This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects and an ever-slipperier slope for the young.

The white work­ing class, which usu­al­ly inspires lib­er­al con­cern only for its para­dox­i­cal, Repub­li­can-lean­ing vot­ing habits, has recent­ly become news­wor­thy for some­thing else: accord­ing to econ­o­mist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the win­ner of the lat­est Nobel Prize in eco­nom­ics, its mem­bers in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immod­er­ate rate. While the lifes­pan of afflu­ent whites con­tin­ues to length­en, the lifes­pan of poor whites has been shrink­ing. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealth­i­er ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this head­line: ​“Income Gap, Meet the Longevi­ty Gap.”

This was not sup­posed to hap­pen. For almost a cen­tu­ry, the com­fort­ing Amer­i­can nar­ra­tive was that bet­ter nutri­tion and med­ical care would guar­an­tee longer lives for all. So the great blue-col­lar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Jour­nal says, ​“star­tling.”

It was espe­cial­ly not sup­posed to hap­pen to whites who, in rela­tion to peo­ple of col­or, have long had the advan­tage of high­er earn­ings, bet­ter access to health care, safer neigh­bor­hoods, and of course free­dom from the dai­ly insults and harms inflict­ed on the dark­er-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevi­ty — 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women — though, hard­ly noticed, it has been nar­row­ing for the last two decades. Only whites, how­ev­er, are now dying off in unex­pect­ed­ly large num­bers in mid­dle age, their excess deaths account­ed for by sui­cide, alco­holism, and drug (usu­al­ly opi­ate) addiction.

There are some prac­ti­cal rea­sons why whites are like­ly to be more effi­cient than blacks at killing them­selves. For one thing, they are more like­ly to be gun-own­ers, and white men favor gun­shots as a means of sui­cide. For anoth­er, doc­tors, undoubt­ed­ly act­ing in part on stereo­types of non-whites as drug addicts, are more like­ly to pre­scribe pow­er­ful opi­ate painkillers to whites than to peo­ple of col­or. (I’ve been offered enough oxy­codone pre­scrip­tions over the years to stock a small ille­gal business.)

Man­u­al labor — from wait­ress­ing to con­struc­tion work — tends to wear the body down quick­ly, from knees to back and rota­tor cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doc­tor may opt for an opi­ate just to get you through the day.

The wages of despair

But some­thing more pro­found is going on here, too. As New York Times colum­nist Paul Krug­man puts it, the ​“dis­eases” lead­ing to excess white work­ing class deaths are those of ​“despair,” and some of the obvi­ous caus­es are eco­nom­ic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for work­ing class peo­ple of any color.

I grew up in an Amer­i­ca where a man with a strong back — and bet­ter yet, a strong union — could rea­son­ably expect to sup­port a fam­i­ly on his own with­out a col­lege degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leav­ing only the kind of work once rel­e­gat­ed to women and peo­ple of col­or avail­able in areas like retail, land­scap­ing, and deliv­ery-truck dri­ving. This means that those in the bot­tom 20% of white income dis­tri­b­u­tion face mate­r­i­al cir­cum­stances like those long famil­iar to poor blacks, includ­ing errat­ic employ­ment and crowd­ed, haz­ardous liv­ing spaces.

White priv­i­lege was nev­er, how­ev­er, sim­ply a mat­ter of eco­nom­ic advan­tage. As the great African-Amer­i­can schol­ar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, ​“It must be remem­bered that the white group of labor­ers, while they received a low wage, were com­pen­sat­ed in part by a sort of pub­lic and psy­cho­log­i­cal wage.”

Some of the ele­ments of this invis­i­ble wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s asser­tion that white work­ing class peo­ple were ​“admit­ted freely with all class­es of white peo­ple to pub­lic func­tions, pub­lic parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few pub­lic spaces that are not open, at least legal­ly speak­ing, to blacks, while the ​“best” schools are reserved for the afflu­ent — most­ly white and Asian Amer­i­can along with a sprin­kling of oth­er peo­ple of col­or to pro­vide the fairy dust of ​“diver­si­ty.” While whites have lost ground eco­nom­i­cal­ly, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the ​“psy­cho­log­i­cal wage” award­ed to white peo­ple has been shrinking.

For most of Amer­i­can his­to­ry, gov­ern­ment could be count­ed on to main­tain white pow­er and priv­i­lege by enforc­ing slav­ery and lat­er seg­re­ga­tion. When the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment final­ly weighed in on the side of deseg­re­ga­tion, work­ing class whites were left to defend their own dimin­ish­ing priv­i­lege by mov­ing right­ward toward the likes of Alaba­ma Gov­er­nor (and lat­er pres­i­den­tial can­di­date) George Wal­lace and his many white pseu­do-pop­ulist suc­ces­sors down to Don­ald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of uphold­ing white pow­er devolved from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to the state and then local lev­el, specif­i­cal­ly to local police forces, which, as we know, have tak­en it up with such enthu­si­asm as to become both a nation­al and inter­na­tion­al scan­dal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a run­ning tal­ly of the num­ber of Amer­i­cans (most­ly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment and a wave of on-cam­pus demon­stra­tions, has large­ly recap­tured the moral high ground for­mer­ly occu­pied by the civ­il rights movement.

The cul­ture, too, has been inch­ing bit by bit toward racial equal­i­ty, if not, in some lim­it­ed areas, black ascen­den­cy. If the stock image of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry ​“Negro” was the min­strel, the role of rur­al sim­ple­ton in pop­u­lar cul­ture has been tak­en over in this cen­tu­ry by the char­ac­ters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Hon­ey Boo Boo. At least in the enter­tain­ment world, work­ing class whites are now reg­u­lar­ly por­trayed as moron­ic, while blacks are often hyper-artic­u­late, street-smart, and some­times as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to main­tain the usu­al sense of white supe­ri­or­i­ty when parts of the media are squeez­ing laughs from the con­trast between savvy blacks and rur­al white bump­kins, as in the Tina Fey com­e­dy Unbreak­able Kim­my Schmidt. White, pre­sum­ably upper-mid­dle class peo­ple gen­er­al­ly con­ceive of these char­ac­ters and plot lines, which, to a child of white work­ing class par­ents like myself, sting with condescension.

Of course, there was also the elec­tion of the first black pres­i­dent. White, native-born Amer­i­cans began to talk of ​“tak­ing our coun­try back.” The more afflu­ent ones formed the Tea Par­ty; less afflu­ent ones often con­tent­ed them­selves with affix­ing Con­fed­er­ate flag decals to their trucks.

On the Amer­i­can Down­ward Slope

All of this means that the main­te­nance of white priv­i­lege, espe­cial­ly among the least priv­i­leged whites, has become more dif­fi­cult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the com­fort of know­ing that some­one was worse off and more despised than they were; racial sub­ju­ga­tion was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own sit­u­a­tion was deteriorating.

If the gov­ern­ment, espe­cial­ly at the fed­er­al lev­el, is no longer as reli­able an enforcer of white priv­i­lege, then it’s grass­roots ini­tia­tives by indi­vid­u­als and small groups that are help­ing to fill the gap — per­pe­trat­ing the micro-aggres­sions that roil col­lege cam­pus­es, the racial slurs yelled from pick­up trucks, or, at a dead­ly extreme, the shoot­ing up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civ­il Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a job­less high school dropout and report­ed­ly a heavy user of alco­hol and opi­ates. Even with­out a death sen­tence hang­ing over him, Roof was sure­ly head­ed toward an ear­ly demise.

Acts of racial aggres­sion may pro­vide their white per­pe­tra­tors with a fleet­ing sense of tri­umph, but they also take a spe­cial kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to tar­get a black run­ner and swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort — and a strong stom­ach — to paint a racial slur in excre­ment on a dor­mi­to­ry bath­room wall. Col­lege stu­dents may do such things in part out of a sense of eco­nom­ic vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, the knowl­edge that as soon as school is over their col­lege-debt pay­ments will come due. No mat­ter the effort expend­ed, how­ev­er, it is espe­cial­ly hard to main­tain a feel­ing of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty while strug­gling to hold onto one’s own place near the bot­tom of an unde­pend­able economy.

While there is no med­ical evi­dence that racism is tox­ic to those who express it — after all, gen­er­a­tions of wealthy slave own­ers sur­vived quite nice­ly — the com­bi­na­tion of down­ward mobil­i­ty and racial resent­ment may be a potent invi­ta­tion to the kind of despair that leads to sui­cide in one form or anoth­er, whether by gun­shots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceil­ing if you’re stand­ing on ice.

It’s easy for the lib­er­al intel­li­gentsia to feel right­eous in their dis­gust for low­er-class white racism, but the col­lege-edu­cat­ed elite that pro­duces the intel­li­gentsia is in trou­ble, too, with dimin­ish­ing prospects and an ever-slip­perier slope for the young. Whole pro­fes­sions have fall­en on hard times, from col­lege teach­ing to jour­nal­ism and the law. One of the worst mis­takes this rel­a­tive elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hat­ing on those — of any col­or or eth­nic­i­ty — who are falling even faster.