The phrase “white privilege” transitioned from the academy into common speech in the Obama years—at exactly the moment that millions of white Americans were experiencing the worst social trauma since the Great Depression. For the first time in American history, life expectancy was actually declining, and most steeply among non-Hispanic whites. Non-Hispanic white males, 31 percent of the population, accounted for 70 percent of the suicides in the United States in 2014.36 Of the 33,091 Americans who died in 2015 of opioid overdoses,
