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April 17 - May 10, 2022
Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and other nonwhite others.
Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.4
on-the-ground white Americans make tradeoffs that negatively affect their lives and livelihoods in support of larger prejudices or ideals.
the tradeoffs made by people like Trevor frequently and materially benefited persons and corporations far higher up the socioeconomic food chain—whose agendas and capital gains depended on the invisible sacrifices of lower income whites.
The white body that refuses treatment rather than supporting a system that might benefit everyone then becomes a metaphor for, and parable of, the threatened decline of the larger nation.
First, a host of conservative political movements emerged (or reemerged) in Southern and midwestern states over the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that brought into mainstream US politics once fringe agendas, such as starving government of funding, dismantling social programs, or allowing free flow of most types of firearms.
as they came to power in Southern and midwestern states in ways that shaped state agendas, national GOP platforms, and, ultimately, policies of the Trump administration.
backlash conservatism gave way to something even more powerful: practices of backlash governance.
Second, these increasingly unified forms of conservatism advanced politically through overt or implicit appeals to what has b...
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A number of people with whom I spoke, when I explained the thesis of my book, told me that positions that appeared to reflect racism instead reflected a larger, color-blind “hatred of the poor.”
White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was—and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow—increasing rates of death.
Succinctly put: a host of complex anxieties prompt increasing numbers of white Americans like Trevor to support right-wing politicians and policies, even when these policies actually harm white Americans at growing rates. As these policy agendas spread from Southern and midwestern legislatures into the halls of Congress and the White House, ever-more white Americans are then, literally, dying of whiteness.
Thomas Frank, in his modern classic What’s the Matter with Kansas?, writes that backlash conservatism rests on the foundation that “ignoring one’s economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed differently it is an act of noble self-denial; a sacrifice for a holier cause.” In her thoughtful study Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild poses the paradoxical question: “Why, with so many problems [in poor white communities], was there so much disdain for federal money to alleviate them?”11
When I began to sift through the statistics for gun injury and death in Missouri, I quickly realized that the primary victims of gun mortality were not criminals or inner-city gang members, as the NRA and some politicians implied. Rather, as gun laws were liberalized, gun deaths spiked… among white people. This was because white Missourians dominated injuries and deaths via gun-related suicides, partner violence, and accidental shootings—and in ways that outpaced African American gun deaths from homicides.
legislation that substantially deregulated gun purchases set Missouri on a path toward becoming a top state for gun suicide, even among other pro-gun states, and that the primary victims of these trends were white Missourians, particularly white men living in rural areas.
688 additional white students dropped out of Kansas public high schools in the first four years of budget cuts than would have done so otherwise. On average, in the United States, dropping out of high school correlates with nine years of lost life expectancy.
the Tea Party, the alt-right, and the populism of Donald Trump seem to signal a marked shift in the course of American history and hasten the downfall of what remains of white conservative political traditions of compromise.
When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness.
in 2016, Missouri lawmakers overrode their governor’s veto to enact Senate Bill 656, the so-called guns everywhere bill. Among other stipulations, SB 656 eliminated requirements for training, education, background checks, and permits needed to carry concealed weapons in Missouri. Bill 656 also annulled most city and regional gun restrictions, vastly expanded so-called Castle Doctrine coverage
research suggested that gun injuries and deaths rose after it became easier for people to buy and carry firearms. For instance, a team of investigators led by Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, analyzed crime data from Missouri and found that the state’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase (PTP) handgun law “was associated with a 25 percent increase in firearm homicides rates.”
Between 2008 and 2014, the Missouri gun homicide rate rose to 47 percent higher than the national average. Rates of gun death by suicide, partner violence, and accidental shooting soared as well. In 2014, gun deaths topped deaths by motor vehicle accident for the first time in the state. News outlets referred to Missouri as the “Shoot Me State.”5
Over the course of the early twenty-first century, rightist agendas came to dominate the state legislature in ways that loosened gun laws, slashed public spending, blocked health care reform, and undercut social safety net programs. Meanwhile, racial tensions came to full boil in November 2014, after Darren Wilson, a twenty-eight-year-old white police officer in Ferguson, shot and killed an unarmed African American teenager named Michael Brown.
What if suicide researchers are barred by their own government from obtaining federal funding to research or compile data about the leading method of lethal suicide in the United States? The method of suicide that kills more Americans than all other intentional means combined, including hanging, poisoning, overdosing, jumping, suffocating, or cutting? The method that kills more Americans than all of the murderers, robbers, terrorists, and attackers put together as well?
In 1996, Congress passed a ban on federally funded gun research. Legislators—lobbied heavily by the National Rifle Association—added a rider to the federal budget. That rider is known as the Dickey Amendment, and it stripped the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of funding for gun violence prevention research and stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
part of the initial impetus for the Dickey Amendment resulted from the outcry from the gun lobby about a 1992 study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) titled “Suicide in the Home in Relation to Gun Ownership,” which tested the hypothesis that “limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides.” After an extensive analysis of nearly a thousand cases, the authors found evidence supporting the notion that “the ready availability of guns increases the risk of suicide in the home” and advised that “people who own firearms should carefully weigh their reasons for keeping a gun in
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the vast majority of people who try suicide by means other than firearm survive their initial attempts. For instance, drug overdose, the most common method in suicide attempts in the United States, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.17
Turning a firearm on oneself (or a loved one in some cases of armed domestic murder-suicide) can fall into a category that experts call “impulsive”—a spontaneous response to immediate stressors, such as a romantic breakup, job loss, fight, or rejection. One landmark study of impulsive suicide attempts in Texas found that 24 percent of young people spent less than five minutes between the decision to commit suicide and the actual attempt, that 70 percent took less than an hour,
Roughly 85 percent of firearm suicide attempts result in death. For this reason, firearms rank at the top of what researchers call “case-fatality charts” that list the percentages of people who die from the different methods of suicide. As suicidologists describe it, guns top the list because of their “inherent deadliness,” “ease of use,” and “accessibility”
I am a white American who sat in a room with other white Americans in a town that is overwhelmingly white, non-Hispanic, and American. Highlighting another, oft-unspoken distinctive factor about gun suicide is its connection to whiteness in general and white maleness in particular.
white Americans dominate death-per-suicide-attempt categories for one main reason: they remain dramatically overrepresented in civilian death data about firearm suicides.
the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—gun suicides between 2009 and 2015 looked like this: • 2009: Non-Hispanic white gun suicides = 16,351; total gun suicides = 17,172 • 2010: Non-Hispanic white gun suicides = 16,928; total gun suicides = 18,365 • 2011: Non-Hispanic white gun suicides = 17,536; total gun suicides = 18,984 • 2012: Non-Hispanic white gun suicides = 18,022; total gun suicides = 19,572 • 2013: Non-Hispanic white gun suicides = 18,561; total gun suicides = 20,087 • 2014: Non-Hispanic white gun suicides = 18,619; total gun suicides = 20,152 • 2015:
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Non-Hispanic white persons comprised 80 percent of the US population in 1980 but only 69 percent of the population in 2000. According to the US census, the percentage of non-Hispanic white people in the United States hit an all-time low of 62 percent in 2013 and kept falling every year after that. And yet over this same time period, 2009–2015, white populations consistently committed 92 percent of all gun suicides.23
A widely cited opinion study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that “attitudes towards guns in many US whites appear to be influenced… by illogical racial biases” related to the “fear of black violence and crime.”
“whiteness means being part of the group whose appearance, traditions, religion and even food are the default norm” and in which experts saw “a crisis of white identity” leading to Brexit and the rise of Trump.
This kind of language often rightly reflects the painful everyday experiences and emotions that emerge when modes of production change, companies leave town, and good, hardworking people and communities are left holding the bag. In the 1890s, Durkheim, the sociologist, introduced the concept of anomie to describe a crisis of disconnect that emerged between personal lives and social structures. Durkheim wrote in an era of mass industrialization, a time when workers and collective guild labor found themselves left behind by evolving economies. Anomic suicide, as he called it, results when people
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Anne Case and Angus Deaton detailed “a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013,” and suggested that not only were white bodies dying off at higher rates—so, too, were the skills, structures, and hierarchies that gave American whiteness its valences in the first place.37
We often hear, for instance, of a crisis of masculinity brought about by women’s suffrage, or the women’s movement, or women’s entry into the workforce, or the #MeToo movement, or any number of other social changes in which strivings for equality by women are met by uncertainty in men. For instance, in 2015, Cardinal Raymond Burke blamed “radical feminism” for causing a “man crisis” in the Roman Catholic Church, which left men feeling “marginalized.”
Instead of the automatic authority they accrued by simply showing up, these men found themselves in a world in which they faced more competition and enjoyed less prestige. Maybe they even had to make their own dinners or type their own memos.
sociologists such as Jennifer Carlson and Angela Stroud, who study what Carlson calls the “everyday politics of guns in an age of decline.” Both researchers study not how guns kill but why guns are deemed worth living and dying for. Stroud, for instance, extensively interviews white, permit-holding, “good guys with guns” and finds that these men carry firearms “because a white person with a gun is not presumed to be a criminal, he or she can navigate the world with some confidence that other people, most notably the police, will not presume they are bad guys.” White privilege
IN 2010, BUSHMASTER Firearms unveiled an advertising campaign for its popular .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle, the civilian version of a fully automatic weapon used by US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The campaign invited men to have their “Man Cards Reissued”
December 14, 2012, when a young man named Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School using a .223-caliber Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle.
On the flip side of the novelty Man Card, fine print explained that the bearer held “Rights and Privileges.… Today he is a man. Fully entitled to all of the rights and privileges duly afforded.” Privileges seems a particularly interesting word choice.
In early colonial America, firearms were the armaments of white upper-class power and a benefit that upper-class whites bestowed on lower-class whites to separate them from people of color.
in the New World, white men “were armed and had to be armed,” as historian Edmund Morgan describes it. Upper-class colonial white people allowed poor white people to carry firearms to quell rebellions by chattel slaves or to repel Native Americans and pirates. Aristocratic whites then found a new reason to carry firearms—to quell potential rebellions by lower-class whites. Laws in seventeenth-century Virginia allowed white people to carry firearms and forbade African slaves and Native Americans from doing so. Meanwhile, the first US authorities in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase moved
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Article VI of the Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1776 and ratified in 1781, required that “every state shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed.” The Constitution, signed in Philadelphia in 1787, granted Congress the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” The Second Amendment, adopted in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, stipulated that “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
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legal historians such as Carl T. Bogus, Robert Cottrol, and Raymond Diamond place white anxieties about control of black populations at the center of these debates as well. In an extensively researched “hidden history” of the Second Amendment, Bogus finds that “the militia remained the principal means of protecting the social order and preserving white control over an enormous black population.
After Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, armed militias and mobs conducted mass executions in Virginia, and the state legislature passed a series of laws that forbade free black persons “to keep or carry any firelock of any kind, any military weapon, or any powder or lead.”
1834, the Tennessee Supreme Court revised the firearms provision in its state constitution on racial grounds: “the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” became “the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.”10
Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s, became a vocal proponent of “the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense.”
“If the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie,” he famously proclaimed, “then it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.”
