contexts.org/blog/education-under-covid-19/ 

 

Institutionally sanctioned punishment begins in preK!

A 2016 Yale University study of discipline disparities in preschool found that implicit bias towards preschool students perceived as black resulted in teachers monitoring their behavior more closely and punishing them more often including in expulsion rates!
Vox shows racism at school from preK-12 in 7 charts (2015).
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646504/discipline-race-charts




This article from the Sociology of Education (2017) shows that implicit bias results in black girls being punished harsher for subjective offenses.  In other words, when the offense is subjective, school officials are more likely to perceive black girls as being worthy of punishment.  You can read the article and use my annotations to answer questions about it.  Then see the data source from the article below to look up data on your own. 
US Dept of Education just released data on racial disparities in every school and school district in America (from preK-12). Here’s how you use the data to show if/how your school discriminates against black students and other marginalized groups. First, lookup the most recent year of data available for your school and/or school district. Right now that’s data on the 2015-16 school year. Here’s where you go: https://ocrdata.ed.gov/DistrictSchoolSearch#schoolSearchHere's a link to Samual Sinyangwe's tweet about this.Click on the Discipline Report on the right side and you’ll see which groups of students your school is most likely to suspend, expel, and refer to law enforcement. You can also see who’s more likely to be arrested at school using the “school-related arrests” tab.
Harsher treatment toward Americans who are black does not just occur in schools. This 2019 study from the Proceedings of the National Acdemy of Sciences of the United States of America concludes that, "people of color face a higher likelihood of being killed by police than do white men and women, that risk peaks in young adulthood, and that men of color face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being killed by police." African American men and women ... face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers... Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims. 
So, yes according to this study from 2009-2012, more whites have been killed, but a DISPROPORTIONATE number of blacks have been killed and that disproportionate number was much LESS likely to be armed. 

In 2018, based on data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, black people were overrepresented among persons arrested for nonfatal violent crimes (33%) and for serious nonfatal violent crimes (36%) relative to their representation in the U.S. population (13%) (table 1).  White people were underrepresented.
This 2021 Washington Post study has detailed every police shooting since 2015.
 
Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans

Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.



Although this is a more anecdotal bit of evidence, I saw this video from Youtube (Watch from 2:30-6:15 and 12:50-18:50) and thought what an amazing contrast to the videos of police stopping Philando Castille, Sandra Bland, Terence Crutcher, Levar Jones and the stopping of black men by police.
This 2019 Marshall project study details sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system (2019).  Not only are Americans who are black more likely to get stopped by police, they are also more likely to get a harsher punishment than the whites who are convicted of the same crimes.
The Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson reports on sentencing disparities (2017) as well. 
 Vox reports (2017) on University of Michigan Law School report on sentencing disparities published by the United States Sentencing Commission.  Among the key findings is that, "Black male offenders continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated White male offenders."
 For more on policing and racism, see:
Whose Lives Matter? (A History of Black Lives Matter Movement)
A Knee into the Gut of America (Colin Kaepernick)
 
3. What was some quantitative evidence that racism affects Americans who are identified as black?

4. What was some qualitative evidence that racism affects Ameriocans who are idewntified as black?

5.  Comment on some of the evidence above in the disparities of how Americans are punished based on race.  What was compelling/surprising?

6.  Any questions about the effects of racism on Americans who are black? 


Racism's Effects on Whites

Just like people are unique and dynamic, so is each racial group.  Therefore, racism affects each group differently.  Surprisingly, however, even whites can be affected negatively by racism towards nonwhites.  One person studying the effects of racism on whites is Jonathon Metzel, a sociologist, and a medical doctor at Vanderbilt University.


Dr. Jonathon Metzel, Sociologist and Medical Doctor


As both a sociologist and a medical doctor, Metzel explores the connection between racism and the negative effects on society, especially among whites.  In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Dr. Metzel finds that the life expectancy of white Americans has gone DOWN for three years in a row, 2015, 2016 and 2017.  (This was even before the Covid-19 pandemic!)   The last time that life expectancy went down in the U.S. for three years in a row was one hundred years ago because of World War I and the influenza outbreak of 1919.  The reasons that it is going down again now are surprisingly related to race.  This has not happened in 100 years and it is almost unheard of in the developed world.! Life expectancy should be going up.

Here is the introduction to Metzel's book.  If you read the last 2 pages of the reading (18-19), Metzel explicitly states that,
It is not liberal or conservative politics in general, but a specific type of politics:
"It is best to avoid knee-jerk assumptions that more money or health care are automatically good....There are far too many examples of liberal or Democratic initiatives that result in poor health for minority and low-income populations...When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools, or make other decisions that are perilous, this is literally asking people to die for their whiteness." 
I argue that the way forward requires a white America that strives to collaborate rather than dominate, with a mind-set of openness and interconnectedness that we have all-too-frequently neglected. 
This is not to suggest that everyone become a Democrat - far from it.  Rather, our nation urgently needs to recognize how systems of inequality we build and sustain aren't benefitting anyone...."
Chris Hayes had Dr. Metzel as a guest on his podcast called Why Is This Happening?

The transcript is available here in case you want to read along while you listen, or in case you simply prefer to read the interview instead of listening.  But you can also listen to the podcast on Apple here and on Stitcher here.  If you listen to the interview, it runs for about 50 minutes.  Note that this is just an interview with Metzel.  For a full understanding of Metzel's findings, see his book, Dying of Whiteness.

Here is the episode embedded:

 
Here is a preview of the interview:
Trigger Warning:  **This conversation explores death by suicide and gun violence**
Life expectancy in America has gone down three years in a row. You might expect to see shorter life expectancies in the aftermath of war or famine — to witness it in an industrialized nation in the middle of an otherwise prosperous era, however, is unprecedented. It is a distress signal that something has gone horribly wrong. 
Jonathan Metzl traced that distress signal to its origin and found something remarkable. He writes that the policies promising to Make American Great Again, policies rooted in centering and maintaining the power of whiteness, are shortening the lives of the white Americans who vote for them. From supporting conceal carry to cutting social services, Metzl explores just what policies white voters are willing to risk their lives for. 
Anne Case and Angus Deaton (mentioned in Metzel's book) detail the rising death rate for whites without a college education.  Here is an explanation from the Brookings Institution.  And here is Deaths of Despair, a 2020 book that Case and Deaton wrote as a follow up to their ground-breaking 2015 study.
Here is a summary of Case and Deaton's work,
Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.

1.  Thoughts on the book?  What surprised you? What do you have questions about?

2.  What is Metzel's overall thesis?


Dr. Jonathon Metzel, Sociologist and Medical Doctor


In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Dr. Metzel finds that the life expectancy of White Americans has gone DOWN for three years in a row, 2015, 2016 and 2017.  (This was even before the Covid-19 pandemic!)   The last time that life expectancy went down in the U.S. for three years in a row was one hundred years ago because of World War I and the influenza outbreak of 1919.  The reasons that it is going down again now are surprisingly related to race.  This has not happened in 100 years.  And it is almost unheard of in the developed world.  Life expectancy should be going up.

For more about Metzel's book see the link to his introduction and the guide below:

Here is the introduction to Metzel's book.
Pgs 2-3
As a sociological study, what methods does Dr. Metzel use?  (pg 2 and 6)
What is the paradox that he finds?  What are some examples from the reading?
Is Trevor an example of the paradox? Why?  Why not?

Pgs 4-5
What was Trevor explicitly and implicitly dying from?
How was Trevor's situation an example of Du Bois' "wages of whiteness"?
What are "white 'ways of life'"?

Pgs 6-9
How does gender play a role?
What are the five trends (evidence) that influence Dr. Metzel's overall claim?
What are the threats to white authority?

Pg 10  How does white backlash politics influence whites to vote?

Pg 11-14  What states does Dr. Metzel focus on? What issues in each state?

Pg 15-16  What type of racism is Dr. Metzel most focused on in the reading?

Pgs 16-18 Why is "whiteness" an important consideration in Dr. Metzel's research?

Here is Robin DiAngelo speaking about the importance of acknowledging race.

Racial resentment = Deaths of Despair + Anti-Gov + Guns = Lower Life Expectancy

I.  Racial Resentment Politics

As we learned in our social class unit, the middle class has been declining and social class inequality growing for the last 50 years.  But that inequality combined with the election of America's first black President brought fringe agendas into mainstream politics:

Note that the discontent in social class discussed applies to all Americans in the bottom 80% of income regardless of race, however, there are unique racial dynamics that intersect with social class.  As Adam Serwer notes in the Atlantic, America has only been a true democracy for 50 years.  During the 50 years that economic equality has been declining, we have seen a slow nudge toward more social equality.  Movements like civil rights and BLM have created some progress that is not lost on the whites who feel like they are not getting ahead financially.  Additionally, the 1965 immigration act opened America's doors to a more diverse but higher social class of immigrants.  Whites see these people as nonwhites who are doing economically well in America (i.e. Asian doctors, engineers, and other professionals). And, politicians have been using coded racial language since the 1970s to use white racial resentment to create political support.  Nixon's Southern Strategy is one of the most prominent examples of this.  Mother Jones details a history of the politics of racial resentment going back to the Nixon campaign here. 



Notre Dame Sociology professor Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

Below are some other examples of political fringe messages or conspiracy theories that paint Obama as un-American:

From Vox, How Southern Racism Found a Home in the Tea Party (2016).

Obama was portrayed as Kenyan and socialist.

Obama was accused of being Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Castro all in one!

Obama was portrayed as both Nazi and Communist  (never mind that these two were enemies)


Obama is Chinese communist.

Obama is Russian.















Tea Party Patriot ads that were distinctly anti-Asian featuring fictional Chinese executives speaking Mandarin and boasting about how much land they bought in Missouri.
Local nbc affiliate reported on the story here.
Asian community leaders spoke out about the ads here.


One example of conspiracy theory politics which attempted to use race to raise doubts and fears about President Obama is that if elected in 2012, he would institute Sharia law in the United States and destroy democracy:


Here is one website detailing the claim and disputing it:

Another example is the following book from former Assistant US Attorney published during the Obama administration which tried to cast President Obama as a Muslim terrorist.  From Wikipedia, 
"throughout the Obama administration, McCarthy promoted views about the Obama administration's advancement of a "Sharia Agenda", arguing that radical Islamists were working with liberals within the United States government to subvert democracy in the West. 


And the Annenberg Center's FactCheck.org details the dogged claims that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States who was anti-American.

Obama was portrayed as not American.

Birtherism
The most persistent and damaging conspiracy theory was that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States as such, was anti-American detailed by this website.  


The most public figure promoting the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States was Donald Trump who began his political campaign with an egregious campaign of racial resentment known as birtherism.  This trope follows a long line of viewing "real Americans" as white and because President Obama's father was born in Kenya, the trope falsely pushes the idea that there is no way that President Obama could be American.  (It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, even the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.)  The Guardian details the history of Trump promoting birtherism here.  And from the Atlantic, here, and birtherism on ABC news here.

At the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama joked about the birtherism although his memoir details how hurtful it was.  But some reports say that it was at this dinner that Mr. Trump decided to run for President.

If there was any doubt that Trump's rise to political power was about racial resentment, the photo below is from the first day after Trump's election.  That is just one of a whole list of racist hate that was manifest on the first day after his election documented at Medium here.  This is just one example that the 2016 election was about racial resentment.  



And this twitter feed documents similar incidents.

This post from buzzfeed documents middle schoolers chanting Trump catch phrases in a way that alarms the parents of the school on the day after his election.

This article from Raleigh documents that the KKK celebrated Trump's win in 2016.  "Trump, a Republican, was officially endorsed by the KKK during his campaign."

The FBI has warned repeatedly that white nationalist group are the biggest threat to domestic security in the US. 


Threats to white authority.

There are numerous examples that show the use of racism throughout the Obama administration, including this article from NBC news here.

Ian Haney Lopez is a constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley.  His book, Dog Whistle Politics, shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy".  This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them.  For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive.  But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.




Michael Tesler shows in his book Post-Racial or Most Racial how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times, racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.



Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains.  She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left.  Below is a summary of her claim:
"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage." 



Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right
In her 2016 book, renown sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains the deep story behind the Tea Party support and the rise of Trump which stems from growing social class inequality happening at the same time as civil rights equality which leaves many White Americans feeling like they are left behind by the government and that they are "strangers in their own land."


At the 2017  annual conference, I had the privilege of helping to facilitate a three-session symposium on the teaching of high school sociology.  Our keynote speaker was Arlie Russell Hochschild.  Dr. Hochschild is a professor emeritus of sociology at UC Berkley.  She is a renowned ethnographer.  At NCSS 2017, she spoke about her most recent work, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right.  What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel.  It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not.  What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real.  Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain, 
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.


Here is a funny take from comedian Hari Kondabolu about the growing threat to white authority:




II. Deaths of Despair


Anne Case and Angus Deaton (mentioned in Metzel's book) detail the rising death rate for whites without a college education.   And here is Deaths of Despair, a 2020 book that Case and Deaton wrote as a follow-up to their ground-breaking 2015 study.  Here is an explanation from the Brookings Institution,
Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.
The combined effect means that mortality rates of whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than blacks by 2015.

Analyze each of the following graphs that display Case and Deaton's findings about "deaths of despair".






III. Anti-government (Healthcare) Movement
Middle and lower-income people experienced negative effects from white backlash policies. Welfare backlash tied to white fear of declining status published in the Journal of Social Forces from Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley.
“This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.”
The findings, published in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.



More whites than any other race use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), but the Trump administration is proposing cuts.  How might this be evidence of Dr. Metzel's claim?



IV. Guns






Dr. Harel Shapira's research from University of Texas Austin highlights the way that gun schools teach gun owners to embrace guns.  See a brief clip of his explaining his research here (and embedded below).  And this story from Quartz about the way NRA ads promote a generalized and vague us vs. them conflict.  One ad that drew the most criticism is here.



Media Matters highlights the many ways that NRA ads try and use fear to influence voters here.
In Missouri, policy went even further than Dr. Shapira's research by passing a law allowing permitless carrying of guns,
Missouri now joins Idaho, West Virginia and Mississippi as one of four states to adopt “permitless carry” in 2016, bringing the total number of US states to 12. Missouri Democrats strongly opposed the law, calling it a “perfect storm” that would cause fatal shootings—already a more common cause of death in Missouri than car accidents.



Guns and Health, Harvard Medicine;
As physicians, we too care about your protection. Our mission is to treat disease, promote quality of life, and prevent injury and death. We discuss matters of health and safety in a confidential, non-judgmental fashion. We ask about depression, domestic violence, and drugs. We make recommendations about practicing safe sex and wearing seatbelts. But some feel that physicians should not talk about guns. In fact, Florida has passed a law limiting such discussion. But guns do affect health and safety. In the United States, the number of deaths from guns continues to climb (now at roughly 33,000 per year, far more than any other developed country per capita) and is expected to surpass motor vehicle deaths for 2015. It is the second leading cause of death in children....the more households that have guns within a particular state, the more gun deaths there are — even after adjusting for crime, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol, and poverty.

 Gun Violence: A Public Health Problem, American Psychological Association

Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S., American Public Health Association

Firearm injuries are a serious public health problem, Center for Disease Control

Gun violence is a public health crisis American Medical Association

Gun violence is a public health issue American Academy of Pediatrics (link includes advocacy suggestions)

Gun Violence Exposure Associated with Higher Rates of Mental Health-Related ED Visits by Children UPENN Medicine


Epilogue:  Dying of Whiteness during the Covid-19 Pandemic

And as a follow-up to Metzel's book, just two years later, a global pandemic hits the US.  But many Americans see the health measures being suggested by the government as an infringement on their rights.  They showed up en masse to protest in Michigan.


How does this quarantine protest exemplify Metzel's thesis?



The protesters brought AR-15 rifles with scopes and muzzles, along with other weapons and assault gear. Most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides followed by accidental deaths. These men are advocating for premature death by implicitly supporting guns and explicitly supporting ignoring medical professionals. Both will lower life expectations for white Americans. 

The NY Post also reported about the protest.


5.  How are the freedom protests during the Covid-19 quarantine an example of Metzel's findings?

And the pandemic has driven gun sales to an all-time high reported by NPR, The Guardian, and the NY Times





Dr. Oz was on Fox News with Sean Hannity to say that "opening schools is 'appetizing' because it may only cost us 2-3% in terms of mortality." That is 1.7 million students dying!

And deaths of despair reached an all-time high during the pandemic:



From the Washington Post:




And the CDC reports that in 2020 alone, US life expectancy declined by a year and a half!  This decline was the largest single year decline since WWII and it set the US life expectancy back to 2003 rates!
The decline in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 can primarily be attributed to deaths from the pandemic, as COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths or 74% of the decline. An estimated 11% of the decline in life expectancy can be attributed to increases in deaths from accidents/unintentional injuries. Drug overdose deaths account for over one-third of all unintentional injury deaths, and last week NCHS reported an all-time high of over 93,000 overdose deaths in 2020.

Other contributing causes of death to the decline in life expectancy in 2020 include homicide
(3.1% of the decline), diabetes (2.5%), and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (2.3%).

6.  Any questions about how racism affects Americans who are white?  Anything you want to know more about?


This follow up analysis from The Conversation (2023 ) shows the trend is not only growing after Covid but it has gotten worse!



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