The racialized distress of cities like Detroit was clearly shocking. But, as Obama emphasized, America’s crisis was not confined to predominantly African American communities. Across the country, class, not race, was the most important determinant of an American’s life chances, and the big story of his second term as president was rural white working-class despair. It was Appalachia—West Virginia and Kentucky—held back by structural change, educational failure and immobility, that lurched into the headlines. At its most extreme, this lethal cocktail came to be symbolized by an epidemic of drug
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