More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 15 - August 26, 2019
All the while, the issues themselves—such as guns, health care, or taxes—accrued larger symbolic or moral meanings in ways that rendered conversations about the effects of specific policies ever-more difficult.10
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 of US whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.
Though framed as universal expressions of Second Amendment rights, racial tensions lurked around every corner of these legislative decisions.
It’s sometimes a matter of speed
versus slow decay.
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.
Grief is, by its very nature, immensely personal and isolating. Anne Lamott describes living with grief as akin to “having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” For C. S. Lewis, grief felt “so like fear.” But grief can also produce community. Toni Morrison once said that in times of grief, instead of words or wishes, “I think you should just hug people and mop their floor.”
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.”
If the corpus of English-language written communication is any guide, the concept of a right reserved to elites has steadily declined for two-plus centuries. But there it was, twice, on the wallet-sized Man Card. “Rights and Privileges.” Privileges duly afforded. A word and concept calling back to an unequal, inegalitarian past.
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 other Southern white people through the assurances codified in the Second Amendment.
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.
That represents a 17.39 percent increase in white male time—time spent working, playing, raising families, living—that was instead lost to gun suicide.
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.
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.
An expansive study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that “widespread slowdown in health spending” saved the United States trillions of dollars and that the uninsured rate dropped to the lowest level on record.
Historian Michael Ralph describes Civil War–era slave insurance as central to the formation of US health and life insurance industries and a way that owners of capital sought to shield themselves against the risks associated with the loss of an individual’s capacity for labor: The same period which witnessed the demise of formal enslavement saw the debut of structures that protected the privilege of people whose wealth and power suddenly threatened to come undone: this would include sharecropping and convict leasing.
A somewhat contradictory relationship to authority also manifests: men decry government or elitist interference or colonization in one breath and express deep brand or corporate loyalty (“I love my McDonald’s”) in the next.
Whiteness, to again reference historian David Roediger, became the currency through which the men laid claim to their dwindling benefits.
Their expressions of whiteness and white anxiety seemed in so many ways to work against their own self-interests; to live free and die sooner.
Resistance to health care reform also reflected venerable Southern traditions of opposition to change and particularly to perceived Northern intervention into racial norms and social orders.
Rather, they suggest that Southern white medicalized suffering occurred within historical and ideological frameworks that allowed white men to interpret ACA resistance in way that gave larger purpose to the act of refusing medical intervention. Pain affirmed group identity and a position in a hierarchy that, while hardly at the top, was not at the bottom either.
However, we found a related phenomenon in our study of the available data: not only did people in Kentucky have more access to physicians and medical care compared to Tennesseans, but Tennesseans paid more for what care they did receive.
Moreover, this idea of cost also frequently assumed that health was fair and equitable—I pay what I owe, and I pay for the consequences of my own actions—and conveniently overlooked the deep unfairness of medical expenses.
Cost, in other words, functioned as a metaphor for concerns about a system that gravely threatened the sense of individualism underpinning particular white notions of health.
And though the ACA and Medicaid expansion would have cost real money from somewhere, the dirty little secret of federally funded health care programs in states like Tennessee is that much of the actual expense would be borne by the taxes of… Northerners.
Or perhaps it’s because Kansans perfected the art of what psychologists call reaction-formation, turning ennui-inducing endless plains and quiet cornfields into imaginary places of vibrant progress and rejuvenation.
The collaborative, can-do attitude that propelled people across the flat land seemed replaced by resentment.
In this sense, US austerity arguments do not so much ask citizens to buckle down in the name of national unity as to reallocate resources from the many to the few.
Convincing people to “do more with less” when there is otherwise more sometimes also depends on suggesting that groups other than one’s own are getting free rides while your group toils in the fields.
Austerity codified hierarchy:
Rather, public education became less efficient, and often more expensive, because of policies that Brownback and then Trump supporters voted for.
Conservative rhetoric blamed the objects of tax cuts (schools) while often giving the subjects that implemented the cuts (politicians and policies) a free pass.
It’s a narrative about how “whiteness” becomes a formation worth living and dying for, and how, in myriad ways and on multiple levels, white Americans bet their lives on particular sets of meanings associated with whiteness, even in the face of clear threats to mortality or to common sense.
Doing so blocks recognition of the ways racial anxieties manifest themselves in laws, policies, and infrastructures—in ways that carry negative implications for everyone.
Yet alliances that result from attempted cooperation, rather than attempted domination, are often shown to be healthier than nondiverse ones, all things being equal. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that socially diverse groups are more innovative than homogeneous groups and that diversity encourages people to become more creative, diligent, and hardworking.
On stepping down from the US presidency in 1809, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to his republican supporters that a primary lesson he learned as head of state was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
Behind these agendas are core assumptions that the happiness of a select few persons takes precedence over the care of a great many others. Human life has suffered as a result, as has the notion that good government protects and promotes well-being in the first place.
Meanwhile, mental illness is rarely the main causal factor in mass shootings—people who are the most severely disordered lack the capacity to plan complex crimes or are already barred from obtaining firearms.
