White women in rural America are having a hard go of it. A recent Washington Post article reported that, around 2000, the death rates for black Americans and Hispanics began to fall while the death rate for white Americans began to rise.
Now The Stranger has taken a closer lookat the numbers, highlighting the fact that the death rate for white men has been gradually falling, but that of white women has spiked upward. There’s also a difference between urban and rural white women. The death rate for white women in cities has remained flat, but has risen sharply for their rural counterparts.
The Stranger notes, “White women in rural areas are not being killed but killing themselves, either directly or indirectly. And it is mostly women above 40.” Still, it’s worth noting that the death rate for white women as a whole is still much lower than that of white men, Hispanics, and black Americans.