> The fact that the Canton graduates were largely successful in evading the stigma associated with opium peddling was also due to #ClassAndRace... The[y].. were protected.. by the.. belief that a group of upper-crust white men from some of the nation’s oldest Protestant families.. titans of industry and pillars of.. communities.. could not have done anything blameworthy. These dynamics of race and class have not, by any means, ceased to operate even in twenty-first-century America.