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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

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.