White people are now the only group whose life expectancy is decreasing. That it has been primarily defined as a health crisis – unlike the similar situation with crack cocaine that unfolded in the black community in the 80s, which was defined as a social problem to be solved by incarceration on a massive scale – is, Younge notes with characteristic scrupulousness, “both progress and the definition of white privilege”. The victims are disproportionately white. And there is the opioid crisis, from which more Americans died last year than in the whole of the Vietnam war. There is the real decline in income and job security since the 50s and the death of the American dream that things can only get better. First, there is the sense that, as the day approaches (within a generation) that white people will become a minority, that their – well, they would call it culture, others would call it privilege, so let’s split the difference and call it way of life – is under threat.
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