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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

For instance, African Americans are far more likely than other Americans to die by gunshot in cases of homicide, assault, and in encounters with police. A far-ranging 2013 report by the Pew Research Center used US death certificate data to detail how “blacks were 55% of shooting homicide victims in 2010, but 13% of the population.”

By contrast, whites were 25 percent of the victims of gun homicide in 2010, but 65 percent of the population.

Similarly, a 2015 Brookings Institution report relied on data from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) database to show a remarkable segregation whereby the vast majority (77 percent) of white gun deaths were sui...

Broadly put, a white person in the United States is five times as likely to die by suicide using a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.

Statistically speaking, then, white Americans die by gun suicide more than they should and die by gun homicide and police shootings less than other groups of people. For African Americans, it’s the exact opposite.

here as well, the patterns are more complicated than they might seem. This is because the trends of white suicide and black homicide followed opposite trajectories over past decades (and indeed over the same decades when many US states loosened their gun laws). While white gun suicides skyrocketed between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s, this...

According to the data from Pew, gun suicides rose even as rates of gun homicide and other forms of gun crime fell. By 2015, even Breitbart News reported that gun suicides accounted for two-thirds of firearm deaths in the country.

These startling racial and gender trends in death were frequently marked by their invisibility. Surveys of US public opinion suggest that many Americans remain largely unaware of the prevalence of white gun suicide—or of the links between gun ownership and gun suicide at all.

Public discourse about gun death instead focuses on violence toward others and homicides and relies more on racial and media stereotypes and anxieties about black criminals than on-the-ground realities.

Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.

THESE RACIAL DISPARITIES between white suicide and black homicide did not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are in many ways reflective of ways that Americans talk about race, violence, and mortality more broadly.

all too often, when questions of aggression or violence involve blackness, many observers are quick to look for clues based in “biology” or “culture.” Straight-faced scientists ask whether “blacks” express so-called warrior genes, leading “them” to attack “us” more frequently.

Most scientists and scholars would rightly call this kind of research what it is—namely, racist. But the implicit frame whereby “black” minds or bodies or cultures function as causal categories of analysis in violence research remains too often in place.

To even ask a question such as whether “whites” are biologically, genetically, or culturally prone to gun suicide (not a position that I in any way endorse but that nonetheless would seem the correlate of a question about whether “blacks” are more biologically prone to gun homicide) seems innately counterintuitive. Ask this question to leading research search engines such as PubMed or AJP Online. Ask search engines like Google. Ask a stranger on the street. The answer will more than likely be confusion, silence, or the reply that we should give to all questions about the biology of violence—that violence is social and structural and that “white” in any case is not a true biological grouping but a social one.

Ultimately, the complex interactions of race, gender, and violence lead back to risk. Risk helps people identify the possibility of peril in their loved ones and is something that we all want to avoid in our own lives. Risk implies peril, hazard, and the possibility of loss.

Yet risk feels particularly complicated in the context of the stories of white firearm suicide. Lessons seem hard to cull when the support groups are comprised only of grieving loved ones because the primary victims do not survive long enough to tell you what was going through their minds.

Ultimately, risk is embodied not in the imagined intruder but in the person who already lives in the house. Risk then becomes at once prevalent and invisible.

Assumptions about “whiteness in crisis” often drive coverage, not just about white gun suicide but also about the identity of the American plurality in the age of globalization and economic change.

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 lose a sense of usefulness and of where they fit in within their societies, leading to feelings of “derangement” and “insatiable will.”

Anomie seems an apt description for the experiences of working-class white communities in places like Missouri during the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The value of many goods and services these communities produced diminished in the global economy.

Research conducted by economists 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.

The working definition of a “crisis” often assumes an upheaval felt by a dominant group in the face of a threat or change that leaves previous power structures upended. 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.

Of course, masculinity crises likely felt very real from the perspectives of men who experienced them. Somewhere, sometime, some men woke up one morning to learn that the hierarchies on which they built their picket fences and senses of accomplishment appeared threatened or already overturned.

The ways we define crisis allow us to attach the language of calamity to whiteness, men, or other seemingly dominant groups, while at the same time making it harder to see the suffering of women, immigrants, people of color, and other persons who do merit a “crisis of authority”—because they are supposedly built for it, or because they have lived with crisis all along.

Such framing of crisis is also often based more in an imagined sense of nostalgia than in any lived reality, inasmuch as many men fought to maintain what they held to be their natural authority even though every man was not a king, a boss, a plantation owner, or a CEO. By definition, the majority of men needed to be underlings for the system to survive.

If there is any correlation between crisis masculinity and white male gun-suicide trends in the United States, then perhaps attempts to link guns to mortality should more fully consider the meanings of guns in relation to the myths of “decline” and “fall from grace” that play out when certain white Americans talk about their guns.

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 allows these men to “distinguish themselves not only from bad guys but also from versions of masculinity that do not measure up to the [armed, white, good-guy] ideal.”42

Further, these sociological approaches suggest that placing a biomedical frame around gun mortality data and calling the loss of life a threat to public health, as medical researchers like myself are admittedly liable to do, can overlook how guns came t...

The campaign invited men to have their “Man Cards Reissued” by answering a series of “manhood questions” and then, presumably, buying the gun.

Barf

Ads appeared online and in leading gun and ammunition magazines and were first tied to a popular promotion in which sweepstakes winners received rifles along with cards certifying that their manhood had been “restored.”

Baaaaarrrrrrfffffff

To become a card-carrying man, visitors of Bushmaster.com will have to prove they’re a man by answering a series of manhood questions. Upon successful completion, they will be issued a temporary Man Card to proudly display to friends and family. The Man Card is valid for one year.

The Bushmaster campaign flew under the radar of mainstream attention until 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. Suddenly, the playful links between .223 rifles and masculinity became public liability.

Condemnations like these highlighted the correlations between masculinity and guns that so often play out after high-profile US mass shootings. And in this case at least, the critiques had an impact—in the weeks following Sandy Hook, Bushmaster quietly pulled most of the Man Card ads and took the promotional website offline.

In the midst of the furor, many critics overlooked another, highly loaded component of the Man Card campaign: its explicit claims not just about masculinity but about privilege.

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.”

Woooooof

Privileges seems a particularly interesting word choice. The term generally implies special advantages or immunities available only to a particular person or group and not to others. Privileges thus connote benefits enjoyed by the few and beyond the reach of the many.

If the corpus of English-language written communication is any guide, the concept of a right reserved to elites has steadily declined for two-plus centuries.

The advertisers surely must have known (or should have known) that “privileges,” in the context of a promotion for semiautomatic weapons, could not help but invoke race in addition to masculinity.

The privileges of white gun ownership meant that firearms emerged as particular weapons of white male authority in the Southern United States.

This notion of privileges provides entry into a third framework for understanding the relationships between guns, cultures, and everyday life in states like Missouri: the framework of history.

The intersecting trajectories of guns, whiteness, and privilege help explain why firearms came to convey particular meanings to specific populations and address why people who feel their privilege was bestowed by guns might be so loath to give them up. History also becomes a tool manipulated by gun advertisers, corporate lobbyists, and politicians ...

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 England, gun ownership was a right restricted to the wealthy—the principle being that anyone below the rank of gentleman found with a gun was a poacher. But in the New World, white men “were armed and had to be armed,” as historian Edmund Morgan describes it.

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.

Armed white citizen militias emerged in Southern states during the Revolutionary War to such an extent that their rights to bear arms were enshrined in the founding documents of the new country. 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.”

Like much of the original Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment originally extended privileges to white people but not to slaves and free blacks.

Scholars of gun culture in the United States often assume that the inclusion of armed white militias in the Second Amendment reflected eighteenth-century tensions between the need for national defense and fears of government tyranny.

However, 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.”

Bogus also details how anti-Federalists stoked fears of slave rebellions as a way of fomenting white Southern opposition to the Constitution, forcing Madison to placate slave-owning Virginians and other Southern white people through the assurances codified in the Second Amendment.