Old White Men Lead the Suicide Statistics in US “Deaths of Despair”: So Are They Privileged?

I admit to being late reading Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019), but it deserves its praise and popularity. As I expected it gives copious, well-selected examples of the illogical derangement of the Left on these issues, but Murray ties them together with carefully reasoned argument. As a result the book avoids the breathless rush that journalists often adopt when writing on current affairs, reflecting both Murray’s educational background and the fact that he has written several books before, including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017).

You should read The Madness of Crowds, although you’ll need to be in an up mood, because it is depressing stuff. In this post I want to focus on a quotation Murray gives in the book’s conclusion. He quotes Mark Lilla (p. 240), a writer and Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, New York City, who was a guest on a panel at Rutgers University in 2016. In pointing out the contradictions and impossible demands made by proponents of identity politics, Lilla said, “You cannot tell people simultaneously ‘You must understand me’ and ‘You cannot understand me’.”

This nicely sums up an important thrust of the Black Live Matter movement and race identity politics as a whole: as a white person you cannot understand the lived experience of being a black person, therefore you cannot pass judgement, and in fact you can have nothing to say about how black people act and how they think. The privilege you gain from being white means you live an entirely different kind of life, which effectively bars you from the discourse about black people, their issues and their aspirations.

This argument has interesting implications if we apply the moral mirror here. Because if being white means living such a different life that understanding a black person’s life is impossible, then it follows that being black means it is impossible to understand a white person’s life. If the abyss based on skin colour is that great, and the lived experience so different, then it is inarguable that black people cannot understand white people.

So, the same conclusions follow: as a black person you cannot understand the lived experience of being a white person, therefore you cannot pass judgement and in fact you can have nothing to say about how white people act and how they think. The lack of privilege you have from being black means you live an entirely different kind of life, which effectively bars you from the discourse about white people, their issues and their aspirations.

Let’s be clear. There is no doubt about this: if it is impossible for white people to understand black people, then it is impossible for black people to understand white people. But this is not something anybody likes to admit, or even think about, or if they do they are too scared to say it out loud.

The obvious black person’s response is to say, “Oh that’s just wrong. I know about white people. I know about their lives, their money, their education, their opportunities, their incarceration rates. I know about all that, and there are statistics to back me up.” But we are talking here about the lived experience of being black and the lived experience of being white: what it’s like, on the inside, where it counts. That’s the point of difference. Let’s face it, white people can observe and cite statistics.

So how can we get some measure of lived experience that isn’t blinkered by one’s skin colour (assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is true). What better indicator could there be than suicide rates: these give a clear indication of quality of life and whether a person thinks their life is worth living.

And the statistics are overwhelming. The group most condemned for their privilege and ignorance are older white men, and they are the very group that feature most prominently in the “deaths of despair”, as researchers call them. According to Wikipedia, suicide is a national public health issue in the US, with the rate increasing by 24% between 1999 and 2014, and those most likely to commit suicide are older white males. In the US, the National Violent Death Reporting System records that men over 65 are the most likely to die of suicides, closely followed by men aged 40–64.  The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reported in 2016 that white middle-aged men account for 70% of suicides.

If you are someone who likes graphs, here are two from the same Wikipedia item.

Notice the green “non-Hispanic white” line on the graph, the highest and most steeply climbing, and compare it to the purple line for black people, the lowest on the graph. If old white men feature so highly in deaths of despair, what does that tell you about their white “privilege”, about their lived experience as a white person, a white man, living in the US? It tells you that their lives are so unbearable that they are killing themselves in record and rapidly increasing numbers. Meanwhile, they are blamed for pretty much everything. Is this what Black Live Matter proponents  aspire to so fervently that they loot and burn down buildings? Suicidal despair?

But there is another aspect of the “You don’t understand black people’s lives”. When calls to defund the police were first heard during the recent Black Lives Matter protests, the obvious question was asked: “What happens if you are out at night and you find yourself in danger of being raped?” (This was a woman reporter asking a woman protestor.) The response was that this is the lived experience of black people, so it would simply mean that white people share the same experience.

Think about it. This means we’re not going to aim to improve society, reform the police force, help people, protect them from harm. We are going to make sure everyone suffers the same levels of harm allegedly experienced by the most disadvantaged people in the population.  The overall social aim is for everyone to live in constant terror of being robbed, raped and killed, even though this is not the experience of the majority of black people in the US.

And is this just a temporary situation, so that black people can enjoy some measure of historical retribution and white people can learn their lesson, after which we head towards some sort of more-enlightened equality in a utopian society? Or is the whole of the US supposed to exist as some extended, long-term version of CHAZ? What’s the plan?

There are good examples of countries where racist laws have been enacted to achieve a measure of retribution against the privileged white and powerful stratum of society and to redistribute wealth to the oppressed black population: Zimbabwe and (latterly) South Africa spring to mind. Zimbabwe has seen long-term human rights violations, forced land confiscations and economic disaster stemming from its raced-based legislation, along with widespread social prejudice and attacks against white people. Once the “breadbasket of Africa”, Zimbabwe is now an economically crippled net importer of food. If the aim was to make everyone suffer, that’s working out quite well.

Intersectionist theories have to be discussed and challenged. Claims about white privilege and systemic racism have to be discussed and challenged. Apologising merely justifies and inflames the Black Lives Matter movement, validating their actions and spurring further action. There doesn’t seem to be any possibility of forgiveness in the rhetoric – an issue Douglas Murray spends some time discussing: what does it take to be redeemed? When is it time to stop shouting and abusing and to show mercy? No time soon, I fear.

Harry Wiren