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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

I think you could strike 'Young' and 'White' from the title, and it'd still be accurate.

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.”"

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.

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.

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.

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

Brilliant, couldn't have been said better.

An interesting thing I noticed after moving to America, is that race is such a big deal here that many issues have to be labeled by race, even if they apply universally.

Canadian medias on the other hand, seem to be much less interested in playing the race card.

Canada doesn't (to my knowledge) have a history of slavery, de jure (Confederacy) and then de facto (Jim Crow) followed by segregation. That may be the reason there is little interest on "playing the race card".

Canada has <5% minority groups... most are 2-3%. It's pretty much all white (86% or something)

US is 60% white roughly.

It's a bigger deal because it's a more noticeable issue.

Depends on the area. The coasts are very different.

I was astonished by the diversity in Toronto. A much more global feel than I get in the midwest US.

its very strange to. i never saw it as a child nor expeirienced it but when i got older in america every one seems to be about race and other things that can differentiate in one way or another.

Possibly because many people have looked at the social narratives that they grew up with and concluded that they did not accurately reflect their experience of the world.

true but still why race issues i grew up with many different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities never had issues nor today. is it about misunderstandings or learned and/or brought up that way or trully just the news.

I'm having some trouble parsing your sentence, and do I don't know anything about when/where you grew up that would allow me discuss this in context. This doesn't seem like the place to do a review of the history of race relations in the US, which is a large and complex subject.

'Playing the race card' often comes off as code for saying 'racial issues aren't real.' Are you sure that you're not overlooking significant structural factors just because Canada has less racial tension than the USA does?

Canada also has less races and it's less diverse than America. The race card has been played way too much these past 8 years. It's disgusting.

You would probably do well to ignore my comments on any sociopolitical topics then, as the difference in our outlooks will likely cause you acute distress.

Setting aside white, young is relevant as the numbers are showing a marked increase in some behaviors versus ~15-20 years ago among the same age group in particular. It's one thing (still bad) to see alcoholism and drug abuse amongst the middle aged following the termination of a career or something, it's quite another to see it increase amongst the youth before they even have a chance to start (or because they find they have no chance to start).

I wonder if they're mistaking economic factors causing more drug deaths for the new and lethal Fentanyl-laced heroin on the streets.

The part that applies specially to young and white is the elevated mortality. Life expectancies for that group are declining which isn't true for African-Americans and Hispanics or Asians.

You could, but the article is focused on issues specific to young white Americans.

thats what i was thinking it put a little to much emphasis on those.

Won't get as many clicks that way.

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