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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

the dynamic was difficult to discern from the outside. Even as I drove for interviews at a number of public schools, I could not help but notice the tranquility that the schools projected to the outside world. School buildings seemed immaculate and well maintained. Football teams practiced on well-mowed fields. Students strolled through the grounds laughing with each other on the way to class, their futures but a light weight in their backpacks. Much like global warming, the threats of educational disaster seemed, at the individual level, almost impossible to discern. The day was bright, the sun was warm; all seemed well. The data told a different story, one of invisibly slipping skills and invisibly crumbling communities. Of ever-more students falling through the cracks, only to later appear, as if weeds from the underground, working at menial jobs or walking the streets. Or wheeled, short of breath, into emergency rooms.