Taking Out the White Trash?
Taking Out the White Trash?
William Walter Kay
A Panther Growls
“During the year 1969 in New York City alone there were over 900 deaths resulting from drug addiction… the overwhelming majority were Black and Puerto Rican.” (1)
So begins Michael Cetewayo Tabor’s Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide (1970). Tabor dates the heroin plague’s arrival in Black New York to the 1950s while stressing official concern rose only after the plague spread to White neighborhoods. This delay “provides a clue to the understanding of the plague.”
Tabor espies rulers brainwashing subjects into suffering peacefully. Charity spectacles throw the oppressed off-balance. While charity-funded rehabs deny racism has any connection to addiction among Blacks, Tabor links addiction to the heinous, sadistic, deliberate, systematic dehumanizing of Blacks. Internalized racism makes Blacks believe they’re inferior, which causes self-destructive self-hatred. Oppressors encourage “any activity which is self-destructive.”
“The escapist complex is self-destructive.”
Heroin offers the greatest escape.
“The plague, poisonous, lethal, white powdery substance, sold by depraved, money-crazed beasts to Black youths who are desperately seeking a kick, a high, a means, anything that will help to make them oblivious to the squalor, to the abject poverty, disease and degradation that engulfs them in their daily existence.”
“Cloud 9 Society” residents remain unconscious of ugly realities while in heroin’s trance. Delusionary sanctuaries quickly take-off, however, ditching them in alleys in filthy rags and worn-out shoes.
As addicts build immunity to heroin, they must up their dosage. This requires more money. They spiral down chasms of degradation where:
“…always there and ever willing, for a price of course, to meet the addict’s demand for dope is the cop-man, the dealer, purveyor of poison, distributor of death, merciless, murdering scum of the planet, vile capitalists, salesman of death on the installment plan, the dope pusher, the plague-man.”
Legit businesses partake in New York’s heroin trade. Mafia masters of this trade reinvest profits into legit businesses. Milieus fuse.
The Mafia delegated street-trafficking to former Batista policemen. Blacks also became kingpins; even importers via the French Connection. Enormous profits override fears of long jail sentences. Black youths vent frustration through gang culture – another form of escapism.
Heroin trafficking cannot exist without police complicity. Cops take bribes, sell confiscated dope, and give snitch-dealers immunity. Because heroin’s victims are Black, cops don’t seriously disrupt trafficking. Cops only investigate crimes against the rich. Drug crackdowns camouflage the build-up of ghetto police battalions, and the framing of Black revolutionaries.
The rich, their cops and politicians, love watching Black youths nodding-off on the corner.
“As long as our young Black brothers and sisters are chasing the bag… rule of our oppressors is secure.”
“Dope is a form of genocide in which the victim pays to be killed.”
“We the people, must stamp out the plague and we will.”
Professor Deaton
Tabor, a Black Panther, deploys “Black” several times per page. He’s convinced heroin targets Blacks.
Times change.
For one thing, our opioid scourge is far deadlier than its 1960s prequal. In Tabor’s New York annual overdose fatality rates were 75 per million. Today, West Virginia’s rate is 909 per million! (2)
For another thing, like most states with sky-high overdose tolls, West Virginia is White. This peculiarity hasn’t escaped elite academics.
Nobel-winning economist, Sir Angus Deaton, attained his PhD from Cambridge and is now Senior Scholar, and Professor Emeritus, at Princeton. Testifying before Congress in 2017, Deaton read aloud his Economic Aspects of the Opioid Crisis; a paper that groups opioid overdoses together with other “deaths of despair” (suicide and alcoholic liver disease). (3) Collectively, these causes of death yield “unprecedented… stunning” body counts in America. (Deaton notes Canada displays similar “warning signs.”) Corpses are disproportionately White. Deaton deploys “White” twice per page.
Big Pharma’s profligate sowing of opioids yielded a world where: “the US, with 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 80 percent of the world’s opioids.”
Addiction rates are “devastating” because: “once patients are addicted treatment is difficult and often unsuccessful.”
Opioid addicts are typically underemployed rural Whites.
“We tend to regard all these deaths of despair as suicides in one form or another, and we believe that suicides… come with prolonged economic distress.”
Deaton concludes:
“We do not know why it is that African-Americans and Hispanics are protected from these outcomes nor why we do not see these events in Europe.”
Mitigating factors include “more generous social safety nets” and “tighter control of opioids.”
Professor Snyder
After receiving his PhD (History) from Oxford, Timothy Snyder lectured at Yale and Stanford. Snyder has published 15 books and received 20 awards. He’s a Council on Foreign Relations member.
Snyder’s Road to Unfreedom sneaks-in a brief dissertation on the “zombification” resulting from America’s “semi-legalization and popularization” of opioids. Here’s an abridgement:
“As Warren Buffett put it: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Americans die in this war every day, in large numbers…
American citizens in the 1990s, already the test subjects in a grand experiment in inequality, were simultaneously exposed to an uncontrolled release of manufactured opioids…
In 1998 the first pills mills began to emerge in Portsmouth, Ohio; these were purported medical facilities where physicians were paid to prescribe OxyContin… People in Portsmouth with unwashed hair and gray faces could be seen tearing metal objects from one another’s houses (and) selling them for pills….opioids served as currency.
The opioid plague was not widely discussed during its first two decades, and so grew national. About half of the unemployed men in the United States have been prescribed pain medication. In the year 2015, some 95 million Americans took prescription painkillers. For middle-aged white men, deaths from opioid abuse, along with other deaths of despair, cancelled out gains in treatment of cancer and heart disease. Beginning in 1999, mortality among middle-aged white males in the United States began to increase.” (4)
The opioid assault’s epicentre is ‘Greater Appalachia’ (extending north into Maine and south into Louisiana). All 4 worst hit states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana) lay within this region, as do Ohio, Maine, Indiana and Pennsylvania – each a Top 10 most impacted state. (5) This region wasn’t historically an opioid hot-bed. By 2012 one in nine Ohioans were prescribed opioids! (6)
Appalachia has weathered centuries of economic warfare, land clearance and depopulation stratagems hatched by coastal cabals. Appalachian towns, where pill mill seeding began in 1996, are overwhelmingly White. Main streets now stage apocalyptic spectacles of dollar stores, loan shops, massage parlours and video-gambling bars.
Revisiting Tabor’s “clue to the understanding of the plague” – only after the opioid wave swept beyond Appalachia was crisis declared.
Professor Isenberg
Professor Nancy Isenberg teaches history at Louisiana State. She’s received 10 awards; published 6 books. Her White Trash chronicles America’s tradition of denigrating poor Whites. Southern rural landowners have long thwarted their White tenants’ efforts to acquire land, savings or education; whilst disparaging them as whores and tramps. Across America disinherited rural Whites are reviled as hillbillies, rednecks and crackers.
1950s films like Wild River, A Face in the Crowd, and Poor White Trash exemplified a genre but none as effectively as To Kill a Mockingbird (Obama’s fav). To Kill a Mockingbird relays horrible stereotypes of poor rural Whites. Author Harper Lee depicted the villainous Ewells as hopeless:
“No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” (7)
1960s sitcoms like Gomer Pyle and Beverly Hillbillies furthered “White moron” propaganda as did pulp fiction novels like: Cracker Girl, Trailer Tramp, and Trailer Park Girls. (Appalachians accounted for half of US trailer sales.) The 1970 novel Deliverance is a graphic throwback to the worst eugenics disinformation. Author James Dickey hailed from southern aristocracy. Such hate propaganda abounds today.
Isenberg concludes White Trash by situating second-class Whites into the prevailing economic system:
“Job opportunities for all – the myth of full employment – is just that, a myth. The economy cannot provide employment for everyone, a fact that is little acknowledged… America’s reserve army of the poor are drummed into the worst jobs, the worst-paid jobs, and provide the labor force that… cleans toilets and barn stalls, picks and plucks in fields as migrant laborers, slaughters animals… the bottom layer of the labor pool on which society’s wealth rests.” (8)
Post-2015
These three scholars relied on 2015ish data. Post-2015 poor Whites’ plight deteriorated across America, more so in Canada.
On the dope front: America’s annual drug overdose fatalities hit 111,000 in 2022. (9) The number of Americans injecting drugs increased from 774,000 in 2011 to 3.8 million in 2018. (10) The salient demographic is “White men aged 18-39.” (11)
In 2016 Obama signed both the 21st Century Cures Act and the Ensuring Patient Access Act. The former shunted $1 billion toward narcotic paraphernalia giveaways, and related Harm Reduction social re-engineering. The latter facilitated diversions of pharmaceutical opioids to criminal traffickers. Whistle-blower Joe Rannazzisi (head of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control) told CBS:
“If I was gonna write a book about how to harm the United States with pharmaceuticals, the only thing I could think of that would immediately harm is to take the authority away from the investigative agency that is trying to enforce the Controlled Substances Act…And that's what this bill did.” (12)
Since the signing of these decrees illicit drug overdoses have killed 500,000 White laborers in the primes of their lives. Obama never did care much for crackers.
On the labor front: post-2015 America welcomed 20 million job-seekers. The laboring jobs “White trash” used to do are taken by recent, often undocumented, migrants; thereby relegating millions of American-born laborers to “useless eater” status.
Post-2015 Canada’s population grew from 35 to 41 million, entirely due to immigration. Canada’s employed labour force is 30% foreign-born. Transformative immigration appears alongside euthanasia programs not seen since Hitler and opioid dispersals not seen since Chang Kai-shek.
The EU, pop 447 million, loses around 4,500 annually to opioid overdoses. (13)
Canada, pop 41 million, loses around 8,000 annually to opioid overdoses. (14)
Flaws in the ‘Taking out the White Trash’ thesis
Replacement Theory is comic-book dystopia. For the foreseeable future the USA and Canada will remain White-dominated. Moreover, immigration and drug policies, calamitous as they are for lower working class Whites, are conceived and implemented by upper and middle class Whites who benefit from these policies. We are witnessing an old-school, flood-the-labour-market, low-wage strategy coupled with a new-school culling of the surplus labor herd. It’s more about class than race.
Also, whereas White casualties were starkly over-represented in this preemptive pharmacological counterinsurgency’s 1995-2020 phase, other ethnicities, notably Blacks, now perish at equal rates. (15) The overdose death toll among Baltimore City Blacks surpasses Tabor’s worst nightmare.
Finally, the opioid scourge, from inception, impacted Aboriginals as severely as Whites.
Class Uber Alles
Neoliberalism means unrestricted flows of goods, money and labor. Neoliberalism means privatization and austerity. Neoliberalism means a swelling social abscess of citizens who will never find employment.
Neoliberals cannot tolerate the permanently unemployed living to their nineties courtesy welfare and medicare; nor can they abide unwashed mobs surviving via theft and squatting. Neoliberalism presupposes campaigns to increase unemployable mortality. Here layeth the wellspring of Harm Reduction.
Footnotes
1. Tabor, Michael Cetewayo. Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide; 1969, Marxist History Archive, 2006. All quotes in this subsection are from this paper.
2. KFF Mental Health in West Virginia – Substance Abuse and Death
3. Deaton, Angus. Economic Aspects of the Opioid Crisis; 2017. All quotes in this sub-section are form this paper.
4. Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, Penguin Random House, New York, 2019 p. 263-5.
5. American Addiction Centers - Top Ten Overdose States
6. Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, Bloomsbury, New York, 2015, p. 327.
7. Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash. The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, Penguin Random House, New York, 2017, p. 21-2.
8. Ibid, 315.
9. Hoffman, Jan. Overdose Deaths dropped in US in 2023, New York Times, May 15, 2024.
10. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Routes of Drug Use among Drug Overdose Deaths US, 2020-2022, February 15, 2023
11. Oxford Academic, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Bradley, Heather et al, Estimated number of people who inject drugs in the United States, January 2023.
12. Whitaker, Bill. Ex-DEA Agent Opioid Crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress, CBS June 17, 2018
13. European Drug Report 2023 Drug-induced Deaths
14. Fischer, Benedikt. The Continuing Opioid Death Crisis in Canada, Lancet, February 3, 2023.
15. Pew Research Center. Recent Surge in US Drug Overdose Deaths has Hit Black Men the Hardest; January 19, 2022.