Charles Murray’s 2012 book Coming Apart documented that the white working class was doing poorly, but the real shocking news came in 2015 when the husband-wife team of Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented the increase in “deaths of despair” among non-college whites—suicides, cirrhosis, and overdoses from opioid painkillers and heroin.
This was particularly striking because, in contrast, black and Hispanic life expectancies were improving in 2000-2014.
In this decade, however, as I’ve been documenting for the last three years, we’ve seen a surge in “deaths of exuberance”—homicides, traffic fatalities, and overdoses on party drugs laced with fentanyl. These are hitting blacks and Hispanics especially hard during the depolicing of the “racial reckoning.”
But young people are killing themselves more too, especially blacks during the triumph of Black Lives Matter. Here are CDC WONDER statistics for the increase in the death rate from 2019 to 2021 for people 24 and under:
| Growth in death rate from 2019 to 2021 (Age 0 to 24) | Blacks | Hispanics | Whites | Asians |
| Homicides | 43% | 37% | 12% | 12% |
| Motor vehicle accidents | 42% | 30% | 11% | 8% |
| Overdoses and other accidental poisonings | 121% | 83% | 44% | 21% |
| Suicides | 33% | 7% | 5% | 17% |
So for the first three, the deaths of exuberance, there seems to be a direct relationship between how exuberant each race has been during the current depolicing era, with black death rates going up the most, followed by Hispanics, then whites, and finally Asians.
However, the 33% rise in suicides among young blacks during this Black Lives Matter era is pretty shocking as well.
