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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Kansas added only 29,000 “nonfarm” jobs in the two years after the tax cuts took effect—by contrast, Nebraska, an economically similar state with a much smaller labor force, saw a net increase of 35,000 jobs. Kansas began to actually lose jobs in mid-2015; in 2016, Kansas ranked forty-sixth among all states in private sector job growth.

Bloomberg News summarized: “The Kansas supply-side experiment unravels… tax cuts were supposed to spur growth, boost revenue and create jobs. The results were the exact opposite.” Forbes detailed how “the great Kansas tax cut experiment crashes and burns.”14

when Governor Brownback took office. The first rounds of tax cuts eliminated about $200 million in education spending—the largest reduction in the state’s history. Brownback also changed the school financing formula at the expense of poorer, urban districts.

“My district has been forced to cut one million dollars a year,” the superintendent of a district in southern Kansas told me. “One million dollars. At first, we cut lunch options; but now we’re cutting teachers, after-school programs, even whole topics from our curriculum.”

Convincing people to “do more with less” when there is otherwise more sometimes also depends on suggesting that groups other than one’s own are getting free rides while your group toils in the fields.5

J. D. Vance, author of the widely acclaimed book Hillbilly Elegy, wrote a column after the 2016 presidential election titled “How Donald Trump Seduced America’s White Working Class,” detailing how GOP tax cuts often come packaged in messages of restored “greatness” and “learned helplessness” whose emotional content supersedes any fiscal details.7

right-wing John Birch Society during its active campaigns against the civil rights movement. Among myriad other actions, “Birchers” attacked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks (and countless others) as communists. In the 1960s, the Birch Society sponsored billboards across Kansas calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, who had ordered the desegregation of the public schools. Critics saw echoes of Bircherism in Brownback’s school legislation.

Marcel Harmon, vice president of the board of education in Lawrence, wrote in Salon that Brownback’s push toward block grants rested on the “ultraconservative” notion that, as Harmon sarcastically put it, schools could then “afford the opportunity to avoid wasting everyone’s time teaching things like evolution, climate change, social justice, institutional racism or sex education.”15

The conservative white voters who comprised the majority of Brownback’s base elected a politician who implemented a series of policies that, at their core, limited social mobility. Brownback’s version of backlash austerity concentrated wealth at the top of the social pyramid while starving the main conduits through which immigrant, minority, and poor communities mobilized upward. This form of anything-but-experimental austerity ensured that people at the top remained there and people at the bottom were forever looking up.

Austerity codified hierarchy: the rich got richer, and instead of promoting largesse, tax “relief” made sure that the system that assured their dominance remained ever-more inevitably in place.19

Kobach supporters seemed hardened in their positions. Education was a waste. Kobach promised to restore order. Brownback had not gone far enough—“Brownback’s experiment went wrong because he didn’t make enough cuts to follow the lowering taxes.”

Democrats and Republican centrists, meanwhile, seemed in a state of disbelief. “This is like Brownback on steroids,” one educator told me. “We just started to turn things around,” said another. Or, “If Brownback was the common cold to public education, Kobach will be heart disease.” When I asked critics why they thought Kansas might vote for Kobach after the state’s experiences with Brownback, every respondent answered by describing Kobach supporters with language of misinformation, amnesia, and lack of education. “People just forget how bad things were,” was a familiar refrain. Or, “They just believe everything they hear on Fox.”

Diversity provides strength and the promise of a better life, even as racial tensions hover not far beneath the surface. Increasingly, though, forces from above play to white Americans’ worst demons to assure that they don’t trust or work with others. In the absence of such collaboration, large sections of white America then come to identify these larger forces (NRA, Tea Party, Trump) as ones that keep them safe, powerful, and better off than people of other racial or ethnic groups.

What follows, as this book has shown, is the promise of greatness, coupled with a biology of demise. On stepping down from the US presidency in 1809, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to his republican supporters that a primary lesson he learned as head of state was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

a politics that spreads guns, blocks health care, and defunds schools seems to have forgotten Jefferson’s basic principle. Behind these agendas are core assumptions that the happiness of a select few persons takes precedence over the care of a great many others. Human life has suffered as a result, as has th...

Leaders who offer zero solutions for the problems their own policies help create undermine core assumptions behind Jefferson’s notion of good governance:

The nation thrives when the majority of the populace buys into the notion that people of different backgrounds, with different viewpoints, and living in different places can find enough common ground to invest in the common good. When we collaborate in this way, we build roads, bridges, schools, health systems, and technologies that improve daily life for many and serve as the connective tissue on which our sense of community depends.

Then there is the counternarrative I trace in this book. Here, a narrower American identity builds walls, erects castle doctrines, and stands its ground. It blocks social programs out of concerns that minorities and immigrants use more than their fair share of resources. It rails against threats to “core values,” as NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre put it several years ago, and buys guns to protect itself from “home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers.”

Dying of Whiteness reckons with what happens when this second narrative overtakes the first one. The book details the effects that result when—instead of creating shared infrastructures and welcoming persons in times of need—Americans upend health care reform, erase long-standing gun laws, starve public education, and implement tax cuts that benefit only the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else.

in what sociologist Eric Klinenberg describes as social infrastructure, or the kinds of structures that create common cause across social, economic, and cultural divides: schools, libraries, parks, daycare centers, financial and health-related safety-net programs.

there are few methods for harming black and brown populations as effective as blocking access to health care, limiting educational opportunities, or making it nearly impossible for dense urban areas to the limit the flow of guns.

Although structural whiteness elicits positive results for many white people, as Dying of Whiteness shows, it has deeply pernicious results as well—as evidenced by gun suicide data, the health histories of men who would have otherwise benefited from health care reform, and other instances where performing what it “means” to be white involves adopting stances at odds with longevity or well-being. The negative health effects of structural whiteness—and of the resultant imagined pressure of having to stay on top—appear to be growing.