Suicides are up this year, but why?

Every agency has its own yardstick, and therefore comes up with a different statistic. The World Bank, for example, defines "extreme poverty" as living on less than $1.25 per day. I don't think there's any argument about the fairness of that definition in any country.

The only asterisk is for places where people practice subsistence farming. (Toffler calls these people "prosumers," i.e., they produce for their own consumption rather than for a market economy, and therefore neither their production nor consumption is counted in their country's GDP. He points out that the Electronic Era has made us all prosumers to a certain extent, as we put together our own illustrations with photoshop, do our own tax returns with Quicken, and mix our own exercise music with iTunes.) These people may (or may not, depending on their tools and other resources) have the basic necessities of life, so that dollar may be spent on things that poor people in the West would consider luxuries.

Wealthy democratic countries exhibit a similar phenomenon. A destitute family may live like royalty compared to their counterparts in Bangladesh, with formal government assistance like Food Stamps and homeless shelters, and informal private assistance like handouts. (E.g., the "street people" in Washington DC, where government employees hand out alms at every subway station to assuage their consciences, have wheelie suitcases instead of shopping carts, and come winter they all seem to have brand-new down jackets and sleeping bags.)

To be scrupulous, we'd have to count those donations as part of their income, which means of course that we'd then have to subtract the taxes that pay for them from our own income, as well as the alms we hand out at our own subway station. The practical difficulty of doing this means that it's rarely done. Just as your share and my share of the value of America's transportation, education, medical, safety, justice, etc., infrastructure is never included when calculating our personal wealth.

 

It's well-known that Afro-American men as a demographic group are the angriest, most depressed Americans. The racist aspect of our drug laws and their enforcement plays a major part in this.

Every study shows that the rate of drug use among Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans is virtually identical. Yet an Afro-American drug user, particularly a male, is twice as likely to be arrested as a Euro-American. Once arrested he is twice as likely to be prosecuted, and once prosecuted he is twice as likely to be incarcerated. The result is that Afro-American men are incarcerated for drugs at eight times the rate of the rest of us. Indeed the majority of the U.S. prison population is, arguably, Afro-American men convicted of drug use (or related activities, see below), even though Afro-Americans make up only about one eighth of the population.

Once they're released (if they live that long) they have two great impediments to reintegrating into the mainstream. The obvious one is that they are convicted felons. Few jobs are available to them. Out of desperation many become drug dealers; Euro-Americans know exactly which neighborhoods to drive to to make a score. Although drug dealing used to be a lucrative career, as any occupation with such a high risk should be, today (at least here in Washington) there is so much competition for the market that the average drug dealer barely makes minimum wage--and that's the best job most of them qualify for.

The other impediment is AIDS. It's rampant in American prisons (and other countries too) for reasons that are too icky to go into here. A huge percentage of men released from prison have HIV or full-blown AIDS.

Taken together, these two problems automatically lead to a third: No woman will marry them. Family is one of the strongest forces for leading a man into a decent life, and these men have no hope of forming or joining a family. Women may date them and have sex and bear their children, but they don't want them around the house influencing those children.

Afro-American women complain that there are so few decent "black" men in their community that it's become a crisis. The Washington Post ran a series of articles on this "problem" a few years ago. Of course if you reversed the colors and published a series saying that Euro-American women in a community can't find any decent "white" men to marry, the hate mail would overflow the newspaper's mailbox. Why are these women only interested in men from their own ethnic group?

White women do in fact marry black men at a steady rate, and black women call those men "traitors." White men are just as interested in black women (two generations after the civil rights battle most of us are fairly color-blind), but it's damn hard to get a date with one of them.

So you've got a community in which a sizeable percentage of the men have prison records (for doing things we white people get away with -- well all of them except me

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), can't get decent jobs, have no families, and can't even develop a strong, stable relationship with a woman who lives in the community.

Now ask again why their suicide rate is so high. When you get the answer, write to our asshole president and demand that he make good on his pre-campaign promises to soften this country's insane drug laws. The laws that are out of step with virtually the entire rest of the Western world. The laws that have turned Mexico into a war zone. The laws that make life miserable for his people.

 

Yes. But he has chosen to identify himself as an Afro-American and a member of the Afro-American community.

This was not something that happened casually or accidentally, it required a conscious decision. He was born in a state in which attitudes about ethnicity are considerably different from the rest of the country. A sizable segment of the population are of East Asian or Pacific Island ancestry and culture, and often look down on us "haoles." His African father was not present in the family home in Hawaii; he was raised by his Euro-American mother.

He doesn't speak AAVE (African-American Vernacular English or "ebonics") because he didn't live where it was spoken. He has no telltale vestiges of ethnic culture because it was not taught to him. In Chicago (or any major American metropolis outside of the South), if he had made different grooming choices and had continued to live in the mainstream Euro-American community, he would have been accepted unremarkably as just one more American with an interesting mix of ancestry. Here in Washington or back home in Los Angeles nobody would have cared where his forefathers came from. In both cities there are people with much more exotic backgrounds.

He made a deliberate, conscious choice to matriculate into the Afro-American community. Cynics say it was because in that small pond he could be a big fish. To be sure, the question is unavoidable: with his accomplishments, could he ever have run for President if he were just one more "white" man?

He chose to identify the Afro-American community as "his people." I'm merely acknowledging that.

 

Okay, I have to ask. How well do you think he would have been received or taken seriously if he had identified himself as white?

 

It is bizarre. The man is black. To claim that he chose to identify himself as an African American... American society would have identified him as African American.

What box does Fraggle think Obama should tick when determining his race? White? Since, you know, made the specific choice to identify himself as African American? Imagine the looks at the DMV if he had ticked white?

The more interesting comment from his post, however, is this:

I would be curious as to know what he means by "different grooming choices"? Does he mean the people he associated with in Chicago? Choice of spouse? How he dressed and styled his hair? How well would the "Euro-American community" in Chicago have received him if he demanded they accepted him as being "white" or identified them as being "his people"?

 

*Ahem*

Aside from the 'is he black or white' question which may or may not have people with razor blades poised and ready unless that answer is forthcoming, I think Fraggle was commenting on Obama harming "his people" (I assume he meant African Americans) with the current drug laws and 'war on drugs'..