The white man in America (WMIA), has developed an acute double consciousness in the post-1965 Great Society and this double-consciousness has led him to exhibit many of the same characteristics of Jim Crow era Black Americans. For the first time the WMIA finds his American existence - his comfortable middle class status, higher education, the three-bedroom raised ranch, the nice new car, his kids braces, his wife’s new dress, the family vacations and above all the expectations that his children will be even better off than he is - all of this he is now expected to share equally with the “nigger” and the “Jew”, the “faggot”, the “wetback” and the “towel head”. And the violence he once used against these communities to protect his exclusive access to that plush American life - all the killing and the raping and the terrorism, the enslavement of captive Africans and the stealing of land from the Native American - all of it now punishable offenses after 1965. What’s more, these tactics of subversive white nationalism, terrorism, fear, and disenfranchisement are essentially un-American.

           While discussing the WMIA, we be careful to strictly define to whom this term applies.  The term refers to white Christian leaning men, not white women of any denomination. The term refers to white men of all economic backgrounds - which would seem logical as ones’ economic situation may change over a lifetime - but will certainly apply more broadly to lower socio-economic classes of white men. The same dynamic applies to age with the term applying broadly to all ages but in this case, white men above the age of 45 will be more acutely represented. Finally, geographic area, which will also apply broadly to all area of the United States, Alaska, and Hawaii, but certainly one may find more acute representations in non-coastal areas, mountainous regions, farmland, industrial areas, and sparsely populated rural areas.  Many thinkers and writers are beginning to understand that being white is not an ethnic or genetic category, rather, it is a social and even a political category.¹ And so, when I use the acronym “WMIA”, I mean to express an identity beyond the obvious morphological observation of who “looks white”.

         This is an important distinction because part of the WMIA’s existential crisis of self is about defining “whiteness” as the anti-blackness or “anti-other”. Perhaps the most telling examples of this are the recent attempts to use the most inclusive definition of white to include non-white Hispanics and even Asians when quantifying racial populations in the United States. As it is explained in the Levitz article, the attempt by some like Matthew Yglesias² to use the most inclusive definition of white is an exercise in “unqualified optimism” and designed to pacify frightened white Americans. The feeling of fear is, as described in the Levitz article, based on an assumption that should they become the racial minority in America - as is reported to be the case in a recent Census Bureau projection³ - white Americans feel they would face retaliatory racial discrimination. The attempt by Yglesias to use the more inclusive definition of white is an attempt to fool white Americans into thinking they are not a rapidly diminishing population/culture - they are just that. It is the latest example in an ever-growing trend of needing to lie to white people to keep them from being irrational, unreasonable, malcontent or outright violence against their fellow Americans in response to what is inevitable - the “browning” of the nation.

          The lies that the WMIA will tell himself about himself, to justify his ghoulish moral presence and indemnify his fragile self-image against the ocean of blame that history is sure to bring, has led the WMIA to develop a double consciousness all his own. He develops this because, he, much like Dubois, now exist in the gap between his projected self - as an individual and as a member of a cultural group - and his actual self. The essential thesis question, is he the WMIA - as some accused Dubois when he claimed a double consciousness - delusional? We should begin, I believe, with an understanding of the definition of double consciousness.

  Double Consciousness Defined

           DuBois has described the double consciousness as a “peculiar sensation” that forces him and many others like him to view himself through “the eyes of others - of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”⁴. As DuBois acknowledges in many of his writings, there are indeed white people who are just as poor and uneducated as any Black person. In fact, in his work “Black Reconstruction”, DuBois not only says that white people in this nation are just as poor as Black people but also that they subsidize their terrible affliction with what DuBois calls the “psychological wage”⁵. To say that all white people live on some proverbial golden hilltop, economically, would be hard to support by the evidence. Much of the work of J.D. Vance and Elizabeth Catte, which I write about herein, expressly rebut this notion, even though Catte is very much a critic of Vance’s work.

           The point is that any contempt or pity one has for someone else or feel being shown to themselves is inherently a comparative exercise, in and of itself. You have an idea of what the “other person’s” value is and then compare it to your own perceived value. This comparison is almost always chased by capitalist ideas of productivity and value. What “terrible affliction” is being subsidized by this psychological wage? - the WMIA’s double consciousness.

           The WMIA’s double consciousness is, in essence, the same as DuBois’, residing in the gap between his projected self and his actual self. Further, whereas the double consciousness of DuBois and many others within the Black community is at its core a fight for equality within the American experiment of a representative democratic republic, the WMIA’s double consciousness is born from a fight to maintain a systematic inequality in the face of a rising tide of non-white democratic and economic power. After 1965, his greatest tool to stem divert or diffuse the flow of non-white power in America was taken away - he could no longer be lawless. His delusions of grandeur and superiority are soon dashed. His unique double consciousness expressed - one that leaves the WMIA drifting between being perceived as the prosperous hero of American culture, benevolently guiding all mankind out of ignorance and being identified as the oblivious hapless spawn of some morally bankrupt European immigrants who stole everything they have. Somewhere between those two extremes live the white man in America. But is he delusional?

Understanding Delusional Thinking

              As an important point to the essence of the thesis, the parallels between the mindset of a Jim Crow era DuBois and that of the modern WMIA must be placed in delicate yet specific relief. Is it real? - this “peculiar sensation” that DuBois spoke of. Are the symptoms real? Are the causes real? Do the causes have to be real or actual corporeal events for the symptoms to be valid? This is at the heart of the criticism about whether Dubois’ double consciousness was his fault or the fault of society.

There is at the heart of DuBois’ double consciousness, an inherent accusation of being delusional. Whether it be in the delusion of what constitutes a race, is argued by Appiah⁶, or the delusion of racial events - the possibility of a person’s a posteriori experience being discarded as delusional. So, in other words, a Black man may feel that a white manager at a job didn’t promote him, in whole or in part, because he is Black. The natural response by defenders of the white manager might be to say that the reason for the promotion not being conferred was the result of some other criterion other than race and that race was merely a coincidence. In essence, the Black person is being delusional in his understanding of what precisely his black skin affords him or denies him in his native environment. So, is the WMIA delusional when he experiences what he would call “reverse-racism”?

           While the mindset of the post-1965 WMIA is what this essay is here to apprehend and postulate, it is also certainly important to understand that part of the thesis is asking the question of whether the WMIA is delusional - as has been the critique of DuBois. To say that the WMIA has a double consciousness is not enough. This is like saying the someone has a mental disorder and not deliberating as to whether the disorder is born from nature or nurture - is this “double consciousness” a real phenomenon? Much the same as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), there is a trauma and a cause for the trauma. Is the development of a double consciousness a result of a certain type of cultural PTSD? One must begin to ask themselves is the trauma itself is real.

             One might become “traumatized” by witnessing digital or video game violence, Certainly, this is what the National Rifle Association and many other groups like the National Center for Biotechnology Information would have us believe⁷. While the brief scholarly article produced in part by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, California does link shooting video game violence with increased levels of PTSD symptoms, it also mentions that it is not a predictor of PTSD when it factors in other contributing factors like “personality, combat exposure, and social support variables”. The “trauma” of seeing your friends legs blown off from an improvised explosive device (IED), the violence of seeing someone being shot in the head in a video game, the sight of seeing a young Black girl’s neck-snapping from being hung from a tree or running your fingers over the raised scars of a Black man’s back after he was whipped - all of it real.

             This would, in my opinion, suggest that even perceived events not reality-based or on corporeal grounds still have a psychological effect on human beings. To question the material nature of the traumatic event is immaterial in many ways to the emergence of a psychological disorder or a delusional state - a somewhat nuanced accusation which Anthony Appiah makes against DuBois. This understanding may prove useful in the adjudication of whether one may be called “delusional” for perceiving a double consciousness as a result of racism, bigotry, etc. - even over the assertions from others that no such social dynamic exists. One may perceive his personal demons.

 The Common Thread: Poverty

                There is a useful passage from DuBois which describes the nature and placement of the double consciousness in a way that I believe may be comparable to the post-1965 WMIA. DuBois writes in The Souls of Black Folks:

 “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

Certainly, there are as we know, poor Black people and poor white people all over the nation. However, I find that the biggest driver behind the establishment of a 'double consciousness' is not wanting to be defined by poverty or the things that come with it. More than almost anything else in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, J.D. Vance, Elizabeth Catte or Jonathan Metzl is the fight against the stereotype, not only of poverty but also against the perceived ignorance and cognitive simplicity that we Americans associate with being poor or lower middle class. The WMIA post-1965 is a member of a race which, comparatively, is experiencing on multiple levels a sensation of social parity with non-white Americans. It’s an important adjective,⁸ social because this is also an important aspect of the double consciousness of the WMIA - he feels like 'the' America is leaving him and his culture behind. As DuBois would go on to write:

 “He felt the weight of his ignorance - not simply letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.”

 One may think that these passages, about being shackled and being part of an impoverished or poor race, apply most aptly to the American of African descent - this essay rebuts this notion. Baldwin writes, as we will examine later in the work, that the white community was every bit as trapped in the notion of race as the Black community. The white man and the Black man are both prisoners to the original sin of this nation - which is another aspect of the thesis.

The Harvard Professor and the Hillbilly

             We now have two men, one a Black man in America (BMIA) and one a white man in America (WMIA) nearly one hundred years apart. I believe that the juxtaposition of these two straw men in the greater American ego will provide an appropriate adumbration for the thesis. The BMIA post-1877 and the WMIA post-1965. We have two understandings of the world, one of the middle to upper-middle-class Harvard educated Black man and one of the poor white man in Appalachia - both men I contend are suffering from a double consciousness.  At the heart of the WMIA’s double consciousness is a lie, just as there was a lie at the heart of Dubois’ double consciousness in 1903. For DuBois, the lie about himself, and other Black folks were the presence of meritocracy in America. Conversely, Vance suggests the WMIA believes an almost directly opposite lie about himself and his fellow white men - that there is not a meritocracy - rather a racial hierarchy atop which they and their children sit accomplishments, merit or education be damned. This lie, that everyone else must work hard and be twice as good as he is just to get half of the benefits that he enjoys, is something that Vance writes about the WMIA being hopelessly engulfed within.

          Vance writes in his work Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis about the cognitive dissonance between the world that the white man sees and the values that he preaches9. It is an inherently selfish and spoiled view of the world, built into the culture of the WMIA - that he and his family are owed their success and should not have to work too hard to get it. Implicitly or explicitly he knew that this dynamic exists and has existed for centuries in this nation. It is at the heart of “white privilege”⁹. But above all, white privilege is a tool of self-aggrandizement and pride that only the WMIA may fully enjoy. This image of goodness and godliness, prosperity, virtue, and power are at the heart of how the white man views himself in this nation.  If it is part of your existential view of yourself that whiteness is good, whiteness is prosperity, whiteness is holiness and perhaps even that whiteness is predestined success - then one might be jarred by the incidence of poverty or failure in the white community and success in non-white communities.¹⁰  But even then, in the face of any perceived failure or bouts of lower socioeconomic conditions, the white man in America takes solace in the knowledge that he is still more politically and socially agile than his Black counterparts. However, this also means that to maintain this extra “psychological wage” that Dubois intimates come with having superior political/social mobility in America, that feeling can only be maintained if the non-white people remain poor and impoverished. Should the Black people in America ever gain tangible economic power without a proportional boost in the economic or social power in the White community, then what is to be said about the supremacy or whiteness?

            It is not inconceivable that white people understand this to be the case. I recall being a teenager in seeing a lot of my friends claim that they were not black. They would either claim that they were Brazilian or native American but certainly not black – certainly not African. This same type of self-hating behavior is evident in the white community today. How many times have we seen or heard about white women plumping up their lips or getting “butt injections” so that they appear to have the genetic traits of African women? How many white people spend hours every week on a tanning bed or in a tanning salon trying to darken in their skin? We’ve all seen young white People swaggering about a stage with the latest Black-owned lingo, catchphrases, and song lyrics. How many our jotting down on college applications forms that they are “native American” as did Senator Elizabeth Warren?

           Conversely, how many times do Black people change their voices to “sound white”? We call this sort of thing code-switching. And I do believe that code-switching is a symptom of double consciousness. Do white people code-switch? - unsure. However, I would submit in this essay that the number of things that black people do to comport to white America is diminishing. At the same time although not seemingly in proportion, the number of things that white people are doing to comport or fit into black culture is growing. This, in my opinion, has something to do, at least in part, with the economics of pop culture in America. It has everything to do with the growing population and the economic power base of non-white America.

 1877 - 1965: Violence as an Answer

           In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes bargained away the Federal government's protections of the BMIA’s right to exercise his franchise under the fifteenth amendment in exchange for an extra electoral college vote - essentially ushering in the ultra-violent Jim Crow Era. Things changed post-1965. If the compromise of 1877 was a divestiture from the Black family and its future political and social prospects, the Great Society was an investment in the same. When the President of the United States signed those bills, he not only made those old violent Jim Crow-era voter intimidation tactics illegal and punishable offenses, but as the head white man in charge, I argue here that he also made white supremacy in a sense, un-American. And this is the displacement of the WMIA from his natural habitat.

           The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act began revving up Reconstruction era social and political engines that fueled the surge of Black empowerment - at least this appears to be the fear of many WMIA. However, 1964 and 1965 were as much about language and perceptions as they were about legislation and executive actions. What was really happening at this time was that the WMIA sense of reality - just as it was during reconstruction - was being warped, or perhaps it is better stated that his state of reality was being un-warped.

           I believe Toni Morrison described the warping of the mind well in her interview with Charlie Rose, “If you can only be tall because someone’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”¹¹ It’s a sentiment that points to the inability - the fear even - the WMIA has of looking the BMIA in the eye on an even playing field and competing for resources and capital.  Just as his reconstruction era predecessors, the post-1965 WMIA was presented with the prospects of having to look eye to eye with his Black counterpart and understanding himself to be the equal or perhaps even inferior to the Black man in America. No longer looking down from his golden hilltop at Black communities residing on smaller mud lumps in a dark valley, the WMIA now looks around to see other hilltops just as golden as his. What happens if the BMIA builds a shinier city on a hill? What if he builds it higher, faster and better?

         History tells us with rather stark examples that when presented with this spectacle the WMIA gets violent. The violence of Jim Crow era - the fear, envy, and acrimony simmering in the WMIA - was born not from Black communities and individuals proving themselves to be failures or incapable of governing themselves, rather, these communities were enormously successful. When the Fifteenth Amendment afforded the BMIA the right to vote, Black communities produced an array of Senators and Congressmen. Vast areas in the south were represented by Black men at all levels of government. Black communities also started and self-supported their own banks and lending institutions. They had their own insurance companies and civil governance bodies. Their streets were as clean and prosperous as any white neighborhood with a similar socio-economic profile. Through voting, equal protection under the law and moderately potent unionizing efforts, the Black community successfully constructed several golden hilltops of their own. The result of Black success was almost always violence and terrorism. The sharecropper massacre of 1919¹². Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921¹². These are just a couple of the more well-known violent reactions to successful Black communities.

          During the same period when they were hanging Black people and burning down their successful business districts and homes, massive white expansions to the west were met - not with pitchforks and nooses - but with federal land grants and free agricultural education. By the early and mid-1930’s the American government has already spent half a century underwriting the legacy and generational wealth of the WMIA while, at the same time, the same WMIA was burning Black-owned businesses in Tulsa.

          The emergence of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has exacerbated the race problem only this time, for the white man. Perhaps, this time after 1965 for the WMIA is in some ways like the world faced by the Black man in America after the Compromise of 1877¹³. In both cases, legislation exacerbated the race problem.  Dubois does make the claim that legislation can exacerbate the race problem. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois writes, “...the Emancipation Proclamation seemed to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problem of today”¹⁴. By “war amendments” DuBois footnoted that he was speaking of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

          The cultural significance of these Amendments in the mind of the WMIA, especially in the American South, cannot be overstated. These Amendments, much to the recognition and dismay of Booker T. Washington two decades later, enraged the WMIA to the point of violence. But this violence was only possible to the extent that between 1877 and 1965, the American government had all but sanctioned subversive and violent efforts to preserve and advance white supremacy.

          The Compromise of 1877 is what many scholars understand to be the beginning of the Jim Crow era. However, what is important to understand here is that the Jim Crow era did not start because Black folks were failing or were doing so poorly that they needed saving. Rather, white southerners reacted violently and visceral, demanding that the north pull back federal troops from polling places and state houses because Black folks were succeeding! We had dozens of elected officials and hundreds of new Black-owned businesses that thrived from the patronage of Black people. We had Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) popping up to admit the sons and daughters of former slaves then, producing some of the greatest minds the nation had ever seen - Black geniuses, politicians and titans of industry emerging only half a generation after the fall of the slaveholding south. Through what many felt was extortion, the protection of Black southerners, and many northern Blacks as well, was bargained away and the United States government divested from the future of the Black community. It re-invested and doubled down on the white community.  It did this in the form of not explicitly barring or outlawing voter intimidation, poll taxes, separate but equal, white mob violence, etc. Land grants for the Midwest and western states were handed out to the WMIA at a record rate. Later in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, G.I. Bill military benefits were handed out to white soldiers but not Black ones. The WMIA and his family were given government-backed home loans to buy property which formed the base of the white middle-class wealth. In other words, with the help of a racially biased and proactive American government and of course, the blind eye that same government turned when white men used violence against the Black community, the WMIA thrived and dreamed.

           However, in 1964 and 1965, the American government re-invested, at least in principle, in the Black man and his family as fully franchised citizens. More importantly, this reinvestment came with federal troops in the form of the IRS, the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA and many other federal and state agencies dedicated to preserving what the compromise of 1877 had allowed to be suppressed - the unfettered right to vote and equal protection under the law. Unlike he was able to do in response to the war amendments, in the hay days of the Jim Crow era, now the WMIA was unable to lynch, burn, rape or murder his way to the front of the line. He was forced to compete fairly and equally, for the first time in his American existence, with the Black man - and as J.D. Vance explains in his work Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the WMIA understands himself to be losing.

   Conclusion

             Is the WMIA delusional - no, and neither was DuBois. To say that Black men like DuBois or the more modern white man from regions like Appalachia are “delusional” would be to say that they are habitually crazy. I reject Appiah’s critique of DuBois “race problem” in terms of scientific definition because, as I have shown, whether a particular fact is misplaced or misguided is in many ways immaterial to the perception of one’s environment at large.

            Delusions are personal and belong to the individual experiencing them. They are no less real than any other perception a human may have. So, if the DuBois and the Hillbilly from Appalachia truly believe that they are experiencing a “peculiar sensation” of displacement and helplessness  - if they understand themselves to “not exist”¹⁵ as Catte intimates - then who am I do tell them that they are delusional?

            What is very interesting is the plight of Catte in her work to rebut Vance. The narrative of poor, dirty, uneducated, slack-jawed, barefoot, ignorant, racist, bigoted white people from the hills drinking moonshine and having relations with their cousins - is not the whole story about white people. Not that some of it may not be true, but that there is more to them there in the mountains and hillsides of Appalachia than what is portrayed. This is precisely what Catte is attempting to say in her assertion that she “does not exist”. She is saying that the socially conscious, progressive, LGBTQ friendly, minority friendly Appalachian does in fact exist. She laments the portrayal of Appalachians by Vance because she is, much like nearly every Black person in America, helpless against the tide of prevailing public opinions - even if those opinions are about her own life and culture.

         She specifically notes that the problem with the portrayal of Appalachia is what they say but what they fail to mention about the region and the people.¹⁶ This, of course, tracks with what we know to be the case in the Black community. They lack complexity, the inability to tell our own stories, the pressure to jettison authentic culture for fear of reinforcing a harmful stereotype - I love fried chicken but might be hesitant to order it in front of white people. 

         Of course, the biggest difference between the idealistic version of Vance’s or Catte’s white Appalachia community and Dubois’ Black community is that for the Black community, their struggle is in large part against the white community. In a very real way, there is rampant racism and bigotry in many regions of Appalachia - a long history and legacy of it which cannot be so easily swept aside. Catte, in her rebuttal to Vance, does attempt to paint a picture of a much more diverse and progressive image of Appalachia and even talks about the growth of the non-white population there.¹⁷ However, what is inescapable, even by talented thinkers such as Vance or Catte, is that the WMIA’s struggle for freedom from the shackles of public perception - which leads to double consciousness - is a struggle in large part against the reality of things he did. In short, after 1965 and with the rise of national news and Title 918 style social justice efforts, he no longer wants to be associated with the things and circumstances which he still benefits from to this day.

            The WMIA effectively kept Black families out of their neighborhoods. He did actively try to stop or curtail Black folks from voting or realizing the full power of their collective franchise.  The WMIA did fight against integrating schools and bussing. He did actively try to keep Black people from joining labor unions. His fight, as I mentioned in previous sections, is in fact about keeping a system of inequality in place. His ever-failing efforts to do so have forced him to reckon with his past in a way that had previously been staved off by violence and terrorism. He tries to remove the word slavery from books - he cannot. He tries to keep his confederate statues - he cannot. He tries to maintain his psychological wage over Black people - but then Barack Obama. He tries to explain his ghoulish presence in the rosiest of terms - but facts emerge. He pleads his case of economic disenfranchisement and the death of his culture - thoughts, and prayers. Finally, he must reconcile himself with his past - I believe that a double consciousness abounds. What this means for the disposition of the “soul” of white people I believe is a sociological question - a cultural critique of a community facing an ever-rising tide a self-reflection and accountability.

White people are finding themselves, especially in places like Appalachia, to be the problem. There appears to be a white man problem and the idea is not so farfetched. Catte wrote of the “Appalachia problem”¹⁸ in terms that I took to have very similar fallout to the DuBois “Negro problem” in that the nation 'really' doesn’t know what to do with these misfit Americans. I suppose as DuBois attempted to do, the answer to the question of the Appalachia or “white man problem” is best answered by the white man, honestly and consciously reflecting on his personal spiritual strivings - not as a white man but as a human being.

 

NOTES

1. Levitz, Eric. “America Will Only Remain 'Majority White' If Blacks Remain an Underclass.” Intelligencer, 3 May 2018, nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/for-america-to-be-white-blacks-must-be-an-underclass.html. "After all, “white” is a social category — not an ethnic or genetic one."

2. “Matthew Yglesias.” Vox, www.vox.com/authors/matthew-yglesias.
3. “Graphic Technology. Variable Data Exchange.” doi:10.3403/30197441u. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/releases/2015/cb15-tps16_graphic.pdf
4. B., Du Bois W. E., and Farah Jasmine. Griffin. The Souls of Black Folk. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005. p.9 "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
5. B., Du Bois W. E. B. Black Reconstruction. kindle, University of Norte Dame Press, 2006.
   p. 164-65 "It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness."
6. Appiah, Anthony. “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 21–37., doi:10.1086/448319. p. 36-36 "The truth is there are no races...the evil that is done is done by the concept and by easy - yet impossible - assumptions as to its application. What we miss through our obsession with the structure of relations of concepts is, simply, reality."
7. Etter, Darryl, et al. “Modern Warfare: Video Game Playing and Posttraumatic Symptoms in Veterans.” Journal of Traumatic Stress, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28370328. "The shooter players group reported higher levels of PTSD symptoms than participants who did not play any video or shooter games"
8. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, p. 147 KINDLE VERSION: “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”
9. An unearned benefit, tangible or intangible, based wholly or in part on having white European-like physical features.
10. Blay, Zeba, and Zeba Blay. “Watch Toni Morrison Break Down Why Racism Is A White Problem.” Huffington Post, 10 Nov. 2015, www.huffpost.com/entry/watch-toni-morrison-break-down-why-racism-is-a-white-problem. “What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Still smart? Do you still like yourself? ...If you can only be tall because someone’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
11. “The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb the Racial Disparities of the Justice System.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 2 Aug. 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/death-hundreds-elaine-massacre-led-supreme-court-take-maj or-step-toward-equal-justice-african-americans-180969863/.
12. Keyes, Allison. “A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 27 May 2016, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewit ness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/.
13. Editors, History.com. “Compromise of 1877.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 17 Mar. 2011, www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/compromise-of-1877.
14. Burghardt, Du Bois W. E. The Souls of Black Folk. " the Emancipation Proclamation seemed but to broaden and intensify the difficulties; and the War Amendments made the Negro problems of to-day."
15. Catte, Elizabeth. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia? Independent Pub Group, 2018. p. 9 "I do not exist; my partner does not exist. Our families do not exist.
16. Op. cit. p. 46 17.
17. Op. cit. p. 84
18. op. cit. p. 9

 

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