[cpayne624]

I think they specify 'White' based on this passage:

"While blacks and Hispanics without college degrees are also falling behind economically and socially, middle-age mortality has worsened for whites in particular over the past 20 years—a fact some attribute partly to social context.

“For whites, their reference group is previous generations of whites,” said Shannon Monnat, a Pennsylvania State University professor who studies the opioid epidemic in rural America. “When they look back on their parents and grandparents, it feels like their generation is doing worse.”"

[dkhenry]

Its previous generations non college educated whites who are previously lived in rural areas which better job prospects then today. The fact that the mortality gab is closing is nothing to do with race and more to do with economics. Showing that race isn't the factor, but the reporting instead focuses on race like this is some kind of white person problem. All we are seeing is the economic collapse that hit inner cities and led to drug and mortality problems reach out to the rural areas.

[anigbrowl]

It has to do with race in that racial privilege used to have a higher economic premium than it does now. It would be facile toignore this fact; economics isn't some indepedent objective force, but the product of social and structural factors that are ultimately arbitrary.

I'm a big fan of Colin Woodard's book American Nations, which examines the very different social, economic and cultural assumptions of 11 different regions in the USA and goes a long way towards explaining the various frictions that arise from conflicting worldviews.

[dkhenry]

I would debate that this is less racial privilege and more locality based. These areas that are now becoming economically depressed are ones that could support the wage depression that drove jobs out of the city decades ago ( and with them drove anyone who could afford to flee out of the city ). I think you are right on, but we need to understand that, while race provided differing social and structural factors, the issue is not someone's race, and to make the problems focus on race distracts from the real issue. This is everyone's problem.

[rdiddly]

Essentially what that's saying is, white people now have black-people problems.

[ryandrake]

Brilliant, couldn't have been said better.