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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

But white Americans dominate death-per-suicide-attempt categories for one main reason: they remain dramatically overrepresented in civilian death data about firearm suicides.

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.

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. A 2017 survey found that “fewer than 10% of gun owners with children (or gun owners who had received firearm training) agreed that household firearms increase suicide risk.”30

Straight-faced scientists ask whether “blacks” express so-called warrior genes, leading “them” to attack “us” more frequently. They shamelessly suggest that the overrepresentation of African Americans in the criminal justice system results from underlying biological differences that cause “blacks” to commit more crimes, or demonstrate more psychopathic personalities, or act more impulsively or with less cultural regard for long-term consequences than do everyone else. 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.

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.”36

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.

According to evolutionary biology, these men responded in predictable ways—by smoking, fighting, drinking, pumping iron, driving too fast, or other modes of chest-beating that restored a sensation of order but also increased their blood pressures and shortened their collective life spans.40

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.

Privileges thus connote benefits enjoyed by the few and beyond the reach of the many. As it turns out, usage of the term privileges fell considerably since its heyday in the early 1800s, a time when most English-speaking people had little trouble separating the rich and powerful from everyone else.

Like much of the original Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment originally extended privileges to white people but not to slaves and free blacks.7

Reagan claimed that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

Or perhaps the trends also symbolized three hundred years of history in which owning firearms and carrying them in public marked a privilege afforded primarily to white men.20

However, when police arrived at the scene, parents were startled to learn that the gun-toting man was wholly within his rights because of new legislation in the state that expanded so-called stand-your-ground rights and eliminated many gun-free zones, such as at county parks.

In 2015, police in Gulfport, Mississippi, cited open-carry laws in the state for their initial failure to detain a white man who frightened Walmart shoppers when he ambled through the store loading and racking shells into his shotgun. And in 2016, a Washington Post reporter followed a fifty-one-year-old white man named Jim Cooley as he strolled through the aisles of the Walmart in Winder, Georgia, buying groceries while wearing a “Trump Wants You” T-shirt and with an ATI Omni-Hybrid Maxx AR-15 semiautomatic rifle strapped to his back.23

The legislation protected the deputy who felt threatened by a black man with an air gun at the expense of the African American victim he shot.26

But the implicit bias framework often overlooked the different historical narratives embedded in American racial assumptions about guns.

However, in his book Gun Crusaders, sociologist Scott Melzer exposes the role of white men with guns on the nineteenth-century frontier as a mythology not of the 1800s but of mid-twentieth-century popular culture.

Communication studies professor 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.

“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 who hold the levers of power and status in society today.”32

Rather, white gun owners imagined these encounters based on anxieties about persons of color. In such stories, gun ownership became a defense of internalized notions of racial order as well as an external personal safety.35

To Gil and many others, guns function as weapons, totems, and transitional objects that promise autonomy, protection, and self-reliance.

Firearms connoted tools that claimed to help white men maintain privilege or restore it when it seemed under threat. This notion of armed supremacy was then codified into laws and everyday practices and passed down through generations.

There was this weird sort of mentality amongst the rural white folk that we gotta take up arms because the protesters could be coming for us.

Moreover, risk calculation is largely straightforward for pretty much any other topic except guns. Risk is an algorithm, a formula, a recipe. Risk is an exposed nail, unsecured scaffolding, a toxic vapor in the air. Risk is something people want to avoid.

Politicians and lobbyists then manipulate the knowledge vacuum surrounding risk to balkanize everyday people on matters of life, death, and mundane daily routine—matters about which, if left to their own devices, people could probably forge consensus.

Gun-industry trade organizations fund leading gun suicide–prevention programs—and then force them to restrict mention of the potential risks posed by firearms.

John’s Hopkins researchers concluded in the 2015 paper that

Physicians who treat patients at elevated risk for suicide can counsel patients and family members about the link between access to a firearm and suicide risk and the potential benefit of reducing firearm access. The study also highlights the value of a population-based approach to suicide prevention.…

A PTP law that would restrict access to handguns for individuals with a history of severe mental illness, criminal behavior, domestic violence or substance abuse, or by simply delaying access to a firearm during a time of crisis through an application review period could prevent suicide.8

Just to say it again, I 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.

In other words, the space between the actual line and the alternate-reality line conservatively suggests that the loosening of Missouri’s gun laws equated to 413 additional white male suicide deaths over the years 2008–2015.

But as I did the math, I began to appreciate that risk factors listed on refrigerator magnets are based almost entirely on individual psychological factors and stressors that assess how a particular person acts or how they feel. However, risk factors for gun suicide (unlike homicide) rarely ask people to assess risk based on who a person is, what they are, or where they live.

The math revealed, however, that being (white, male) and living (in a place like Missouri) emerged as profound risk factors between 2008 and 2015.

Much has been made about opioid addiction in rural America and its impact on white men. But the aggregate death rate for white males by unintentional drug poisoning in Missouri between 2008 and 2015 was 17.51 per 100,000 people, while the rate for self-inflicted gunshot was 17.82.

Perhaps most important, the aggregate death rate for white men dying from firearm homicide was 2.56, meaning that white men in Missouri were seven times more likely to turn guns on themselves than to be fatally shot by intruders in their castles or assailants against whom white men needed to stand their ground.

Who wouldn’t be tempted by a platform that claimed to increase one’s own privilege, power, safety, and authority? However, again, the math and the graphs suggest the dangerous, mortal underside of linking privilege so closely to instruments of warfare and of then supporting politicians and policies that allow these instruments to be ever-more easily allowed into people’s everyday lives and intimate spaces. The data overwhelmingly suggests that more guns mean more deaths, and particularly so for the very people whose privileges and potencies Man Cards and pro-gun policies claim to restore.

Put another way, the data hints at the possibility that white male gun suicide may be a side effect of both loose gun policies and conceptions of white masculinity, in addition to the effects of troubled individual minds. And that in this sense, white men writ large make a Faustian bargain in order to accept the larger benefits of gun ownership more broadly.

White men die by their own guns two and a half times more often than do their nearest demographic, and exponentially more often than they do at the hands of dogs, bears, ladders, carjackers, intruders, terrorists, or other predators combined.

Only in retrospect do individual-level warning signs shout out “This was a risk factor!” as if flashing red lights. Did you not see your father sliding into depression? Why did the doctor prescribe Ritalin? How did we allow him to date that awful girl?

Of course, life rarely stands still to allow us to spot subtle warning signs amid a constant flow of daily events. However, in retrospect, those flashing individual factors seem impossibly clear. Individual factors thus serve as the basis for a guilt known only to survivors, a gnawing sense that “our loved ones might still be alive if only we had been more attuned.” Guilt then functions as more than self-beratement—it also promotes the altogether human fantasy that the act of suicide, like the guilt itself, is under our control.

And perhaps in some other world, like the world I’ll inhabit when I leave, that makes sense. But right now, in a cold parking lot in the middle of night in the middle of somewhere, these interventions feel like small drops in a massive bucket that keeps getting bigger.

Potential solutions feel so far away, and particularly so because of politicians and a political system that block even the slightest attempts at compromise and enable ever-more bullets and ever-more guns.

African American men largely supported the ACA because the legislation potentially helped “everybody” and because they felt that anything would be an improvement over Tennessee’s crumbling health care delivery system. But many white men, like Trevor mentioned in the introduction to this book, voiced a willingness to die, literally, rather than embrace a law that gave minority or immigrant persons more access to care, even if it helped them as well.

We often found that no ivory-tower health-policy explanation of the ACA’s potential benefits came close to challenging concerns about ways that health insurance came from the administration of an African American president or placed white Americans into “networks” with immigrant and minority populations.7

For many people, these symptoms mean a trip to a doctor who might diagnose a dreaded but potentially treatable condition, such as infection or diabetes or colitis. But for these men, the diagnoses become primary tumors for larger, metastatic social and economic problems.

Most of the men then fell into what policy experts dispassionately call the doughnut hole of coverage—meaning these men were just well enough to maintain menial employment, working hourly on assembly lines or at odd jobs. The income from these jobs put them just above the level of poverty—at the time, $15,856 a year per person. Most of them thus no longer met state requirements for Medicaid. Insurmountable mountains of medical bills then followed.1

If the ACA wasn’t a panacea for the dire financial and biological situations faced by the men in the group, it was close. But the men, much like the politicians up the road, will have none of it. The reason, the men tell me in so many ways, is cost. “The dang thing cost too much,” says a man in his late forties who uses a walker to ambulate due to diabetic neuropathy. “We got enough debt in this country as it is.” “It’s a waste of our hard-earned tax dollars,” adds a man in his fifties who wears a nasal oxygen cannula because of chronic lung disease.

And yet in a room in a housing project in the real world of the American South, cost also functioned as a proxy for the tensions of race, as questions of Who is paying for whom? and Whose labor supports whom? led to deliberations about ways to hoard health for some persons, while denying it to others.

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. The court held that Medicaid expansion was “optional” for states and that each state could make its own choices about coverage for the less fortunate.4

These and other developments revealed an inconvenient truth: at the end of the day, population-level medical care is often more expensive than it is affordable, and particularly so in the United States. And, as physician and health economist Aaron Carroll succinctly puts it about health care, “sometimes good things cost money.”12