First, it will take more generations to overcome the grief caused by enslavement, and outside of the historically unaware, emotionally reactionary or empathically deprived, none can really argue with that centuries-long catastrophe and its lingering incapacitating and institutionalized manifestations…the latest of which can be seen with a President who is stoking the fires of racism to strength his base.
In Canada, the end terminus for the Underground Railway, we are trying to undo our own legacy of racism in relation to our Indigenous peoples.
Our many apologies aside, while there has been much done to rectify the inequities, there is still more work to do on both sides.
And as it is with America, the grief over slavery, with its associative manifestations of anger, our reconciliation with our Indigenous people will understandably take more generations to undo the damage and move toward mourning.
However, there’s been nothing fragile about most of our most recent efforts.
Did they take time…of course.
Where old beliefs tackled and dissected frustratingly long past their due date?
Agonizingly so.
Nonetheless, I think you’re making a huge leap: Depression and suicidal ideation (and completion) linked to survivor’s guilt over ‘white privilege’?
First, there’s the gender issue: In the US the suicide rate is four times higher amongst males but, unfamothably tragic in the 10–14 age range, only 1.5 times higher in males.
Lamentably, it is much the same in Canada. There should be some kind of non-sexist medical enquiry, with its associative costs, on both sides of the border, to find out why boys and men are killing themselves and often other first…and then curtail the carnage.
White males accounted for 69.67% of suicide deaths in 2017.’ while 6% are ‘Black’ males.
However, the suicide rate amongst black teenagers has seen the largest spike since 2002 in some cases due to the availability of guns (boys) and of rope and hanging (girls).
Also, according to a recent U of Toledo study: “suicide is the second leading cause of death after homicide for African Americans between the ages of 13 and 19”:
see https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/uot-sra062119.php
Also, the Washington Post reported that “suicide rate for black children twice that of white children:
Still, accidents like car crashes, then suicide followed by homicide are the one-two-three leading causes of adolescent death both in Canada and the US.
What does the U of Toledo study do to your claim of ‘Black’ resilience?
Second, another gender issue — the opiate epidemic:
In the US, as of 2017 : 68% of the deaths were male while 32% were female.
In Canada, 75% of the overdose deaths were male while 25% were female, with nearly 94% deemed accidental.
As a side note, 98% of workplace deaths and injuries — which may of course necessitate pain medications — were also male. And almost all Canadians have access to medical treatment and therefore prescriptive care.
As a side note, I would suggest that if the statistics were reversed, that if it were more women than men dying or suffering, accusations of misogyny would be aimed at every level of Government and action demanded and virtuously bestowed.
But back to opiate deaths: according to the Kaiser Institute, as of 2017, in the US: 78% of the opiate deaths were ‘White’ while ‘12%’ were ‘Black’.
And we know exactly where to place most of the blame: Johnson and Johnson (Billions to be paid according to the recent Oklahoma court order) while Purdue Pharmaceuticals ( has offered Billions with the Slacker family promising to relinquish control).
And that’s not even getting into the GP’s who were turned into easily duped if not complicit drug dealers. And of course, as you suggest, ‘White’ people are more likely to have a GP and able at first to afford the highly addictive prescription.
As well, The Economist had this to say about ‘White’ male suicides:
The researchers argue that one factor behind their results may be that poor whites have fallen in status in relative terms, so that they are doing worse or no better than their parents while poor minorities have still seen some progress even if they remain disadvantaged. “The combination of fear of downward mobility, weak safety nets, and eroding social cohesion likely contributes to the high levels of desperation,”
See: https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/06/15/americas-rising-suicide-rate
Of course, if we really want to end the war on drugs and bring down the suicide rates, we have to improve reality for all genders and all races, especially with the digital world so accessible to those who would make others as miserable as themselves with the simple press of a button.
And to state the obvious: we need to take better care of our men if not for compassionate then for economic reasons:
After all, suicides costs the US economy $69 billion a year!
See: https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
Some other possible causes other than ‘White’ privilege for Depression, and solutions to decrease anxiety:
One of my Psychology Profs said that ‘Depression is anger and frustration turned inward.’ Anxiety is of course inferred as anger is a manifestation of fear.
So, if you want to ameliorate anxiety then keep our children away from their cell phones and computer screens for as long as possible! Nothing on the screen can neither replace the reality of human touch nor replicate having the experience of overcoming obstacles with others to strengthen the self.
And contrary to what one might believe, the digital world actually isolates many children.
Another way to help with anxiety is to increase levels of vitamin D.
There’s a plethora of scientific evidence which points to a lack of vitamin D in many many people’s diets and exposure to the sun (some stats say as many as 60% of US population is Vitamin D deficient)…absorption is dependent on the amount of melanin in one’s skin and the amount of exposure needed.
IOW, a darker skinned person needs more time in the sun whereas a lighter skinned person doesn’t. Hello to those darker skinned people living in North America during the winter.
As well, the lack of vitamin D has significant if not long lasting effects on the neurological networks for the release of serotonin, endorphins and even oxytocin…and it’s dramatically important at the prenatal as well as adolescent stages of development too.
(See David Suzuki The Nature of Things: https://www.tv-eh.com › 2015/10/21 › the-nature-of-things-explores-the-c…
So, a lack of vitamin D can lead to Depression and what do we prescribe? SSRI’s or anti-depressants, which can have a slew of often deadly side effects for some. Sandy Hook’s shooter Adam Lanza may come to mind.
Even worse, where do most people work today?
Inside and under fluorescent lights. As well, how many well-intentioned parents have slathered on the chemically laced sunscreen, thinking they were helping their children?
Of course sun within moderation but get that vitamin D.
Look at what great strides the Japanese have done with their students’ overall health and performance with shinrin-yoku or ‘forest bathing’.
All races need to get outside!
Gut Flora:
What about the recent work on the distasteful but effective fecal transplant therapy to increase overall gut flora to positively affect mental health?
And it may not just work for paranoid schizophrenics and c-difficile patients.
In England, there are current trials underway to see if fecal transplant therapy can help to cure melanoma! See: London cancer researchers make number 2 their number 1 …
Good food and access to good medical care should be available to all: except for those living below the poverty line.
So anxiety is not just about being ‘White’ or “Black’ but rather more about being rich or poor.
So, back to your point about resilience.
According to the Kaiser Institute: 18.4 percent of Americans under age 18 live in poverty, while some put it as high as 20.5%.
And since ‘Black’ people are four times more likely to live below the poverty line, then that is worthy of a damn good fight by all peoples with resilience of all colours and religions to rectify such a glaring problem for all people.
And the resilience shown by ‘Black people’s struggle for equality has indeed been shown in countless ways and over centuries: MLK Jr., Medgar Evers Malcolm X and thousands of others, even ‘White — albeit Jewish’ Andrew Goodman, paid for it with their lives.
So overturn the money lenders’ tables and ensure that all God’s children are getting enough nutrition from the right food.
By not ensuring that…the necessity of cheap fast food means that many poor in North America will continue to be overfed and undernourished if not over stimulated and undereducated.
But back to your comments about ‘White guilt’ and shame.
Guilt is there to remind us not to do ‘that’ again. Like placing a finger on a burning stove element or by using the N-word in a diatribe or the guilt one should feel by blaming an entire ethnicity for the sins of the few.
Guilt often involves empathy and an understanding of harm: perhaps that motivated the mostly ‘White’ Quakers to fight to end slavery and help with the Underground Railway.
However, it must be remembered that 14, 550,000+plus ‘White’ people have the privilege of living in poverty in America: given that the dividing line is $12,000 dollars per annum, many would naturally put the numbers much much higher.
Who’s to shamefully blame for that?
Shame, unlike guilt, has an ego-centric focus which essentially means ‘I’m incapable of doing anything but that which brings me or others harm’.
The biggest thwart to racial equality on both sides of our border is the horrendous, long term soul-destroying, and shameful, inequality of income distribution.
Racism abets and enforces economic inequality, and the protection of one’s wealth at the expense of others is the main motivation.
It’s highly divisive, it always was and is, it keeps people segregated, wrongfully incarcerated for generations, or worse lynched or shot, ultimately incapacitating millions.
Most thinking people — regardless of their ethnicity — get that. Many unfortunately are unwilling to tackle it.
But that level of systemic inequality can easily make people angry and frustrated maybe even Depressed. (Perhaps of interest is that the difference between suicide and murder-then-suicide is that while the ideation process is similar, it’s just that the anger is first focussed on the deaths of others before turning the gun on him or herself.)
But blaming the whole ‘White’ race and patronizingly lecturing them about what they need to do won’t help: its counter-intuitive when ‘White’ people are still 60% plus of the US population and of course, a big part of the solution.
Lastly, the inherent if not latent anger in the labeling, so unfortunately apparent in this time of Politically Correct Identity Politics, is becoming part of a ‘movement’ which is almost as insidiously limiting and divisive as racism and income disparity.
It is a movement which essentially pulls out the welcome mat from under the feet of another race, and in this case shames all ‘White’ people, some who may want to — and get this quelle surprise — can help to end the kind of racism which often leads to those at the bottom to fight amongst each other for just the scraps from the feast table of life.
It is a movement which, while purporting to excoriate all aspects of racism, hypocritically uses sub-human adjectives and methodologies, often on this very forum, to degrade ‘White’ people.
It is a movement which seems to not be able to accept let alone embrace nor publish many stories of ‘white people’, especially older ‘White’ males, who may have helped put an end first to slavery and then racism at any time in America’s history.
It flourishes on absolutism: a belief that anything ‘White’ or male or worse both is to be automatically viewed with skepticism, fear if not outright disdain.
It is a movement which reaches its conclusions as how to deal with admittedly huge and long festering social problems without using either the lense of historical context or the principles of scholastic integrity.
It is a movement which uses debasing dialogue-limiting epithets like ‘white fragility’ or ‘white privilege’ with impunity, without a thought of how such insults will actually supposedly bring ‘White’ people to the discussion table let alone encourage them to help address the many wrongs which desperately need to be fixed.
It even makes the ludicrous, effete if not fascistic argument that ‘White’ people who may disagree with anything the ‘movement’ opines, not only lack resilience and are therefore somehow weak, but also harbour unconscious levels of entitled racism, all due to the lack of melanin in their white skin.
It’s a movement whose advocates believe, with puritanical dehumanizing zeal, that they, and only they, know who has suffered, and who is suffering, and therefore who is worthy of compassion.
It is a movement which, when confronted with an opinion which runs contrary to its ‘principles’ or points out errors, will often refute this opinion’s logic with just a colour or gender label, ‘you’re just a guilty White woman’. All of which somehow magically absolves those in this movement from a need for critical thinking let alone a reasoned response if not a need for self-reflection and accountability.
Hell, they probably won’t even read it if they see the opinion has been penned by a ‘White’ person.
Even worse, if a ‘White’ person doesn’t agree with such an entitled angry pseudo-intellectual appellate, if not an adolescent schoolyard bully name-calling onslaught, suddenly she’s labelled the fragile one…‘bleeding mayo’?
Telling any person that they have to understand that they may not be resilient enough to handle a version of the truth, is potentially condescending enough to actually decrease their empathy or desire to listen.
Imagine inviting ‘Black’ people to discuss important cross cultural issues by labelling them with similar demeaning epithets before they make it to the door let alone the table.
Most Black people might find it all patronizingly infantile, disrespectful if not racist and justifiably turn away.
Most would deem their rejection of such an insulting invitation as coming from a place of strength.
Such invitations to ‘White’ people, if shaming lectures and skewed logic can be equated with invitations, should be seen for what that they are.
They are backhanded invitations, many but not all of which ironically use the same crude limiting racist behaviors as were once used to label all ‘Black’ people in order to deny them their humanity and keep them in their place.
Black people would be rightfully heralded as coming from a place of strength, of resilience, to reject such insults: after all, they have been doing so for many decades.
Imagine ‘White’ folks reacting to such insults then.
Imagine then the outcome of this movement: ‘White’ people turning away from their ‘Brown’ or ‘Black’ brothers and sisters.
‘White’ people, just when you need them most, seeing themselves as coming from a place of strength to entrench the system that has kept many from sharing in the riches of their country rather than coming from a place of compassion to embrace those less fortunate than themselves and unite with others to address such great wrongs.
Now that’s what I’d call a depressing shame, the likes of which arguably gave the US and the world a Trump in the first place.
And it is a movement which needs to clean up its own racist and misandric act, for its given the hate-mongering Trump even more ammunition to keep us disillusioned, distracted and ever more divided.
And that truly is a shame.