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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

As promised, the new administration soon pushed a steady stream of cuts to health care delivery systems, financial regulations, environmental protections, job and child support programs, and drug treatment initiatives, all of which imperiled communities and locales where government functions were weak to begin with.3

Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor wasn’t angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained, “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and other nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance.

Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.4

Yet the more I spoke with Trevor, the more I realized how his experience of illness, and indeed his particular form of white identity, resulted not just from his own thoughts and actions but from his politics.

where 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.

else. 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.

Rather than landing a man on the moon, curing polio, inventing the internet, or promoting structures of world peace, a dominant strain of the electorate voted in politicians whose platforms of American greatness were built on embodied forms of demise.

DYING OF WHITENESS explores the effects of what became central GOP policy issues—loosening gun laws, repealing the Affordable Care Act, or enacting massive tax cuts that largely benefited wealthy pers...

I repeatedly found examples of policies, politics, or products that claimed to restore white authority but silently delivered lethality. An

major part of these movements’ appeals lay in rallying cries that tapped into emotionally and historically charged notions that white Americans should remain atop other racial or ethnic groups in the US social hierarchy, or that white “status” was at risk.

“Donald Trump is for Americans first. . . . You’re not racist if you don’t like Mexicans.”

White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. 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.

Minority and immigrant communities, often the targets of backlash’s ire, suffered greatly and needlessly. But the data I track in this book reveals the shocking extent to which the health and well-being of white Americans suffered from the health effects of these policies as well.

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.

led

For nearly two centuries, gun ownership was a privilege afforded mainly to white citizens in states such as Missouri, and guns became particular symbols as a result.

Health insurance similarly represented a privilege afforded only to whites in many Southern states: through the antebellum period, insurers covered black bodies as property. Kansas became a national flashpoint for the limits of “separate but equal” public education, leading to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision in 1954.

text The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger shows how “racial folklore” fuels racial ideologies in ways that open white working-class communities to “economic exploitation” by ruling-class whites. More recently, writer Toni Morrison states the inherent conflict of American whiteness bluntly: to “restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves.”

the electorate has chosen a regime whose policies come cloaked in the promise of restored privilege, enacted through mechanisms of polarization and divisiveness. As a result, we talk about eliminating financial safety nets and social support programs, allowing ever-more guns, defunding roads and bridges while at the same time enacting tariffs and building walls. Such talk, and the policies that flow from it, often signify protection, preservation, or continued supremacy. But in many instances, they ultimately serve to hemorrhage our collective abilities to solve problems or help people in times of need.

The recent histories of Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas thus serve as object lessons and cautionary tales that suggest how the racial system of America fails everyone.

Ultimately, the three states we visit in this book show ways that, when white voters are asked to defend whiteness, whiteness often fails to defend, honor, or restore them.

Guns also feature prominently in the stories people tell at the support group and in the lengthy one-on-one interviews I conducted with group members and other people from Cape in the days and weeks following the gathering at the library. For pretty much everyone I speak with, the language of patriotism and protection collides with memories of extraordinary trauma and pain.

The room responds in much the same way as had many of my prior and subsequent interview subjects when I ask any type of question that contained words such as firearm or gun: they circle the wagons. “I don’t think any of us blame the gun,” Billie replies without a hint of defensiveness. “It’s not the gun’s fault. I still own many guns. Guns are important to us and to our liberties. Heck, I’m teaching my nieces to shoot in case they need to protect themselves.” “Lot of us come from military or come up with hunting,” says June. “Guns are a way of life.” “We pass down guns in our family, strong NRA,” James adds.

Guns mean protection, self-preservation, and patriotism, as my cab driver Jim told me.

“Thank you so much for coming and listening to us,” she says. “And just wanted you to know that what she said is right. We don’t blame the gun. It’s never the gun—it’s the person. Besides, if they say it’s the gun’s fault—well, they might come take away our guns, too.”

risk. Risk is generally the first and greatest focus for suicide researchers. This makes sense when you think about it. A main goal of suicide research is to anticipate which persons are most likely to harm themselves in order to then prevent their self-destructive actions. Prediction is particularly important because suicide is often a solitary, individual act.

Threatening or talking about wanting to hurt or kill oneself • Feeling hopeless • No reason for living, no sense of purpose in life • Withdrawal from friends, family, and society • Increased alcohol or drug use

What if suicide researchers are barred by their own government from obtaining federal funding to research or compile data about the leading method of lethal suicide in the United States?

In 1996, Congress passed a ban on federally funded gun research.

Inspired by the overwhelming response to Bushmaster’s “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” sweepstakes, today Bushmaster Firearms announces the latest part in the series; the Man Card online promotion. To become a card-carrying man, visitors of Bushmaster.com will have to prove they’re a man by answering a series of manhood questions. Upon successful completion, they will be issued a temporary Man Card to proudly display to friends and family. The Man Card is valid for one year.1

Many of the questions on the Man Card quiz read as predictably stereotyped: “Do you think tofu is an acceptable meat substitute?” “Can you change a tire?” “Have you ever watched figure skating on purpose?” Other questions unsubtly invoked menace: “A car full of the rival team’s fans cuts you off on the way to the championship game. What do you do?” After users completed the quiz, their Man Card arrived by download, e-mail, or post.2

The privileges of white gun ownership meant that firearms emerged as particular weapons of white male authority in the Southern United States.

The intersecting trajectories of guns, whiteness, and privilege help explain why firearms came to convey particular meanings to specific populations and address why people who feel their privilege was bestowed by guns might be so loath to give them up.

In early colonial America, firearms were the armaments of white upper-class power and a benefit that upper-class whites bestowed on lower-class whites to separate them from people of color.

In England, gun ownership was a right restricted to the wealthy—the principle being that anyone below the rank of gentleman found with a gun was a poacher.

But in the New World, white men “were armed and had to be armed,” as historian Edmund Morgan describes it. Upper-class colonial white people allowed poor white people to carry firearms to quell rebellions by ...

Armed white citizen militias emerged in Southern states during the Revolutionary War to such an extent that their rights to bear arms were enshrined in the founding documents of the new country.

“the militia remained the principal means of protecting the social order and preserving white control over an enormous black population.”

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.

On one side of the emerging gun divide, the modern gun control movement took shape after the high-profile assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. An unlikely coalition of politicians and activists drove what in retrospect would be the crowning achievement of the movement, the Gun Control Act of 1968. Although President Johnson saw the act as far from sufficient: “We must continue to work for the day when Americans can get the full protection that every American citizen is entitled to and deserves, the kind of protection that most civilized nations have long ago adopted,” he said at the signing. But the law nonetheless brought new levels of federal oversight to the buying, selling, and tracking of guns, seemingly guaranteeing equity in the market.16

Americans made up “about 4.43 percent of the world’s population [in 2015] yet owned roughly 42 percent of the world’s privately held firearms.”

legal gun ownership remained concentrated in white populations well into the twenty-first century.

According to polling data from the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Political Polarization study, whites were more than twice as likely as African Americans to own and carry firearms.

Privilege is associated with safer neighborhoods, longer life spans, better schools, more cordial relationships with police, healthier diets, and any number of other positive characteristics and outcomes. In a gunfight, it’s probably better to be the guy sanctioned to carry a firearm than the guy barred from doing so.38

Truth be told, my dad didn’t purchase a gun until two, three years ago. Then suddenly he became very pro-gun and very pro-gun rights about two, three years ago in the context of the Ferguson uprising.

“I have to protect myself, I have to protect my wife because I think this is a real possibility that this is the world changing.”

research that even attempts to use established statistical methods to assess the relative risk of firearms is roundly critiqued as unscientific by the same people who try to block funding for gun science.

From 1921 until 2007, Missouri enforced a permit-to-purchase (PTP) law that required anyone wanting to purchase a handgun to apply in person at a local sheriff’s office. There, potential buyers would undergo an interview and a series of background checks to assess risk factors such as past convictions for violent crimes, being under a restraining order for domestic violence, or heightened risk of suicide.

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