Race is not a big deal in “Our Kids.” The voices include many whites along with Latinos and blacks, and the problems are similar across ethnicities. Nor do the Latinos and blacks treat discrimination as a decisive factor in their problems. Sometimes they explicitly discount the importance of discrimination.
Such observations are heartening, and they correspond to my own experience living in a part of rural Maryland with a Southern heritage and a significant black presence: race is not the angst-ridden issue in working-class America that you would assume if you based your expectations on the highly publicized problems in Ferguson or Baltimore. The same observations are disheartening insofar as “Our Kids” drives home how widely the problems it describes have spread throughout the working class. We’ve got a national affliction on our hands, not pockets of affliction.