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At many points along the way, I became convinced that reasonable people of vastly divergent, pro-this or anti-that backgrounds might find middle ground if left to their own devices.
My narrative highlights a reality that liberal Americans were often slow to realize: Trump supporters were willing to put their own lives on the line in support of their political beliefs.
on-the-ground white Americans make tradeoffs that negatively affect their lives and livelihoods in support of larger prejudices or ideals. By design, vulnerable immigrant and minority populations suffered the consequences in the most dire and urgent ways. Yet the tradeoffs made by people like Trevor frequently and materially benefitted persons and corporations far higher up the socioeconomic food chain—whose agendas and capital gains depended on the invisible sacrifices of lower income whites.
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.
I kept thinking that at some point, the drive for self-preservation might trump political ideology. Why would someone reject their own health care, or keep guns unlocked when their children were home?
Yet because of the frames cast around these and other issues hued with historically charged assumptions about privilege, it became ever-more difficult for many people with whom I spoke to imagine alternate realities or to empathize with groups other than their own. Compromise, in many ways, coded as treason.
when tracked over time, racially driven policies in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas functioned as mortal risk factors for all people who live in these states.
In this book, I do not mean white as a biological classification or a skin color but as a political and economic system.
Americans increasingly represent a “paradox” of privilege, access, and social rewards on one hand and relatively poor health outcomes on the other. For Malat, this paradox helps explain why “whites in the USA… rank poorly in international health comparisons.
Liberals and progressives have at times used disdain for conservatives, or a sense of superiority over them, as ways to mask their own ways of promoting inequity.
When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass
arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness. Living in a state or a county or a nation dominated by a politics of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable, quantifiable, and increasingly mortal preexisting condition.
For pretty much everyone I speak with, the language of patriotism and protection collides with memories of extraordinary trauma and pain.
Guns are a part of the culture in white rural Missouri, and often proudly so. Guns mean protection, self-preservation, and patriotism,
