*The response was, to say the least, unexpected. I’m talking about one of my recent Facebook posts in which I asked the question, “Why are so many unhoused mentally challenged white men on South L A streets?” I posted this along with the query, a picture of a shirtless, seemingly mentally challenged young white man panhandling and mumbling out loud in the middle of a busy intersection in predominantly lower-income, Black and Hispanic South L.A.
The post ignited an avalanche of comments and musings from dozens of readers. The opinions ranged from disbelief to surprise to offering a host of reasons why they are turning up in noticeable numbers on predominantly lower-income African American and Hispanic neighborhood streets.
The reasons for the surge in the number of challenged whites in South L.A., and indeed many other inner-city neighborhoods, can be cited by rote. They lack jobs, education, are afflicted by mental, drug, and alcohol addiction, and are deeply impoverished. They are widely regarded as white society’s washed-out discards, beyond the pale, an embarrassment, better out of sight, out of mind, so where better for them to wind up than in South L.A.
They are there because of two steadily mounting crisis factors that have slammed many lower-income, working-class young white men. The first is poverty. It’s true that Hispanics, and especially African Americans, have disproportionately higher rates of joblessness and poverty than whites. However, in terms of raw numbers, Census figures on poverty consistently show that the majority of men in poverty are white. In most cases, they are either marginally skilled or unskilled and have not attended college.
This ties directly into the second crisis issue that has hit young white males hard. That’s drug use. A study by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) in 2017 found that nearly forty percent of young white adults aged 18 to 25 used illicit drugs. Several studies in the past decade since then have found no evidence of any decline in that stratospheric figure on white drug use. Overall, whites consistently have the highest rates of drug use and abuse of all ethnic groups.
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Experts on this issue have come to much the same conclusion as to why there is high drug use among this group. Drugs are cheap and accessible, and they are the way many express their sense of rebellion and alienation from society. It is also their means to deal with stress and anxiety that often comes from a lack of skills, education, and jobs.
They are derisively and popularly branded as the proverbial white trash. They, like Blacks and Hispanics, are saddled with a boatload of stereotypes and negative depictions. One observer of the “white trash” cultural and media portrayal ticked off this list of pejoratives about them: They’re called angry (white males), lazy, dirty, overweight, sunburned, stupid, racist, alcoholic, abusive, jobless, tacky, diseased, violent, backwards, Bible-thumping, and uneducated.
These stereotypes are repeated and depicted so routinely in the media and popular culture that it is practically an article of belief that a poor white guy must fit one, if not all, of these stereotypes. That hardly engenders sympathy and a willingness to assist a person who is widely viewed as inherently offensive. After all, the equally popular and no less stereotypical belief is that a “normal” white person is hard-working, educated, cultured, and most importantly, perfectly fits into mainstream (read white) society.
One expert summed it up this way: “If you think about the words white and trash, you realize that they have nearly opposite meanings. ‘White’ suggests purity, cleanliness, even the sacred. While ‘trash’ is about impurity, dirtiness, and the profane.”
In the book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness, the expert notes that “White trash names a people whose very existence seems to threaten the symbolic and social order. As such, the term can evoke strong emotions of contempt, anger, and disgust.”
There’s one other factor that has served to push more young white males to South L.A. streets. The sense of insecurity and even hostility that they often experience living on Skid Row. They are often regarded as just as out of place there and thus unwelcome as they are in white middle-class suburban communities.
They are kind of reverse racial outcasts. They do not have the means to flee to more distant neighborhoods where they would not be welcome anyway. So, the closest, easiest, and probably safest bet for them is to hang out on a South L.A. street and other inner-city streets.
The blame finger for their plight locally is pointed squarely at officials for not doing enough to combat the surge in homelessness among all groups affected. It is no easy task.
The “where do they go” question has been the perennial question asked every time cities make periodic sweeps of homeless encampments, as well as the men and women sleeping on the sidewalks.
The sweeps amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That is simply shifting them from one part of the city to another, maybe placing a few in temporary shelters, while leaving the rest right back where they started, plopped out on yet another sidewalk. And that sidewalk for an increasing number of white males is on South L.A. and other inner cities streets.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is Trump’s Obama Obsession (Middle Passage Press). He is the publisher of thehutchinsonreport.net.
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