This whole article goes to show why season two of The Wire is criminally neglected: Since the 1990s, the epidemic in white rural and suburban areas has grown. No curtain is big enough to draw across the suffering on display, with 669,000 Americans using heroin in 2012, a 65 percent increase from 2002. A recent film, Gateway to Heroin, quoted a Boston undertaker who had buried “hundreds” of white kids who had died from opiate overdoses. Another filmmaker attuned to the problem of the white underclass is Debra Granik, with her award-winning films Down to the Bone and Winter’s Bone. Maybe if the pundits and reporters had paid attention in 1995, almost twenty years ago, the problem wouldn’t be as devastating. At the time, a study emerged indicating that all was not well in suburbia. A 1997 SUNY study surprised its authors when their interviews with white women revealed that 92 percent of those interviewed had experienced battering or had seen their mothers or sisters battered. “Domestic violence is not a phenomenon found only in poor and working-class homes,” Weis said in a press release, but is “found widely in very privileged homes as well.” Weis added that the 31 black women respondents were much more open about the violence they saw and experienced. “The white women in the study, on the other hand, were very secretive,” Weis wrote. She speculated that such secretiveness served to protect the popular image of family life in the white community and that shame and secrecy were encouraged by the media focus on demonizing black people. Do white pundits, reporters and TV news producers have a no-snitch policy on exposing social crises in the white community? While popular culture, novels, film and theater portray the black boogeyman as a threat to women (more so than the mostly white men who deny Medicaid to the poor and send black and Hispanic women to prison for drug crimes), white men’s treatment of white women is rarely discussed. I’ve challenged the white men who finance black boogeyman products to address the issue of domestic violence against white women. Why isn’t Nicholas Kristof on this?
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 17:19:54 +0000
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