That health graph! Jeez Louis(iana).
Fuckin' LOL of course they goddamn realize it. Wealth was a proxy for breeding long before slavery was abolished and became absolutely entrenched during Reconstruction. It's pretty funny if you look up "wigger" on UrbanDictionary because the people who remember aren't gonna tell ya? But it's the term Southern elitists used to describe white people who are honorary members of the African-American race due to their (lack-of) income, (lack-of) resources and (lack-of) breeding. I'll say this for the south - they integrated more than most people realize, it's just that black people can never be white. White people? Yeah they can for sure be treated as black. There's a reason the South cares so fucking much more about "tradition" - it reinforces a striated culture of haves and have-nots. The North was colonized by religious extremists and rebels while the South was colonized by mercantilists. The North became a place that was brutal to everyone while the South became a place that took care of nobility at the expense of the chattel. Northern tradition is whatever your grandfather did; Southern tradition is whatever your grandfather's grandfather's grandfather did - because if you had any resources you sought greener pastures and you aren't a Southerner anymore. The people running for office, the people applying law and the people distributing resources aren't on goddamn Medicare and they know it and if you're in trouble your church will sort your shit out, not the state, because your church can determine whether or not you deserve it. State's gotta give money out to everyone, especially "welfare queens". The cruelty is the point.“Expanding Medicaid could help a lot, but these states just don’t do it,” Braga told us. “And they don’t realize how much of an impact that actually has on people’s lives and their financial well-being — even access to employment.
Long discussion of weather wigger was a valid and real class of people is one of the more ignorant things I can remember us kids discussing growing up in neighborhood of gritty white auto workers. We weren't poor, our dads had boats, took hunting trips and could own several different nice guns. We knew that we weren't middle class like the folks on TV (at least not until Rosanne and we didn't really understand Archie Bunker) but we wanted to be better than somebody. I also remember playing smear the queer in our boy scout pack, not one adult ever batted an eye at us gleefully smearing some queers. I know gay men who remember smearing queers and they never thought a thing about it until I brought it up decades later, homophobia was the air we breathed. It's so different from the world my child inhabits. I paid a lot of attention to the news as a kid. I remember Reagans welfare queens and Willy Horton. I loved the word intefada (feels good in the mouth) and wished I could wear a hat like Arafat. I guess I'm musing.
We probably have a couple dozen people passing through the birth center every year who would have been hunted like Matthew Shepard when I was a kid. We've got a long way to go but we've come so far? I mean, we didn't just play smear the queer? I had to hide a drunk buddy from the cops because he trashed a gas station with the excuse that "the cashier came onto him." Legit Nazis. There were the skinheads who weren't that racist and then there were the skinheads that oh my holy fuck most definitely were. Back when men were men and swastikas were in ballpoint on denim jackets. That's why they're mad. This is what we took from them.