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When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was—and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow—increasing rates of death.
Succinctly put: a host of complex anxieties prompt increasing numbers of white Americans like Trevor to support right-wing politicians and policies, even when these policies actually harm white Americans at growing rates. As these policy agendas spread from Southern and midwestern legislatures into the halls of Congress and the White House, ever-more white Americans are then, literally, dying of whiteness. This is because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being
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In his seminal work on Reconstruction, historian W. E .B. Du Bois famously argued that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor whites a valuable social status derived from their classification as “not-black.” “Whiteness” thereby provided “compensation” for citizens otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism—while at the same time preventing working-class white Southerners from forming a common cause with working-class black populations in their shared suffering at the bottom of the social ladder.
A 2017 analysis published in the JAMA found that gun violence was the least researched major cause of death in the United States as measured by the number of papers published, and the second-least-funded cause of death related to its death toll. It was as if someone placed a silencer on knowledge.15
More to the point, present-day studies suggest little variability among ethnic groups regarding what is called suicidal ideation—or thoughts of self-harm.21 Perhaps as a result, non-gun suicide attempts are diversely distributed among races and genders, with particular demographic groups showing particular trends.
But white Americans dominate death-per-suicide-attempt categories for one main reason: they remain dramatically overrepresented in civilian death data about firearm suicides.
From 2009 to 2015, non-Hispanic white men accounted for nearly 80 percent of all gun suicides in the United States, despite representing less than 35 percent of the total population.
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.
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. And because white Americans, and for the most part white men, comprised the majority of gun suicide victims, this meant that white men increasingly drove the overall data on US gun deaths.29
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
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In 1834, the Tennessee Supreme Court revised the firearms provision in its state constitution on racial grounds: “the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” became “the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.”10 Supreme courts in nearby states followed suit in the years leading up to and during the US Civil War by proclaiming that gun rights extended only to white “citizens.”
As Adam Winkler aptly describes it in his terrific book Gun Fight, “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
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Gun-industry trade organizations fund leading gun suicide–prevention programs—and then force them to restrict mention of the potential risks posed by firearms.
“Kansas City’s Terrifying Year of Homicides—the Worst in 24 Years,” read a headline in the Kansas City Star. That same month, the New York Times reported that homicide in New York plunged “to a level not seen since the 1950s.” Yet instead of asking the seemingly obvious questions—Did the fact that New York restricted gun ownership relate to its success? How can we model these strategies elsewhere?—GOP politicians in the US Congress championed a so-called concealed-carry reciprocity bill that would allow guns from places like Missouri to flow more freely into cities like New York.
Connecticut experienced a drop in its firearm suicide rate coincident with the adoption of a PTP handgun law that was greater than nearly all of the 39 other states that did not have such a law at that time, and Missouri experienced an increase in its firearm suicide rate following the repeal of its PTP handgun law that was larger than all states that retained their PTP laws.6 The analysis ultimately estimated a 15.4 percent reduction in firearm suicide rates associated with the implementation of Connecticut’s PTP law and a 16.1 percent increase in firearm suicide rates associated with
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In summary, people who reflexively shouted “Gun research doesn’t add up!” were often the same people who supported a ban on effective gun research. It was as if they reprimanded plants for not flowering during a drought while at the same time blocking the trucks that delivered water. They did so without ever once suggesting they would support research that might better test not just the comparisons between Missouri and Connecticut but also the pro-gun positions that they themselves promoted.
the math shows that white non-Hispanic men in Missouri were 2.60 times more likely to die by firearm suicide than white non-Hispanic men in Connecticut, and 2.38 times more likely to die by firearm suicide than nonwhite men in Missouri.
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.
And the quest for best ways to limit guns to people in moments of despair suddenly opens into a series of much larger questions. How in the world might we go about changing white masculinity? Or can we open a space to talk about why white men feel they need guns in the first place? What threats do they imagine, and what safety or reassurance do guns represent? 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
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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.
The story of Becca Campbell—and, indeed, of Dying of Whiteness—asks us to consider what white Americans give up when they invest so heavily in remaining at the top of social hierarchies or, more often, in defending a notion of status or privilege that appears under attack. In many instances, we give up days and months and years of life, as well as skills that might lead to better, more nonhierarchical, and less lethal solutions to the anxieties brought about by living in an ever-more integrated world.5
we lose perspective when we explain racially charged encounters in the United States solely on the basis of what exists in people’s minds or on their individual actions. Doing so blocks recognition of the ways racial anxieties manifest themselves in laws, policies, and infrastructures—in ways that carry negative implications for everyone.
In an increasingly polarized country, such structures silently shape larger American interactions surrounding race, as well as intimate encounters that impact how we live, work, think, feel, and die.8
I often found myself wondering: What might American politics look like if white humility was seen not as a sellout or a capitulation but as an honest effort to address seemingly intractable social issues?
