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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

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.

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, and that “male sex” and a history of having been in a physical fight—but not depression—were found to be risk factors for these impulsive suicide victims.

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”—in other words, because of many of the same qualities that draw people to guns in the first place.19

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.

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

“few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization” that aimed to confiscate any guns that free blacks may have obtained during and after the Civil War and thereby “achieve complete black disarmament.”

Similar fates met other high-profile leaders who took up Williams’s call for armed black self-defense. Mainstream condemnation followed Malcolm X’s claim in 1964 that “Article number two of the Constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” 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

For Stroud, examples of white people who carried guns to protect against racial others were particularly important because most of the racialized altercations never actually happened. 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.

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.

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.

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.

As this process plays out, the peril to white men comes not just from the instrument, the impulse, or even the legislation. Rather, privilege itself becomes a liability. White men themselves become the biggest threats to… themselves. Danger emerges from who they are and from what they wish to be. Over time, the data suggests, “being a white man who lives in Missouri” then emerges as its own, high-risk category.

I can’t help but think that so much of the tension that survivors describe, in the group and in my interviews, arises from the difference between individual and structural explanations of gun suicide. Survivors are stuck between warning signs they might have seen or should have known on the one hand and predetermined factors built right into the laws, traditions, and culture of their communities. 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? In the minds of survivors trying to make sense of the unimaginable, these and other searing questions serve as grounding frameworks that suggest A led to B, a direct line from the doctor, the illness, the bad date to the loss. 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.

More than anything else, the group and the interviews suggest how complicated, confusing, and ever-more painful survival narratives become when death comes from the barrels of guns—for reasons even in excess of the fact that laws generally protect gun manufacturers from liability claims. Yes, perhaps we should have done more to secure it, lock it, keep it away. And yes, perhaps the product should have come with tamper-proof packaging, a safety cap, or some other form of trigger warning meant to circumvent disaster. At the same time, people have been told for most of their lives that these products are us, circumscribe us, privilege, defend, and define us. That questioning these products and their role in our lives is a form of heresy. That blaming the gun or the politician or the policy is what liberals do. That giving even an inch on guns means that the squatters and the migrants will overrun the plantations and the farms.

“You know, I do think there needs to be some kind of middle ground, to be honest,” she says. “People here love their guns, but we can’t just have guns everywhere all the time. It’s just creating chaos and, you know, not making us any more safe. “I would never say that in the group, though.”

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.

“Trumpcare Is Already Hurting Trump Country” warned the lead editorial in the New York Times on May 19, 2017. The opinion piece detailed how the mere threat to dismantle the ACA prompted major insurance companies to stop selling policies or raise premiums significantly. A subsequent House bill further endangered health coverage for at least 24 million people by cutting spending on Medicaid and eliminating subsidies that helped the poorest Americans buy insurance.

Washington’s threats to cut subsidies threw health care for entire states and regions suddenly up for grabs. The result, to understate, was uncertainty. “No one feels optimistic about the market,” Tennessee insurance commissioner Julie Mix McPeak later claimed.

Tennessee was an important site for several reasons: chief among them that, while the state was home to leading US health insurance companies, such as HCA Holdings, its politicians also continually blocked the ACA and Medicaid expansion for state citizens. Health insurance coverage rates thus remained low for many lower- and middle-income Tennesseans when compared to expansion states; health care coverage in many ways became an export product as a result. As of February 2017, seventy-three of ninety-five counties in the state had only one insurer offering health care plans, putting these counties at peril if the insurers decided to pull out. For the early part of that same year, the city of Knoxville had no insurer. “As a state we already did not have a lot of options,” an article in the Tennessean explained. And “now, 16 counties are facing having no [insurer] options in 2018.”6

Our focus groups explored people’s attitudes about the ACA. As this section of the book details, we found jarringly different attitudes among racial groups. 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. Many white men also complained about the fiscal cost of the ACA, while neglecting the cost their opposition exacted on their health.

In many ways, the frameworks surrounding rejection of the ACA in Tennessee differed considerably from those underlying gun expansion in Missouri. The gun debate centered on protection, privilege, and individual responsibility. It set people in castles and instructed them to stand their grounds. Health care, meanwhile, promoted networks, safety nets, and other metaphors that highlighted real or imagined connections among bodies and communities. The central tension of political debates against the ACA rested in the ways that GOP politicians tried to set people apart and mistrust each other, even as diseases and pathogens showed little resp...

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.

Here and elsewhere, cost taps into the larger tensions represented by currency; something that we spend our lives trying to accumulate at personal levels, but that means little if not also invested into communal transactions that raise the value of society as a whole.4 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.