One in seven white women, for instance, smoke cigarettes while pregnant, thereby endangering the health of their soon-to-be-born children: a rate that is 60 percent higher than the rate for black women. White women were also about 30 percent more likely than black women to drink alcohol when pregnant in 2010-2011, thanks to a significant reduction in gestational alcohol consumption among black women compared to previous years and a slight increase in such consumption among whites. So is there something about white culture that contributes to this disproportionately cavalier attitude among white women when it comes to the health of their developing fetuses?
And what is it with white people and suicide? Although suicide touches all communities, the numbers show that whites end our own lives at a far higher rate than blacks. In 2010, for instance, whites committed suicide at a rate that was roughly three times higher than the rate for blacks. Is there something about whites, culturally, that can explain this disproportionate inability to cope with life’s pressures, or with depression, or the other precursors to suicide?
And what’s the deal with white people and drug overdoses? In 2010, for example, white men were nearly twice as likely as black men to die from an opioid overdose and white women were more then twice as likely to die from such an overdose as black women. Interestingly, not only are whites apparently having a hard time handling our drugs, but even more telling, there has been a shift in the rates of opioid overdose deaths since the late 1990s, at which point black men were actually 44 percent more likely than their white counterparts to die this way. Since 1999, while black male opioid drug overdose deaths have fallen, rates for whites have increased by 137 percent! In other words, black men are taking it easier on the heavy stuff, while apparently white men are swallowing Hydrocodone like Tic-Tacs. What’s up with that?
And don’t even get me started on binge-drinking! It had been a while since I’d looked at the data on this, and although I knew white rates of heavy boozing were higher than the rates for blacks about a decade ago, I had hoped that we might have learned to control ourselves in the interim, but no such luck apparently. In 2011, for instance, white folks were still about one-fourth more likely than blacks to have binged in the past month, and 78 percent more likely to binge drink regularly (5 or more times in one month).
And although most youth, regardless of race, don’t use hard drugs, racial disparities remain when it comes to these harder narcotics. By their senior year of high school, whites are four times more likely than blacks to have used hallucinogenic drugs, with 1 in 11 white seniors having done so, compared to only 1 in 42 black seniors. Likewise, white seniors are 2.4 times more likely to have tried Ecstasy, four times more likely to have tried cocaine (even 2.5 times more likely to have used crack), 3.5 times more likely to have used amphetamines (with more than 1 in 7 white seniors having used these compared to about 1 in 22 blacks), and 4 times as likely as comparable blacks to have used sedatives, with one in ten white high school seniors having done so. Among 12th graders, whites are 2.7 times more likely than comparable blacks to have used a prescription drug without a prescription, with about 1 in 6 whites having done so.
As for current drug use, by 10th grade, whites are nearly 70 percent more likely than comparable blacks to have used an illicit drug other than marijuana in the past month, and by 12th grade, they are more than twice as likely to have done so, with 1 in 10 whites currently using drugs other than weed, compared to only 1 in 23 blacks in that grade.
In college, the disparities continue, with white students more than twice as likely as black students to smoke weed or use other illicit drugs like Ecstasy, twice as likely as black students to abuse prescription opioids and three times as likely to abuse stimulants. At HBCUs, there is virtually no evidence of prescription stimulant abuse at all, according to one national survey, again suggesting that maybe white culture needs to take a few pointers from black folks and the educational institutions where they predominate.
All in all, as the Centers for Disease Control note, there are any number of dangerous activities in which white youth engage more often than black youth. Yet somehow we escape the generalized cultural critiques that follow blacks whenever members of their group do something wrong. In addition to the above-mentioned differences in alcohol and drug use, as well as drunk driving and smoking, white youth are also more likely than blacks to text while driving, thereby putting themselves and others at risk on the road, more likely to vomit or take laxatives so as to lose weight, less likely to have used a condom the last time they had sexual intercourse, and far more likely to use dangerous, cancer-causing tanning lamps to become, well, darker — which raises the question as to why white people hate ourselves so much that we’ll go out of our way (especially white women and those guys from Jersey Shore) to become brown. But that’s another essay for another day I suppose.
And why are white youth so disrespectful to their parents? According to the available evidence whites between 12 and 17 are nearly twice as likely as their black counterparts to have fought with their parents at least 10 times in the past year. Why no lectures from the cultural warriors of the right towards smart-mouthed white teens, whose disrespect for their parents clearly indicates a pathologically delinquent tendency? And please, someone develop this lecture quickly as we have a 12-year old who I fear may be tempted to try out some of that white-culture-backsassing-**** on us any day now!
And why no sexual responsibility lectures for the white and affluent college students who apparently are far more likely to hookup with multiple sexual partners than college students of color? Putting aside the over-reaction to so-called hookup culture in general (which seems to be substantially overblown as is the case with most conservative moral panics), and the way in which that reaction seeks to demonize and then circumscribe the sexual freedom of women, to the extent there is any overly-irresponsible sexual behavior on campus, it is the white and wealthy who drive the trend.
Looking again at drug use, but now for the overall white versus black populations — in other words, not just youth — although current drug usage rates are roughly the same across racial lines, the sheer numbers of white drug users should sound alarm bells, especially among those who claim that a few thousand black murderers per year presents a cultural crisis in the black community. So, for instance, the data indicates that as of 2011 there were approximately 83 million white people, 18 or over who had used illicit drugs, as opposed to only 13 million such blacks; 23 million whites who had used drugs this year, as opposed to only 4 million blacks; and 13.4 million current white drug users, compared to about 2.6 million blacks.
For cocaine, whites are over 75 percent more likely than blacks to have tried the drug, while for hallucinogenic drugs, whites are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely than blacks to have tried them. For prescription psychotherapeutics like pain relievers, sedatives, tranquilizers or stimulants, nearly 1 in 4 whites have misused them by taking such drugs without a prescription, compared to fewer than 14 percent of blacks.
So why no cultural critique of white drug use, or hysterical cries that white drug users indicate something about white people that needs to be collectively addressed? After all, drug users in the white community are far more prevalent as a percentage of our population than black violent criminals are of theirs.
