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September 25 - October 16, 2019
where on-the-ground white Americans make tradeoffs that negatively affect their lives and livelihoods in support of larger prejudices or ideals. By design, vulnerable immigrant and minority populations suffered the consequences in the most dire and urgent ways. Yet the tradeoffs made by people like Trevor frequently and materially benefitted persons and corporations far higher up the socioeconomic food chain—whose agendas and capital gains depended on the invisible sacrifices of lower income whites.
The white body that refuses treatment rather than supporting a system that might benefit everyone then becomes a metaphor for, and parable of, the threatened decline of the larger nation.
In his seminal work on Reconstruction, historian W. E .B. Du Bois famously argued that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor whites a valuable social status derived from their classification as “not-black.” “Whiteness” thereby provided “compensation” for citizens otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism—while at the same time preventing working-class white Southerners from forming a common cause with working-class black populations in their shared suffering at the bottom of the social ladder.
When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness.
My dad never needed guns when we was growing up. An’ then he got worried about protection, security, you know, and terrorism and intruders. I have no idea why; maybe that’s what everyone was saying.” She, too, begins to cry. “So my ex and I… we took him out and taught him to shoot. I had no idea that he would ever… he called me in the middle of the night, told me it was all my fault. Did it right then. And why?
“And just wanted you to know that what she said is right. We don’t blame the gun. It’s never the gun—it’s the person. Besides, if they say it’s the gun’s fault—well, they might come take away our guns, too.”
Because of the ban and its downstream effects, researchers rarely study why a small number of gun owners chose to turn their guns on themselves while many others do not.
Resiliency is important because the vast majority of people who try suicide by means other than firearm survive their initial attempts. For instance, drug overdose, the most common method in suicide attempts in the United States, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.
Risk, as anthropologist Lochlann Jain puts it, is a form of American autobiography—inasmuch as it reveals a great deal about our relationships with cars, machines, and other objects and technologies.
According to evolutionary biology, these men responded in predictable ways—by smoking, fighting, drinking, pumping iron, driving too fast, or other modes of chest-beating that restored a sensation of order but also increased their blood pressures and shortened their collective life spans.
This logic suggests that men need to be on top because they embody no skills for acting otherwise; and everyone else, to paraphrase an important book about women-of-color feminism, are born with bridges called their backs.
As it turns out, usage of the term privileges fell considerably since its heyday in the early 1800s, a time when most English-speaking people had little trouble separating the rich and powerful from everyone else.
“If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie,” he famously proclaimed, “then it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.”
Projecting such profound gender and racial meanings onto objects might then render men subject to the maneuvers of marketers, sellers, lobbyists, politicians, and other manipulators of common sense. Of course, guns are also incredibly dangerous, but the danger they pose to people who own and carry them and to their families becomes harder to acknowledge or recognize when these objects of potential self-destruction carry such weighted connotations.
Gun logic required imagining danger around every corner; losing the Man Card needed to remain a constant threat.
Expanded health care enabled well-being for highly practical, seemingly nonideological reasons: health care allowed more people to go to doctors and to do so before they became gravely ill, thus saving money and improving quality of life. This line of reasoning is often attributed to ivory-tower health economists who study the benefits of particular health policies through frameworks of economics or public health. In the African American groups, we
Researchers estimate that over 60 percent of people who file for bankruptcy in the United States do so because they are unable to pay for medical costs due to a lack of health insurance or so-called underinsurance (insurance not sufficient to cover the costs of a major health incident).
Similarly, a 2013 insurance study found that over 35 million US adults had unpaid medical bills in collections, 17 million suffered lowered credit ratings due to high medical bills, and 15 million used up all of their savings to pay medical bills.
To a large extent, factors such as where we live, the state of our environment, genetics, our income and education level, and our relationships with friends and family all have considerable impacts on health… the context of people’s lives determine their health, and so blaming individuals for having poor health or crediting them for good health is inappropriate.
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today.”
Research has repeatedly demonstrated that socially diverse groups are more innovative than homogeneous groups and that diversity encourages people to become more creative, diligent, and hardworking.
On stepping down from the US presidency in 1809, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to his republican supporters that a primary lesson he learned as head of state was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” Somewhere along the road from then to now, a politics that spreads guns, blocks health care, and defunds schools seems to have forgotten Jefferson’s basic principle. Behind these agendas are core assumptions that the happiness of a select few persons takes precedence over the care of a great many others.
From a practical standpoint, these beliefs rarely hold up to scrutiny. Not a single high-profile mass shooting in 2018 had to that point been carried out using an illegally obtained weapon. As is often the case in mass shootings, the guns were legally obtained—this is in part what makes them so hard to prevent.
