Getting Serious About White Deviance: An Open Letter to the Pioneer Fund

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted November 6, 2000.

To the Pioneer Fund:

With great excitement, I recently discovered your organization's work for the betterment of mankind, through the applied science of racial research. As someone who has been investigating the disproportionately pathological tendencies of persons of European descent -- whites in the popular vernacular -- imagine my delight upon reading your Charter, which notes:

"The Pioneer Fund is committed to the proposition that people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are, on the basis of heredity, inherently unequal and can never be expected to behave or perform equally."

Gentlemen, I couldn't have said it better; and given our mutual interest in racial differences, I feel certain you will be intrigued by my funding proposal.

Just as your group has lavishly financed those whose work demonstrates the intellectual deficiencies of blacks, so too is it critical to examine the reasons for the disproportionate drug use, binge drinking, and propensity for serial murder that are the hallmarks of the Caucasian population.

Although it has long been known that roughly 90 percent of serial killers in modern history have been white, only recently has evidence emerged to illuminate the epidemic of substance abuse in the white community.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, whites are 11 percent more likely to have used drugs than blacks and 25 percent more likely to have done so than Hispanics.

What's more, recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Household Drug Abuse Survey indicates:

-- White high schoolers are 4.5 times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine; 3.6 times more likely to have gotten high using inhalants, like paint fumes or Liquid Paper; twice as likely as blacks to have used heroin; and six times more likely to have used methamphetamine. In fact, there are more white high school students who have used crystal meth than black students who regularly smoke cigarettes;

-- Whites are 43 percent more likely than blacks to drink alcohol and 27 percent more likely to binge drink than blacks (consuming five or more drinks at a time), with white youth more than twice as likely as black youth to binge;

-- Whites are 74 percent more likely than blacks to binge drink regularly (at least five times monthly), and white youth are three times as likely to do so;

-- In fact, there are more whites who binge drink at least once a month than there are blacks in the entire U.S. population!

And finally:

-- According to a private study, white college students consume three times more alcoholic beverages weekly than black students, are 65 percent more likely to drink to the point of being hungover, and 71 percent more likely to drink 'till they puke.

What's more, these white behaviors put others at substantial risk:

-- Whites are almost twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk, and 15 percent more likely to do so than Hispanics;

-- Whites between 12-17, are 34 percent more likely than black youth to have sold drugs in the past year;

-- The annual cost of white alcohol and drug abuse is approximately $200 billion in escalated health care and law enforcement expenditures, as well as lost productivity;

-- White males are 24 percent more likely than black males to have carried a weapon in the last thirty days; and white males in high school are twice as likely as their black counterparts to bring a weapon to school.

Could these overwhelmingly consistent examples of white pathology be mere coincidence? Or might they indicate a genetic predisposition to such harmful activities? Surely, the latter possibility is strong enough to warrant a massive research effort to get to the bottom of these phenomena.

Of course, the liberals will insist there are environmental explanations for white drug and alcohol problems. One can imagine them trying to blame two-earner white families for being too busy with their dot-com startup or landscaping classes at Home Depot to give their children the nurturing needed to resist drugs. But as the Department of Health and Human Services data indicates, white kids are 27 percent more likely than blacks to receive anti-drug information from parents, and 24 percent more likely to receive similar information in school, yet they just can't seem to put down their needles and pipes.

Though some will insist white alcoholism is environmentally-conditioned -- what with happy hour at TGI Friday's and Chili's virtually entrapping white businessmen and soccer moms to get plowed on Micro-Brews and Flaming Margaritas -- in the end, I feel confident that scientific truth will prevail, and whites will be forced to take personal responsibility for their behavior.

As for the methodology I will use to determine if there is a white genetic predisposition to substance abuse, I have written to Phillipe Rushton, of Ontario to ask for his assistance. Since you have generously underwritten Rushton's work on black hypersexuality -- which you'll recall he demonstrated by going to a shopping mall and asking blacks, whites and Asians how far they could ejaculate -- you will no doubt appreciate my desire to include him in this endeavor. I propose that Rushton return to the mall and ask blacks, whites, and Asians how many bong hits they can do without choking, and how many tabs of ecstasy they can take before their eyeballs roll back in their head and they begin to drool.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »