"There are Two Americas Now: One with a B.A. and One Without"

That is the headline for Thomas Edsall's guest column in the New York Times a few days ago.  It is a follow up on the widely discussed work of Mary Ann Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton economists who are well known for their scholarship on deaths of despair.  Some of the focus here is on the upward trajectory and optimism of Black folks and the downward trajectory and pessimism of white folks.  They also note the recently rising mortality rate among Black men, quoting Carol Graham of Brookings: 

Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:

The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks.

Near the end of the piece, Edsall also turns to the rural-urban axis, quoting the work of rural sociologist Shannon Monnat of Syracuse University's Lerner Center:  

Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”

For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over the same 28 years, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25 to 44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”

The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men 45 to 64 saw death rate per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45 to 64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.

I wrote about these issues in my 2018 law review article, The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working-Class White Women in the Era of Trump.  

The Edsall column continues:

In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:

The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.

In a separate 2017 paper, “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:

Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

On rural resentment and pain, and its link to the trucker strike

I am a huge fan of Thomas Edsall, who writes regularly for the New York Times, but I missed this column earlier this month until today.  The headline is provocative, "There's a Reason Trump Loves the Truckers."  As is typical of Edsall, he marshals recent academic research on a topic.  You have to get pretty deep into this column to get to the rural part of this one, which otherwise focuses on class and regional inequality, but I'm just going to highlight below those rural bits.  The rural bits, by the way, could also be framed as regional inequality.  Edsall writes:  

I asked Rodríguez-Pose whether the truck protests in Canada are a harbinger of future right-wing populist protests, and he pointed to developments in France in his emailed reply:

In France, the phenomenon of the “gilets jaunes” (or yellow vests) is clearly an example of the “revenge of the places that don’t matter.” This is a movement that emerged as a result of a severe hike in diesel taxes in order to pay for the green transition. But this was a decision that many people in small town and rural France felt imposed significant costs on them. These are people who had been encouraged just over a decade before to buy diesel cars and, in the meantime, had seen their public transport — mainly buses and rail lines — decline and/or disappear. Most of them felt this was a decision taken by what they consider an aloof Parisian elite that is, on average, far wealthier than they were and enjoys a world-class public transport system.

The pitting of a populist rural America against a cosmopolitan urban America has deep economic and cultural roots, and this divide has become a staple of contemporary polarization.

“Urban residents are much more likely to have progressive values. This result applies across three categories of values: family values, gender equality and immigration attitudes,” Davide Luca of Cambridge University; Javier Terrero-Davila and Neil Lee, both of the London School of Economics; and Jonas Stein of the Arctic University of Norway write in their January 2022 article “Progressive Cities: Urban-Rural Polarization of Social Values and Economic Development Around the World.”

* * * 

Luca and his colleagues emphasize the divisive role of what Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who died last year, called the “silent revolution” and what Ron Lesthaeghe of the Free University of Brussels describes as the “second demographic transition.”

Citing Inglehart, Luca and his co-authors write:

when people are secure, they focus on postmaterialist goals such as “belonging, esteem and free choice.” The possibility of taking survival for granted “brings cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality and democracy increasingly likely, giving rise to a new type of society that promotes human emancipation on many fronts.”

The urban-rural conflict between postmaterialistic values (shorthand for autonomy, environmental protection, sexual freedom, gender equality) and more traditional values (family obligation, sexual restraint, church, community) is most acute in “high income countries,” they write. This suggests, they continue, “that only more advanced economies can provide cities with the material comfort, and probably the right institutional environment, to make progressive values relevant.”

I'm thinking "postmaterialistic values" sound like what Rob Henderson calls "luxury beliefs"--those that folks with other pressing problems (think Maslow's hierarchy of needs) in their lives solved then have the time to worry and think about. 

In an email, Luca elaborated:

There is a strong correlation between my analyses (and similar lines of research) and trends highlighted in second demographic transition theories. Some of the factors driving the second demographic transition are definitely linked to the development of “self-expression” values, especially among women.

Cities, Luca argued, “are the catalysts for these changes to occur. In other words, cities are the loci where self-expression values can develop, in turn affecting reproductive behaviors and, hence, demographic patterns.”

Social capital is by no means the only glue that holds right-wing movements together.

The Rodríguez-Pose and Luca papers suggest that cultural conflict and regional economic discrepancies also generate powerful political momentum for those seeking to build a “coalition of resentment.” Since the 2016 election of Trump, the Republican Party has focused on that just that kind of Election Day alliance.

Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, sociologists at Syracuse and Cornell, have analyzed the economic and demographic characteristics of counties that sharply increased their vote for Trump in 2016 compared with their support for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In their October 2017 paper “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and Brown found that “Trump performed better in counties with more economic distress, worse health, higher drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates, lower educational attainment and higher marital separation/divorce rates.”

There's so much more to Edsall's column, which I'll try to get to in another post focusing more on class than geography.  

Meanwhile, here's another New York Times column on the Ottawa trucker's strike, this one by Ross Douthat and focused on class.   

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Kristof and WuDunn on Who's Killing Working Class Whites (as opposed to "Why They are Dying")

Here's today's column on deaths of despair, brought down to a specific Oregon (and Oklahoma) family, "Who Killed the Knapp Family?"  The story starts in Kristof's hometown, Yamhill, Oregon, and ends in Oklahoma, where the adult children have been buried after dying of what so-called "deaths of despair."  Here's an excerpt curated to focus on the Knapps, Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan.  The only one still alive is Keylan, in part because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary;    

They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday. 

Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth.

Don't miss this piece in its entirety, apparently based on a forthcoming book by Kristof and WuDunn.

Kurgman conflates working class whiteness and rurality (or, a return to The Geography of the Class Culture Wars)

Krugman asserts in his column, "A Racist Stuck in the Past," that Trump is stuck not in the antebellum period, Reconstruction or even Jim Crow--but in 1989, a mere 30 years ago.  It's an interesting rhetorical strategy--to talk about the relatively recent past as "the past."  Krugman's point is that Trump conflates the urban with blackness and black dysfunction, and he dates this back at least to Trump's response to the brutal 1989 beating of the so-called Central Park Jogger:  Trump called for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five, the five men arrested for the crime.  The five were later exonerated, in 2002, but Trump has never admitted he was wrong about the men.

Krugman uses those events as a jumping off point to talk about how urban black dysfunction has evolved into rural white dysfunction in a short three decades, a trend he says Trump is in denial about:

[Trump's] vision of “American carnage” is one of a nation whose principal social problem is inner-city violence, perpetrated by nonwhites. That’s a comfortable vision if you’re a racist who considers nonwhites inferior. But it’s completely wrong as a picture of America today. 

For one thing, violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better than it was. 

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent that there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed their mortality rates above those of African-Americans. 

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

Note that Krugman's definition of rural is quite broad--seemingly any place not the inner city.  

Krugman goes on to explain how these events confirm what William Julius Wilson wrote decades ago: the problem of three or four decades ago was not "some peculiar problem with black culture."  Rather, the catalyst for the decline of African Americans was poor job opportunities and the attendant decline of the traditional family.  Krugman asks how one might test Wilson's hypothesis:   

Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

Krugman concludes:

What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t.

The colorblindness aspect of the first part of conclusion will annoy many, but I generally like Krugman's argument.  What I'm less comfortable with is his conflation of rurality with whiteness and white dysfunction.  Indeed, his column seems to me a terrific illustration of what I called, in my 2010 article, "The Geography of the Class Culture Wars," a progressive tendency to project what's wrong with America onto rural people and places, who are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) raced white.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

What does the Camp Fire and its aftermath reveal about white privilege?

I can't help wondering, as I read the New York Times latest story on the Camp Fire's total destruction of Paradise, California, what good the "whiteness" of the vast majority of survivors is doing them.  Are we, the voyeurs consuming news about the tragedy such as that proffered up by "In a Walmart Lot, a Rough Refuge for Fire Evacuees," seeing the refugees/evacuees/survivors (what word should I use?) of the fire with more or less compassion because the vast majority of them (indeed, all I have seen visually depicted in the many media sources I have consumed) are apparently (non-Hispanic) white?

These days, we hear a great deal about white privilege, white supremacy (not only as a far-right ideology but as a phenomenon, what some students in our class have suggested is a synonym for white privilege or racism generally), whites, and whiteness in the news media, and amidst the chattering classes generally.  Our heightened preoccupation with race in the Trump era has caused mainstream/left-leaning media to express whiteness and make it an explicit component of analysis.  Just a few examples are David Brooks' "The Rich White Civil War," David Leonhardt's "The Senate:  Affirmative Action for White People," and Thomas Edsall's "Who's Afraid of a White Minority?"  (I am certain I could find better illustrations of my point if I took a lot more time to track them down, but I'll let these suffice for now, given that this is just a blog post, not (yet) a law review article! or book chapter).  My point is this:  Critical race scholars have long complained (appropriately, in my opinion) about whiteness being "transparent," meaning that whiteness is an unspoken racial default.  If no race is specified, white or whiteness is assumed.  This is an aspect of what Peggy McIntosh calls the invisible knapsack of white privilege.

Scholars--including me--have been increasingly resisting and defying this transparency by calling out whiteness, by naming it, making whiteness an explicit axis of analysis, including in the context of intersectionality (i.e., what is at the intersection of white-skin privilege and socioeconomic disadvantage?).  Some of my illustrative work is here, here and here. Another fabulous example, this one by Prof. Camille Gear Rich, is here.  Increasingly, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election, journalists and pundits--especially in the mainstream media and on/from the left--are centering race in their analysis of many phenomena, including phenomena that would not previously have been seen as "raced."  I think the Brooks and Leonhardt pieces at the links above are pretty good examples of that, though Brooks also focuses on class ("rich") and Leonhardt could well focus on rurality in lieu of whiteness when complaining about the disproportionate power Senators from red states.  So, if we are going center race (as opposed to centering ability, gender, class, sexuality or ...) and not permit whiteness to be transparent, we're going to see the words "white" and "whiteness" in a lot more headlines and news coverage.  That's the trend I've observed.

That brings me back to the Camp Fire and its aftermath:  All of the folks I have seen photographed or featured in media coverage as evacuees/refugees from the Camp Fire area appear to be (non-Hispanic) white.  This is consistent with the demographics of Paradise, California (87.1% white alone; 7% Hispanic or Latino; 1.5% Native American; 1.2% Asian; 0.1% African American), and Butte County more generally (which is a bit more diverse72.1% white alone; 16.4% Hispanic or Latino; 2.5% Native American; African American, 1.8%).  Yet these evacuees don't look privileged, and that appearance is not only because they've just survived a wildfire with little but the clothes on their backs.  In fact, they look largely like the population associated with rural-ish/nonmetro places:  disproportionately elderly, low-income and/or low-education, people with disabilities, veterans.  Interestingly, 14.1% of Paradise residents live below the poverty line, compared to 19.5% of those in Butte County. (A former student who lives in Chico told me this summer that the city has in recent years been a magnet for homeless people because it is known to be a generous, charitable community; I have no idea if this is borne out by hard data, but the higher poverty rate in Butte County than in Paradise seems consistent with that proposition).

Some of the folks featured in Simon Romeo's New York Times report are representative:  They include financially precarious whites, including veterans (more than 10% of Paradise residents) and (from other journalists' reports) the elderly (more than 25% of Paradise residents were over the age of 65) and people with disabilities (18.9%).  (More links to coverage of the fire's aftermath, touching on lack of housing and illness, among other issues, are embedded here). Indeed, many news reports have referred to Paradise as a "retirement community" because it had attracted as residents so many elderly folks on fixed incomes looking for reasonably priced places to live, including in the Pine Springs mobile home park that burned to the ground in record time.  Here's some further economic context from/for Simon Romero's NYTimes depiction of those displaced by the Camp Fire:

California is the richest state in the country, home to technology giants like Google and Facebook and the multimillionaires who lost luxury homes around Malibu to wildfires this month. But the blazes are also laying bare the economic inequality that distinguishes the state, as shallow-pocketed survivors grasp for the kinds of ad hoc strategies commonly seen after disasters in the developing world.  (emphasis added)

Romero provides several profiles of evacuees.  One is of a 39-year-old former Marine, Jarrad Winter, "who recently emerged from a stretch of homelessness, only to lose everything" in the fire.  Winter comments,

I never thought I’d live in a tent city... I mean, this is America; we’re not supposed to live this way. But here we are, man, the new normal.

Another is Anjeanette Ramey, age 30, who had worked in customer service previously but was unemployed at the time of the fire.  Romero quotes Ramey:

We were always a paycheck-to-paycheck kind of town. ... All I made it out with were the clothes on my back ... My house, my car, gone. No money, no job. I have no idea what happens next. 

Her boyfriend’s reaction was more about suspicion and anger. He declined to give his name, saying he didn’t want to be known as a victim, and said the couple was avoiding formal shelters because he thought they were unsafe for people like him and his neighbors, who he thought counted for little with the rich and powerful.

A 65-year-old man, James Reed, is a retired tow-truck driver who points to his 1968 Chevrolet El Camino, commenting,  “This is my home now,"  Reed had bought his house in Magalia, a community near Paradise, just two years ago.  He commented for Romero's story,

[B]eing here, in this parking lot, I’m reminded I’m not the only one.

Another profile of an evacuee of the Camp Fire is from a prior NYT story, an 89-year-old woman named Patty Sanders who "barely escap[ed] the mobile home community where for years she has subsisted on a $900 Social Security check."  (Another story of an elderly mobile home survivor is here).  More affluent (if only slightly)--or perhaps just luckier--are the evacuees depicted in this feature, who seem to have found friends or family with whom they can stay in nearby Chico.

And then there are those previously homeless in Chico who have joined the tent city outside the Chico Walmart.  They were mentioned in a local NPR story a few days ago, and they also get a mention in this recent Sacramento Bee piece:

There have been rumors that some homeless people have moved in and taken over, but those in the camp say while there might be a handful, they are not the majority. 

“There’s a few of them, and they live down there,” said fire survivor Tim Howell, pointing to a row of tents near the freeway. “We call that skid row.” 

“The come up here and go through the stuff,” said his friend, Christian Walters, pointing to a tent filled with donated goods. “We call them ‘day walkers.’”

So I wonder if it would be helpful to mention the whiteness of these vulnerable, down-and-out  refugee/evacuee/survivor/victims rather than let the accompanying photos permit the reader to observe what is apparent.  To mention the whiteness and make a point of analysis would at least implicitly resist the conflation of whiteness with affluence, agency, autonomy (which I contrast with Professor Trina Jones point that blackness gets conflated with dependency).

The only instance I can think of where the whiteness of a "victim class" (for lack of a better term; I'm open to suggestions) has been explicitly named in reporting is on deaths of despair which, at least early on, were disproportionately occurring among middle-aged, low-education whites (Read more here (see embedded links, too) here, here, here, and here).  Should we talk about the disproportionate whiteness of the victims of the Camp Fire? or will that just perpetuate the stereotype that rural folks are disproportionately white?  or might doing so call attention to the fact that many whites are in economically precarious situations, completely ill-equipped to bounce back from a natural disaster like the Camp Fire?

Remember this Forbes Magazine story from a few years ago about the 63% of folks, unmodified/unraced, who don't have the savings/liquidity to cover an unexpected $500 expense?  We could think of them as the precariat--and on some level don't "we" see it as their own damned fault that their situation is so precarious?

Another issue should be noted, another question asked:  When we look at photos of (mostly) white refugee/evacuee/survivor/victims of the Camp Fire, do we see them any differently than we saw the (mostly) black refugee/evacuee/survivor/victims of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade ago?  I'd argue that many (or most) of us do not view them differently based on their skin color.  That was part of my core argument in Welfare Queens and White Trash:  most Americans have little tolerance for the poor and/or economically precarious.   As long as the victims/survivors/refugees are the type camped out in a Walmart parking lot rather than staying with friends or able to cash their insurance checks and stay in a motel or some other temporary housing, it's their own damned fault.  Aren't the former at some point assessed as "white trash" or hard living, and the latter assessed as settled working class, even upright, striving middle class.  Maybe "we" (the average or typical person) feels some short-term pity, but does that evolve into long-term empathy for the struggle facing these folks in the months ahead?  Whatever the views of observers, I'm not convinced they vary much depending on the race/ethnicity of the refugee/survivor/victim/evacuee.

Let me end by saying that we can never know with certainty the answer to the question I have posed in my "headline." More precisely, we are unlikely to be in agreement about what the Camp Fire, its aftermath, and media coverage of it reveal about whiteness.  Nor are we likely to reach consensus  regarding how the media should cover racial angles/components of the huge story that is the Camp Fire.  Should they, for example, try to find some Latinx or Native American refugees/evacuees/survivors/victims to profile (I saw a profile of a survivor with a Latinx name, Villanueva, for the first time on Nov. 21). so we know that not everyone suffering is white? Should they mention the whiteness of the vast majority of the refugees/evacuees, survivors/victims?  or just let the photos convey that fact?  Would the latter helpful or important because it defies stereotypes of whiteness as affluent and autonomous?  even whiteness as invincible, as reflected in the adage, "you're white, you'll be alright."

I look forward to hearing others' thoughts on the questions I am raising here.

On upward mobility, the "American Dream"--and China?

The New York Times today reveals a fact that will shock many:  One has a greater prospect of upward mobility in China than in the United States.  This finding (which I'll not scrutinize here in terms of methodology; I'm hardly qualified to do so) flies in the face our cultural assumptions--not only about capitalism v. socialism/communism, but also more strictly about the United States v. China. Here's the gist of the article:

There are two 18-year-olds, one in China, the other in the United States, both poor and short on prospects. You have to pick the one with the better chance at upward mobility. 

Which would you choose? 

Not long ago, the answer might have seemed simple. The “American Dream,” after all, had long promised a pathway to a better life for anyone who worked hard. 

But the answer today is startling: China has risen so quickly that your chances of improving your station in life there vastly exceed those in the United States.

Journalists Javier C. Hernandez and Quoctrung Bui report on the reasons for this surprising conclusion, attributing China's primacy to "an economic expansion without precedent in modern history": 

Eight hundred million people have risen out of poverty. That’s two and a half times the population of the United States.

* * * 

Not only are incomes drastically rising within families, but sons are outearning their fathers. That means expectations are rising, too, especially among China’s growing middle class. 

Life expectancy has also soared.

That brings me to a topic I have explored on these pages (and on Legal Ruralism) in prior posts, such as here, here, here, here, here and here, which is deaths of despair and the the role of optimism--or in the case of the United States pessimism--and mobility (is it upward or is it downward?)  in relation to health and wellbeing.  See more here, including references to the work of Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University, who has theorized white despair in relation to, well, (among other characteristics) whiteness and the current lack of optimism among the white working class, who no longer expect to move up, but instead see themselves slipping backwards. 

A path forward in the war on drugs

The documentary Meth Storm follows an impoverished family of meth addicts in rural Arkansas who are struggling to manage their addiction and stay out of prison. The son, Teddy, has found religion during his sixth stint in prison in the past ten years, and he promises the mother of his children that he will get sober and get his life back on track. Teddy’s mother said this commitment to sobriety was unlikely to last. She says her son has merely found “jailhouse religion” and will be back on meth shortly after he gets out. Disappointingly, Teddy’s mother is right. A few months later Teddy is arrested again for possession and finds himself in prison for a seventh time.

On the other side of the drug war, DEA agent Johnny Sowell acknowledges that every time they arrest a drug dealer, a replacement springs up shortly thereafter. Still, he hopes that this latest round of arrests of low-level drug dealers, dubbed Operation Ice Storm, will lead to the source of the super-potent meth coming in from Mexico. Johnny busts as many low-level dealers as he can, for selling as little as a gram of meth. He pumps them for information until he finally catches a direct connection to the cartel in a dangerous high speed chase. The connection refuses to snitch. If he does, the connection’s entire family in Mexico will be killed. Another dead end in the drug war.

Teddy and Johnny have something in common besides their decaying town. They both keep doing the same things they have always done, in futile hope of a better result. Teddy keeps trying to turn his life around, but always goes back to drugs. Johnny keeps arresting people like Teddy to stop the flow of drugs, but he never gets any closer to the source. Like characters in a modern Greek tragedy, it is impossible for anybody in this community to avoid the cruelty of their own fate. The war on drugs rages on, regardless of the participants efforts to resist.

So what is to be done for communities ravaged by drugs like the one in Meth Storm and their urban counterparts? What is needed is compassion in the law for addicts and drug users, one that recognizes their humanity and decouples it from race or income level.

But what does this compassion look like in policy terms? To start, we must create avenues for drug users to course correct before they are trapped in the cycle of addiction and incarceration. For example, drug courts which emphasize treatment instead of just punishment have shown promising drops in rates of recidivism among drug users. Well maintained and funded pretrial diversion programs are also effective in preventing users from being rearrested.

We also need to reform how we treat drug users who find themselves incarcerated. A study from 2002 indicated that over half of all prisoners in the US met the criteria for a diagnosis of drug abuse or dependence, but only 15 to 20 percent of those who would benefit from treatment received it. Part of the reason is that the current criminal justice system focuses on punishment, rather than treating addiction as a disease. When prisons spend their resources in accordance with this assumption, the inevitable result is that many of the incarcerated do not get the help they need. Every addict who goes to prison should receive treatment for their addiction, otherwise it is only a matter of time before many will return.

Another reform that has been gaining traction is ending mandatory minimums that were a result of the tough-on-crime stances of the 1980s and 1990s. Although the end of the racially tinged 100:1 ratio in sentencing for crack cocaine versus cocaine was a welcome reform, this was a band-aid policy for a specific drug and not a permanent solution. The law still maintains a grossly unfair 18:1 sentencing ratio between crack cocaine and cocaine, and the vast majority of mandatory minimums have not been addressed. For example, the mandatory federal minimum sentence for distribution of five grams of methamphetamine is five years, even though that amount could be as little as a week’s supply to a heavy user.

In addition to ending mandatory minimums, we must go further to ensure that there is something worth returning home to after former dealers and users have served their sentences. We need to invest in job training for prisoners and provide opportunities for these returning individuals to work in their communities and become contributing members of society.

Another consideration is that sentences for using or selling even a small amount of drugs can last much longer than the period of incarceration or parole, because hiring managers discriminate against those with drug convictions. We must destigmatize non-violent drug convictions in hiring and allow rehabilitated drug offenders to have their slate wiped clean. Without these reforms, the reality is that in an area with no jobs like Faulkner County, Arkansas in Meth Storm, the only way the formerly incarcerated can make money is in the drug trade, which will further ingratiate themselves into the cycle of addition and incarceration.

So how do we obtain the political capital to get these policy outcomes in place? We need to humanize drug users and, yes, even low-level drug dealers. The first step is to encourage the positive trends of humanizing opioid users. For people of color whose communities have been criminalized for decades as a result of the war on drugs, it may be difficult for many to square the injustice of only granting compassion to wealthier and whiter opioid users. However, the reality is that many Americans continue to otherize drug users, by saying drug use is something that only poor whites, Latinos, or Black folks do.

In order to help build a broader coalition of support, we need the public to believe that addiction can affect their own family and friends, so any humanizing narratives about drug use and addiction are helpful. For example, when rockstar and drug addict Tom Petty died of an accidental overdose, there was an outpouring of support and much credit given to his family for making his cause of death public. However, when a poor addict like Teddy dies in rural Arkansas, its doubtful that there will be similarly affectionate support. It will just be another sad statistic in the war on drugs. With greater recognition that drug use is not attributable to someone’s characteristics of being poor or a racial minority, we can enact policies that will change the fates of people like Johnny and Teddy in Meth Storm.

Self-care as a privilege

I struggled to decide on a topic for my last blog of the White Working Class and Law semester.   I expressed my troubles to Professor Pruitt and she suggested this article as a possible place to start. The article is the story of the author’s trip to

the most stereotypical bastions of coastal liberal elitism, [to] ask the people... whether they still support Hillary Clinton.  An innocent abroad, I would leave Hamilton County, Indiana, a deep-red suburb north of Indianapolis that Trump won by nearly 20 points... Once on the decadent East Coast, I would luxuriate in its undiluted upscale liberal consensus at bookstores, wine bars, cafes and other Blue State institutions peopled by NPR tote-bagging sophisticates...in counties Hillary won by at least 60 percent or more of the vote.

The author interviewed people who voted for Hillary and discovered that almost all of them still support her (and still really hate Trump).   The author also observed that “Clinton Country” had almost nothing in common with “Trump Country”, and does not really care to change that.   There are many possible interesting topics Professor Pruitt had in mind when she suggested I use this article for my final blog post.   The thing that stood out to me in the article, though, was the privilege of the people the author talks about.   The author makes sure you cannot miss it.   He portrayed people in Hillary Country as being obsessed with SoulCycle, Kombucha, farm-to-table restaurants, and curating healthy energy and spirituality.   Arguably, the article is about the privilege of self-care.

Acknowledging that I may be stepping into over-generalizations of both groups, I started to think about what seems to be a current cultural obsession with self-care.  People on social media love to brag about what they are doing (and buying) to care for themselves (going to SoulCycle classes, downing glasses of Kombucha, eating only organic farm-to table food, and doing whatever it takes to maintain a positive energy??).  Apparently there are at least 1.4 million photos hashtagged #selfcare on Instagram. 

A study by the Pew Research Center found that “millennials” 

spend twice as much as boomers on self-care essentials such as workout regimens, diet plans, life coaching, therapy, and apps to improve their personal well-being.

Self-care is now a $10 billion industry.  The notion of self care has a long history in our nation - which may be tied to our ideas of individuality - but today, 

the irony of the grand online #selfcare-as-politics movement of 2016 is that it was powered by straight, affluent white women, who, although apparently feeling a new vulnerability in the wake of the election, are not traditionally the segment of American society in the greatest need of affirmation.

Perhaps those in greatest need of self-care are those for whom it seems the most unattainable and those who feel the most alienated by its commercialization. 

In reading the article about liberal coastal elites in Hillary Country, I noticed how differently they are portrayed than the white working class Trump Country we have spent so much time discussing.   I thought about the story of the young man in Virginia who had to beg on the street because, 

five days earlier, his mother had spent the last of her disability check on bologna, cheese, bread, and Pepsi. 

I thought about how so many of the white working class struggle just to afford health and dental care, and about the growing numbers of deaths of despair.   Unlike people in the regions hardest hit by the deaths of despair – deaths from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol related deaths – coastal liberal elites have the privilege to take (and afford) a mental health day to sit in a bubble bath and sip on a glass of wine.  On his the 72-hour journey through Hillary Country, the author observed that everyone he 

met seemed to be financially well off, a sign of just how much money is still sloshing into the pockets of Blue America.

All if this is not to say that self-care is unimportant and, there are many ways to care for oneself that cost little to nothing: 

drink water, eat something, work out, go outside, take a shower. 

Yet, at a minimum, any type of self care requires resources that are hard to come by due to the demands of the working class lifestyle: spare time and human capital. 

Perhaps self-care just looks different for those in the white working class, and they are criticized for it.   The mother of the young man in Virginia, mentioned above, does not work and receives disability for anxiety and depression. She imagines what people must say about her: 

Why couldn’t she work? Why did she buy soda and cigarettes when they needed food? How could she afford the Internet and cable TV bills on a $500 monthly disability check? She would sometimes consider how she would answer. She would say that cigarettes and soda make hard days a little easier. That television is just about her only connection to a world that hasn’t seemed to want her anymore.   

Whatever happened to, "Treat Yo' Self"?   Maybe what criticizers really mean is, "Treat Yo' Self and practice self-care, as long as its not on the government's dime! And don't expect us to feel sorry for you in the meantime."

Deaths of despair

In the last two decades the death rate has been rising dramatically among middle-aged white Americans without a college degree. Americans within this subgroup are dying much younger today than they were only a few decades ago. Rather than dying near the age of 80 of natural causes, white working-class Americans are dying prematurely between the age of 45 to 54. Furthermore the higher mortality rate of middle-aged white Americans is not being caused by heart disease, cancer, or diabetes but by an epidemic of slow death suicides through alcohol and substance abuse.

Health problems such as alcohol related liver disease, overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids are ravaging America’s white working-class communities. These premature deaths are reversing the nearly century long trend of increased life expectancy and low mortality rates of Americans whites. According to the New York Times, the mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education has increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. Most doctors believe that the only other time premature death rates spiked to such a degree was when the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit the United States.

Another puzzling element of this epidemic is that it is affecting white communities at a much higher degree than other racial groups. Hispanics have always had lower mortality rates than whites, but the same could not be said for African Americans. Traditionally African Americans had higher mortality rates and lower life expediencies than whites, however now that gap is closing. Now poorly educated whites have become the most vulnerable group in American society.

Many sociologists have attributed deaths of despair to reduced labor force participation by working class whites. Over the last two decades, thousands of American manufacturing and assembly operations have been outsourced to low cost countries and the remaining operations have incorporated artificial intelligence and robotics as part of the workforce. The evolution of American manufacturing and assembly processes over the last two decades has made many jobs that do not require a college degree obsolete. Thus, working class whites find themselves with far fewer employment opportunities today than they did in the past.

Joan C. Williams has linked the reduced labor force participation of working class whites to their sense of identity and community belonging, which stems from their social honor. According to Williams, social honor is the foundation upon which many white working class communities are built. Williams further explains that one’s social honor is linked closely to that person’s ability to provide for their family and contribute to their community. If we take social honor to play a critical role in these communities as Williams explains, then it should not be surprising that continuous unemployment or underemployment is the source of the great social dysfunction these communities are experiencing. 

Thus far the main solution presented to combat deaths of despair is to address the opioid crisis. However, if the fading of social honor is driving these deaths, then addressing the opioid crisis will not remedy the situation. Rather people will rely more heavily on alcohol and illicit drugs to escape their reality and ultimately commit suicide. Another popular solution presented to address the deaths of despair epidemic is to bring back lost manufacturing jobs. However, many of these jobs are in the process of becoming obsolete. The rise of robotics and artificial intelligence allows for the manufacturing process to be conducted with fewer human workers. Thus even if manufacturing operations return to working class communities, they will not be able to employ the same number of people they employed in the past. A possible solution may lie in adopting a European apprenticeship model to train people in working class communities for customized manufacturing operations. This model creates a high skilled work force, which can customize products to an end user’s exact specifications. The customized nature of these products would provide a greater value proposition to buyers; thus, the customized products could successfully compete with mass produced goods manufactured in automated factories.

Do you think American companies are willing to invest resources into working class communities to start European style apprenticeship models? Do you think this solution can lift white working-class families out of chronic unemployment and underemployment? And will the deaths of despair epidemic in these communities end if the economic outlook improves?

On depictions of working class and poor whites in the arts

I have had an occasional series called "Literary Ruralisms" over at Legal Ruralism for many years, and a depiction of "poor white trash" in a movie I watched last night made me think we need a similar feature here at Working Class Whites and the Law.  (We will spend two class periods near the semester on depictions of poor and working class whites in literature and film).  The film I saw this weekend was "Lean on Me," based loosely on the true story of Joe Clark, a maverick educator who became principal of East Paterson High School in New Jersey in the 1980s.  Clark is credited with turning the school around--from a 38% pass rate on state achievement tests to one competitive with the rest of the state. 

The film is definitely controversial and politically incorrect by today's standards--it was made in 1989 and so is nearly three decades old.  Among other things, Clark frequently uses the word "nigger" to refer to African American students, including when addressing them.  I kept thinking that the film would likely look much different if made today, even though it arguably depicts a true story and this is presumably how Clark dealt with other African Americans.

In a final assembly before the students are to take the state tests--after Clark has been working for months to reverse the trends at East Paterson--Clark (played brilliantly by Morgan Freeman, I might add!) says:

You are a bunch of niggers and spics and poor white trash.  

Then, referring specifically to the whites there, Clark says, addressing the African American and Latinx students:

They're just like the rest of you. They've got no place to go.

This is part and parcel of a pep talk aimed at getting the students to bristle at how others see them and to take pride in themselves.

That assembly is the first time I noticed white students present at the school at all (except in the opening scene in 1967, when it was a primarily white school) because all of the action between Clark and his students centers around African American and Latinx students.  But I thought it a good thing that the poor whites were acknowledged at this juncture, along with their presumptively dead end life prospects.  The rhetoric I hear today so often suggests that white-skin privilege is going to carry even low-income, low-education whites wherever they wish to go.  In reality, their prospects are often as poor as those of their Black, Latinx, and other minority counterparts.

I've been writing recently about the relative invisibility of white poverty and I've concluded that keeping poor and working class whites hidden and acting as if they share white privilege on par with more affluent whites may be psychologically soothing for affluent whites, but turning a blind eye to  the problems of that community does nothing to solve those problems.  Indeed, phenomena like deaths of despair suggest our general state of denial is only aggravating them.   

On the shortage of (white?) folks willing to do "lower-rung American jobs"

In my dozen years studying law and rural livelihoods and with my most recent focus on the white working class (whether rural or not), I have often stumbled onto this question:  Why is there a shortage of working class whites willing to do working class labor--or, more precisely, the sort of work long associated with the working class, whatever color?  Is there literally a shortage of working class whites?  Whites without skills to facilitate their engagement in the higher end labor market?  or have the folks we've traditionally thought of as the white working class simply decided they are no longer willing to do such work?  Have they had enough?  Opted out of the labor market altogether?  Gone soft?  We know their numbers are shrinking because they are dying from what we now call deaths of despair?  Read more here and here. 

Incidentally, there was an apparent link noted between work and these deaths--having a job was a protective factor, that is--when the media first began to report on this phenomenon, but I've heard nothing of it lately. Indeed, I've seen contrary suggestions--like the one here--that the work that working class folks do often leaves them in pain, which in turn leaves them addicted to opioids.  Further, this recent analysis from the New York Times refutes the notion that requiring people to work makes the healthier.  It was prompted by the Trump administration's recent announcement that it may impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. 

I come to this question as one raised in a white working-class family where work was everything--not just your livelihood, but your reputation.  Work was what kept families like mine from being condemned as "white trash."  It's what made us the "worthy poor "rather than the "unworthy poor" or--more precisely--the settled working class as opposed to the "hard living" working class.  (Read more about these distinctions here).  My family literally never took a vacation, and I recall my father working literally seven days a week.  He was a deeply, deeply flawed individual, but/and he was nothing if not industrious.  To this day, I am dogged by the work ethic with which I was raised.  This means, among other things, that I struggle with guilt when I engage in leisure activities.  It's also a big factor--but not the only one--underlying my drive to achieve.  Maybe I'm not really that ambitious; I just can't stop working.

With that background, I read Chico Harlan's fascinating--and to me, depressing--story in the Washington Post on New Year's Day:  "U.S. Companies See Opportunity in Exodus from Storm-Ravaged Puerto Rico."  There's lots in this story to preoccupy a ruralist like me, and I wrote a post about it over at Legal Ruralism.  But for purposes of thinking about the white working class, I want to use this story to start a conversation about the demise/fate/disappearance--not sure what word to use--of the white working class.  This is a question that I expect to be a recurring theme this semester in our White Working Class and the Law Seminar, so let's get it on the table early on. 

The story is about how a turkey processing plant in Huron, South Dakota, is recruiting folks from Puerto Rico to come work there because in this town of about 12,000, the employer struggles to recruit an adequate workforce to fill its 1000 jobs.  Take this sentence for starters:

By some counts, nearly 2,000 Puerto Ricans were leaving every day, and in that exodus, some mainland U.S. companies were starting to see an opportunity of their own — a new answer in their ever-evolving struggle to find workers who would perform lower-rung American jobs.  (emphasis added)

Huron was 87% white and about 10% Hispanic or Latino in the 2010 Census.   Based on the Washington Post story, I'm guessing the Latinx influx came in the 2000s, after Dakota Provisions, the industrial turkey processor, opened its doors there.

Working class whites--among others--used to perform "lower-rung American jobs," and they clearly still do to some extent.  But this is not the first mention I've read in the media and in scholarly papers suggesting that whites are no longer willing to do the sort of work they used to do.  (Lots of posts over at Legal Ruralism talk about this phenomenon, mostly in the context of agricultural labor shortages and the need for comprehensive immigration reform).  Because low-skilled whites--and by some accounts, also low-skilled blacks--are no longer willing to do distasteful, back-breaking work, there is a shortage of such labor.  (Here's a story suggesting that employers favor immigrant labor over both black and white workers).  This is one of the reasons we have become so reliant on immigrant labor, as this Washington Post story suggests.  Indeed, get a load of this paragraph about the character of the work force at the turkey processing plant in South Dakota :

Only a handful seemed to be local. The people hanging the birds were from Burma. Some of the people trimming the breasts were from Puerto Rico. Deeper in the factory, cutting skin, removing organs, there were people from Cuba and Guatemala and Vietnam. More than a dozen were from Chuuk, an island chain in Micronesia.

This is consistent with stories like this one, and with my own academic work about Latinx immigration into rural destinations in the South.  It also reminds me of a tour I took of a massive dairy farm back in 2011 in Idaho's "Magic Valley," a field trip sponsored by the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in Boise.  One of the siblings who owned the farm (the woman who gave us the tour) talked about the unreliability of local white labor, and she blatantly implored that she needed "my Mexicans," though she acknowledged that the occasional Burmese refugee did good work, too. 

Is it possible that white folks are turning up their noses and turning away from this sort of labor because the work is getting crappier?  Is it possible that working in a poultry processing facility that processes 19,000 turkeys a day (as the one in South Dakota does) is harder, more demeaning labor than working at predecessor facilities that butchered and processed poultry?  Or is it that the white working class isn't made of the same tough stock it used to be?  And if today's white working class has just gotten lazier or more picky about what it it up for, what it is willing to do for a buck, then I'd like to know what forces have begotten that transition?  Poorer labor protections and fewer benefits?  Failure of working class wages to keep up with inflation?  A culture of laziness that has spread from those small factions of low-income whites who have been historically known as "white trash" into the ranks of the previously settled, respectable white working class.  (By the way, J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy suggests something akin to this latter explanation).  

Finally, what is the relationship between this phenomenon of whites effectively opting out of the labor force and the "deaths of despair," which have afflicted middle-aged, poorly educated white  folks to a greater degree than other demographic slices?  

These are among the questions I hope we'll get a better handle on answering during our semester.   To that end, here are some more resources.

The Wall Street Journal in September 2017 published this op-ed titled, "Bring Back the Work Ethic."

The Washington Post in August 2017 published this piece titled, "Rise of the machines" on how automation is replacing workers. It includes this provocative paragraph:

The line was intended for 12 workers, but two were no-shows. One had just been jailed for drug possession and violating probation. Three other spots were empty because the company hadn’t found anybody to do the work. That left six people on the line jumping from spot to spot, snapping parts into place and building metal containers by hand, too busy to look up as the forklift now came to a stop beside them.

And don't miss Terrence McCoy's compelling series on disability and work, which appeared over the course of last year in the Washington Post.  Here's just one entry from it, headlined, "I am a hard worker."