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Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

>Certainly, non-white Americans [...] would not be amenable to viewing themselves as either a symptom of, or merely collateral damage in, the narrative of the decline of white people.

I'm not framing it that way. I think you're the only one here who's doing that. In my view, if we're going to break big issues down by race, it's smart to address and include all the races - especially the biggest one.

While it's nice to imagine that non-white Americans would care about the problems of their fellow citizens, the decline of white America is at least the concern of voting Americans who happen to be white, which is most of them. This fact may be of interest to candidates seeking an electoral majority.

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>In my view, if we're going to break big issues down by race, it's smart to address and include all the races - especially the biggest one.

This isn't a racial issue - the decline of Middle America is not the decline of white America. There is no reason to focus on race per se, much less one race in exclusion to others.

>the decline of white America is at least the concern of voting Americans who happen to be white, which is most of them.

I don't think even most American white people view their economic status and fear of the future through the lens of their own racial identity.

>I don't think even most American white people view their economic status and fear of the future through the lens of their own racial identity.

Personally, I would also prefer to leave race out of it. However, in the Democratic Party 2020 primary, racial identity and "intersectionality" is at the top of everyone's mind. In that environment, I think it is unwise to address every racial group by name except for the largest one.

>This isn't a racial issue - the decline of Middle America is not the decline of white America.

The data shows that something uniquely bad is happening to white Americans [0]:

"We focus on non‐Hispanic whites because their mortality trends were particularly adverse in the last decade and differ from those of non‐Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics."

"The underlying mechanisms driving mortality trends for non‐Hispanic whites are fundamentally different from those driving trends for other racial/ethnic groups, as suggested by James and Cossman (2017)."

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/padr.12249

> This isn't a racial issue - the decline of Middle America is not the decline of white America. There is no reason to focus on race per se, much less one race in exclusion to others.

Really? Because as someone from Middle America, lack of diversity is consistently brought up in conversations about about this area in every other context. Why is the Midwest dying? Why is the Midwest an "undesirable" place to live? Why is the Midwest conservative? Why does the Midwest support Trump? Lack of racial and cultural diversity is brought up in every single one of these conversations without fail.

So it seems appropriate that, in the context of the decline of Middle America, and in in the context of exacerbated declines in health outcomes particularly for white people, we at least consider the racial aspects as well.

As a counter to "diversity" and "conservatism", the entire South has plenty of non-whites, yet exemplifies even greater health dysfunction than anywhere in the Midwest.

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