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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Original Underclass (The Despair of Poor White Americans)
Source: The Atlantic, by Alec MacGillis
Co-published in ProPublica, titled:
White Trash The Original Underclass
Waste people. Rubbish. Clay-eaters. Hillbillies. Two new books that reckon with the long, bleak history of the countrys white poor suggest their plight shouldnt have caught the rest of the country off guard.
That flattering glow has faded away. Today, less privileged white Americans are considered to be in crisis, and the language of sociologists and pathologists predominates. Charles Murrays Coming Apart: The State of White America, 19602010 was published in 2012, and Robert D. Putnams Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis came out last year. From opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they made the case that social breakdown among low-income whites was starting to mimic trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans: Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness were rising sharply. Then came the stories about a surge in opiate addiction among white Americans, alongside shocking reports of rising mortality rates (including by suicide) among middle-aged whites. And then, of course, came the 2016 presidential campaign. The question was suddenly no longer why Democrats struggled to appeal to regular Americans. It was why so many regular Americans were drawn to a man like Donald Trump.
Read it all at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)malaise
(269,057 posts)and it is not just in America either. Add to that the non-stop propaganda that government is evil. Most who are surviving if barely are beneficiaries of the said government. Let me be clear - there are politicians who mean no one any good.
MrScorpio
(73,631 posts)Poor whites should being hearing them say that government should be weaker, less effective and less responsive to their own needs.
But they've been tricked into thinking that this is a good thing.
japple
(9,833 posts)It sounds fascinating. Thanks yallerdawg for posting this.
lindysalsagal
(20,692 posts)The solutions always seem daunting, but without hope, people are forced to go where they'd rather not.
Germany in the 30's. Chronic, unrelenting desperation is easy to ignore when it's not your own life. Thus, the human condition.
We are inherantly a selfish species. But if we ignore those in trouble, their trouble will reach everyone, eventually, one way, or another.
loyalsister
(13,390 posts)There is nothing new about desperation among white people. What is new (or actually a retread of Birth of a Nation) is that more are falling for a deliberate effort to bring out and glorify hate that already exists. Is it a coincidence that people long for the pre-civil rights days when taxes were high and government aid was common, but limited to white people?