Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Republican politicians, including California’s Ronald Reagan, swiftly moved to enact expansive new gun-control measures when Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense advocated carrying guns in public—as permitted by California law at the time. Reagan claimed that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” Fear of black people with guns also suffused a congressional report produced after a summer of urban unrest in 1967, which drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”15

sixty-two-year-old African American man named Clarence Daniels entered a Walmart in Tampa, Florida, with a legally owned pistol strapped to his waist, only to be tackled and put in a choke hold by a white vigilante who held Daniels to the ground while shouting, “He’s got a gun!”

(Wayne himself once said in an interview that “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”)28

starting in the 1980s, the rhetoric shifted around the same time that the rereading of the Second Amendment found its way into legislation and the new NRA emerged; gun manufacturers began promoting the notion that their products help men recover their status, power, and respect.

Leonard Steinhorn maintains that this shift from firearms as utilities to firearms as totems of manhood and symbols of white male identity emerged because the gun lobby and gun manufacturers positioned guns as responses to yet another crisis of masculinity in post-1960s America. “It wasn’t long ago when broad-shouldered white men dominated our culture, and their very status as breadwinners gave them power and pride,”

Starting in the 1960s, the civil rights and women’s movements brought increased competition into these marketplaces, while at the same time wages and the availability of manufacturing jobs declined precipitously. These changes in the economic and social order left working-class white men feeling bypassed, humiliated, and “victimized” by “usurpers” such as women and people of color.

“So how do these white men restore the strength and prestige of their idealized past?” Steinhorn asks. “Through guns, which instill fear particularly among the urban and educated elites

John warned of a racialized “criminal class” that aimed only to steal and rob if not thwarted by armed “good guys.” Other members of John’s CHL class similarly justified their positions, describing anxieties about imagined dangerous neighborhoods and racial others. As a man named Adam explained to Stroud, “You hear about carjackings… let’s just say you pull up to a convenience store and there’s some certain people outside that make you feel a little nervous, then you’ve got your gun there… to make yourself feel more comfortable.”

Gun logic required imagining danger around every corner; losing the Man Card needed to remain a constant threat. Over time, the dominant skill set and survival strategy for coping involved neither compromise nor negotiation. Rather, the response to change in many parts of the country always depended on building more castles and buying more guns.

Epidemiologists and practitioners of evidence-based medicine learn to calculate statistics of relative risk, a term used to describe the likelihood of developing a particular disease after exposure to a pathogen.

Polarization then leads to an often-absurd state of affairs. Calculations of risk produce ever-safer cars, medications, bike lanes, and building codes. Yet the very idea of even studying risk becomes a risk itself when the conversation turns to guns, laying the groundwork for decisions that seem at odds with individual and national well-being. Gun-industry trade organizations fund leading gun suicide–prevention programs—and then force them to restrict mention of the potential risks posed by firearms.

From 1921 until 2007, Missouri enforced a permit-to-purchase (PTP) law that required anyone wanting to purchase a handgun to apply in person at a local sheriff’s office. There, potential buyers would undergo an interview and a series of background checks to assess risk factors such as past convictions for violent crimes, being under a restraining order for domestic violence, or heightened risk of suicide.

“It was no big deal at all,” a retired lawyer from Joplin who grew up working in his parents’ pawn and gun shop told me. “We never thought anything of it, just took a few minutes. Kind of made sense to have someone track the guns in town.”

Missouri state lawmakers repealed the PTP law in 2007, and most remaining gun-purchase checks and regulations fell like legislative dominoes in the years thereafter. As noted earlier, 2014 legislation allowed anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry guns openly in cities or towns that otherwise banned the open carrying of firearms. In 2016, the Missouri legislature passed “permitless carry” legislation, created new “stand-your-ground” laws, and expanded Castle Doctrine protections.

In 1999, Connecticut pioneered a program of what is called “risk-based, temporary, preemptive gun removal,” authorizing police to temporarily remove guns from individuals when there is “probable cause to believe… that a person poses a risk of imminent personal injury to himself or herself or to other individuals.” After the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012, the state passed gun laws billed as among the “toughest in the country,” including new bans on assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines, and mandatory background checks for all gun sales alongside expanded background checks.4

Did gun legislation in one state or another change the ways people lived and died—and if so, how?

people who reflexively shouted “Gun research doesn’t add up!” were often the same people who supported a ban on effective gun research. It was as if they reprimanded plants for not flowering during a drought while at the same time blocking the trucks that delivered water.

believe we should press ahead with firearm research whenever we can because I don’t think that anyone on any side of this gun control debate is well served by censorship or the absence of knowledge—save the organizations and industries that benefit from polarizing Americans and making us think we hate each other or will never reach consensus on difficult issues.

The Missouri graph shows that white male firearm suicides remained atop suicides by everyone else, and particularly so starting in the mid- to late 2000s, around the time that Missouri began relaxing its gun regulations. White male suicides trended downward in the state from the mid-1990s until 2007 and then rose steadily until they hit their highest points on record in 2014 and 2015, at over 20 deaths per 100,000 white men. Meanwhile, firearm suicides by persons of every other demographic group showed what is called random variability, spiking occasionally but otherwise demonstrating relatively lower levels and no consistent increases or decreases over time.

What types of guns did men use for suicide? (WISQARS makes no distinction between handguns, hunting rifles, or AR-15s.) In this sense, how valid is the connection to PTP legislation, since PTP laws often regulate handguns but not other types of firearms?

A constant theme emerged from the almost unimaginably dysfunctional process of trying to sink people’s health care with no real alternative in place: every single GOP proposal, initiative, or inaction carried negative consequences for Southern white working-class populations who formed the core of Trump’s support base.

concerns about threats to their status and privilege represented by government programs that promised to equally distribute resources or imagined health advantages.

Low-income housing represents the last frayed netting that tries to catch men as they fall from whatever safety their lives once represented toward homelessness and the streets. Tennessee is a state without much safeguard in that regard. Residents pay no state income tax, and many social services suffer as a result. Which is to say that the social lattice is weak, has many holes, and often fails to catch men, such as the ones with whom I’m speaking, on their way down.

In June 2012, the US Supreme Court seemingly ended the political battle over the ACA’s legitimacy when it upheld core tenets of the legislation. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts endorsed the government’s right to enforce ACA’s “individual mandate” that required persons above certain income levels to purchase health care or face tax penalties. The Court thus sanctioned what might be considered fiscal principles of herd immunity—namely, that networks of health care and social support work best when most people participate in them.3

the ruling also substantially limited the law’s forced expansion of Medicaid. In its initial formulation, the ACA linked a host of federal payments to each state’s participation in health care reform. Thanks in part to an amicus brief filed by a conservative Vanderbilt University law professor named James Blumstein, the court ruled that the ACA exceeded its constitutional authority by “coercing” states into participating in Medicaid expansion.

each state could make its own choices about coverage for the less fortunate.

once slave-owning state, Tennessee long mandated separate and unequal health care. White hospitals and clinics refused to treat African slaves and free blacks through the Civil War. In 1881, Tennessee passed the first segregation legislation in the postbellum South, a law that required railroad cars separated by race, setting

topics of health care and health insurance in Tennessee were already imbued with historical tensions long before the ACA, as questions such as Whose life is worth saving and insuring? or Whose bodies are seen as risky? coursed through larger debates.

in the mid-1960s, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina—as he defected from the Democratic Party to the GOP—menacingly warned that the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 would lead to “upheaval of social patterns and customs,” leading to violent revolt by white Southerners.

sociologist Alondra Nelson details how the Black Panther Party supported free medical clinics for black Americans as part of its broader strategies for advancing social justice. Panther leader Bobby Seale saw the clinics as more than window dressing: “When donors visited the Black Panther Party, they came and saw our real programs, a real clinic, with real doctors and medics, giving service to people.”7

many Southern men embody what historian C. Vann Woodward once called the “divided mind” of the South, in which Southerners, and Southern white men in particular, seek the material gains of modern America while still holding fast to mores, prejudices, or historical traumas of their regional pasts.11

“government” in states like Tennessee hangs heavy with historical inflections. For instance, government invokes the Reconstruction period, when federal forces and Republican governments “occupied” Southern states and pressured them into granting political rights to newly freed slaves. At the time, redeemers became the term for white Southerners who violently aimed to uphold white supremacy, in opposition to the so-called carpetbaggers and scallywags who promoted Reconstruction governments, black citizenship, and black political activity. Government also implies the bitter legacy of the civil rights era, when many—though certainly not all—white Southerners viewed federal efforts to desegregate schools, lunch counters, voting booths,

group psychology that identified health risks on welfare mothers, Mexicans, gangs, and other abject others who undermined the system. We are the guardians of our own health, the group mentality implied. But socialism and communism undermine us, cost us, and ultimately link us… to them. The narrative then constructed barriers of inside and outside. If you was born here, the message conveyed, with here implying not just the United States but also the white, anti-communist South, then you was born here.

Resistance to health care reform also reflected venerable Southern traditions of opposition to change and particularly to perceived Northern intervention into racial norms and social orders. Historian Drew Faust describes “a kind of guerrilla warfare of the domestic, of the local” that Southern white populations waged in the Reconstruction period, in which whites “just refus[ed] to let society change in the ways that the architects of [Negro] freedom in the North might hope for.”

On an aggregate level, Tennessee’s failure to expand Medicaid potentially cost every single adult black and white resident of the state somewhere between two and five weeks of life.

blocking health care for “Mexicans” and “welfare queens” came at considerable cost to white populations

ACA also protected Americans from medical bankruptcies. Researchers estimate that over 60 percent of people who file for bankruptcy in the United States do so because they are unable to pay for medical costs due to a lack of health insurance or so-called underinsurance (insurance not sufficient to cover the costs of a major health incident). A 2009 study by a group of scholars in Boston, including a rising Harvard law professor named Elizabeth Warren, found that 62.1 percent of all US bankruptcies in 2007 were medical. Ninety-two percent of these medical debtors had medical bills over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income, and the remainder met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills.

though the ACA and Medicaid expansion would have cost real money from somewhere, the dirty little secret of federally funded health care programs in states like Tennessee is that much of the actual expense would be borne by the taxes of… Northerners. Were it truly a post-racial America, cost concerns might have raised certain existential questions about citizenship and responsibility: What is life worth? What is our responsibility to each other? How can we balance individual behaviors and public wealth? But in the real world, cost generated into a feedback loop that we recorded in some of our focus groups, where white Tennesseans used “cost” as a thinly veiled way to talk about race.

If, as Senator Orrin Hatch would poetically put it, Obamacare supporters represented the “stupidest, dumbass people,” then these supporters in Kentucky were at least stupid enough to live longer lives with a bit more money in their bank accounts than their smarter, anti-Obamacare neighbors in Tennessee.

Trump essentially asked lower-income white people to choose less coverage and more suffering over a system that linked them to Mexicans, welfare queens, and… to healthier, longer lives.

from a public health perspective at least, it seems more than possible that the policies and sentiments that aim to bolster the identity of whiteness also effectively turn whiteness itself into a heightened, perilous, and ever-more-costly category of risk.

“But given the greatness of our schools… it’s hard to understand, why have we stopped supporting them? If people only knew the ways we’ve stopped supporting our schools. A principal’s job used to be to provide vision. But now so much of what I do is shift money around. I take from here and put it there. Then I take from there and try to fill a gap somewhere else. Someday… this is going to catch up with us.… Probably already has.” I

Nostalgia very often arises from false memory. What we see as homesickness or a desire to return to the old ways represents a state that psychologists might deem a post-childhood longing for an idealized time when things felt coherent; a time that may or may not ever have existed.

I wished to learn about the everyday experiences of living in a state in which backlash GOP-style austerity politics and steep budget cuts to state budgets, about which much more appears below, came to dominate daily life. Did Kansans experience affirmation of their political beliefs when they saw cuts play out? Or did ideology begin to change when cuts took aim at core issues that impacted schools and children?

Brownback signed a controversial school finance bill, HB 2506, which created tax breaks for corporations that donated to private school scholarship funds, allowed public school districts to hire unlicensed teachers for science and math classes, cut support for at-risk students, and made it easier for schools to fire experienced teachers. HB 2506 further defunded government by supplementing these changes with significant cuts to property taxes. “This is a win for Kansas students,” Brownback said at the time. “This is a win for parents.…

Brownback described the Kansas brand of austerity as “a choice between dependence and self-reliance, between intrusion and freedom,” while claiming that “economic policy in Kansas… means the American Midwest is fulfilling the dream of a Midwest renaissance in America.”7

Cuts to infrastructure became increasingly apparent. Kansas fell below national averages on a wide range of public services, including public transit, housing, and police and fire protection.

“bridges were awarded a D-plus, in part due to Kansas’s nearly 3,000 structurally deficient bridges. Only five states have more structurally deficient bridges than Kansas” and that “dams earned the lowest grade of a D-minus.… With 6,087 dams, Kansas has the second most dams in the United States next only to Texas. Of the state’s dams, 230 are classified as high hazard, meaning failure would likely lead to loss of life and significant property damage.”

“Kansas Will Pay the Price for Diverting Money from Highway Fund,” warned a headline in the Kansas City Star. Slate reported that

the state economy imploded. Tax cuts seemed to bring out the worst in people, often by placing individual wealth management ahead of communal good. Growing numbers of people declared themselves “businesses” in order to pay zero income tax. Rates on the wealthiest citizens fell ever lower,