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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Tax cuts also lead to shortfalls in government services and programs that frequently assist women and minorities. Persons on government assistance, undocumented immigrants, and single mothers receiving child support are just a few of the groups who live and work in economies where income is largely fixed and thus unaffected by reduced tax rates.6

In a brilliant analysis of this phenomenon, journalist Gary Younge details a complex dynamic in which poor white populations vote for politicians who enact cuts to government spending out of a combination of anger that the government is wasting money on “people who do not deserve it,”

In Las Vegas shortly before the 2010 mid-terms I met a woman protesting illegal immigration outside an Obama event who was voting for the tea party candidate Sharon Angle. When it turned out she didn’t have health care I asked her if that wouldn’t be a reason for her to support Obama. “I haven’t really gotten into the whole Obamacare thing,” she said. “To be honest I can’t even think about that right now. I’m so concentrated on the illegals.”

“Kansas’ Tax Plan Makes Racial Economic Disparities Worse,” illustrated the extent to which the cuts exacerbated racial wealth disparities. The data showed that the 2012 tax cuts deceptively increased taxes on the bottom 40 percent of earners in Kansas, or those earning $42,000 a year or less, by hiking sales taxes and eliminating tax credits that benefited low-income families. Such trends disproportionately affected minority communities, including 75 percent of African American and 83 percent of Latino households in the state. By contrast, according to the report, “Kansans who saw the biggest tax cut are mostly white. Indeed, the rate of white Kansans in the top tier of earners is two to three times that of black and Latinos in the highest earning tier.” Laid out visually, the findings looked like this:8

the Kansas experiment reinforced existing racial inequities under the cover of economic progress.9

Educational disparities became so extreme that the Kansas Supreme Court intervened. Five years into the tax-cut experiment, the court ruled that the state failed to adequately fund public schools by hundreds of millions of dollars per year and that the cuts and revised formulas disproportionately harmed minority, low-income, and immigrant children the most. “We conclude the state’s public financing system, through its structure and implementation, is not reasonably calculated to have all Kansas public education students meet or exceed the minimum constitutional standards of adequacy,” the court opined. The ruling explicitly highlighted how the state system failed to prepare over 25 percent of students in basic reading and math skills and shortchanged half of the state’s African American students and one-third of its Hispanic students.11

tax cuts and the school-funding overhaul allowed Kansas GOP politicians to enact an agenda with significant racial implications without expressly needing to talk about race.

Brownback’s version of backlash austerity concentrated wealth at the top of the social pyramid while starving the main conduits through which immigrant, minority, and poor communities mobilized upward.

Schools represented the promise of future betterment and upward mobility for minority and low-income Kansans. Kansas schools also symbolized far larger, national debates about American equality and investment.

Defunding public schools in Kansas, the home of Brown v. Board, thus carried profound unspoken resonance. This history suggests another reason why white Kansans supported economic and fiscal agendas that offered most of them little in the way of material returns.

So honestly, I would say the voices of the immigrants are super important, the voices of the people in western Kansas are super important. And I think that the equity problem is definitely something that continues to need to be looked at.

In the early twentieth century, Kansas schools functioned as symbols of forward-thinking modernity in the Midwest.

Kansas also pioneered junior high school education, a new kind of school that changed what had been a direct path from elementary school to farmwork.

Kansas was also at the fore of early twentieth-century liberal arts education, supervised study, and a number of teacher training programs. A 1916 article in The School Review described innovations in teacher training in Kansas as the result of new standards of excellence that came about because “Kansas laws giv[e] special encouragement and financial aid to high schools.”

Kansas teacher training schools represented stepping-stones toward what education historian Kim Cary Warren calls the “quest for citizenship” for African American and Native American communities in the state.3

Kansas schools became contested ground in the 1950s, when tensions around access to and integration of public schools emerged as charged national topics. In 1951, Oliver L. Brown, a pastor and welder from Topeka, brought a class action suit on behalf of himself and twelve other African American parents from Topeka, whose children were not allowed to attend white schools.

“School cuts definitely started out as something that people thought were only geared toward inner-city, black, and Hispanic schools and districts,” one administrator explained. “That’s how they were sold at first.”

Kansas students plunged to dead last in the United States in student scores on some sections of national proficiency exams and into the bottom five in terms of the percentage of students who took the ACT exam. The state also fell into the bottom ten states in the percentage of high school graduates who pursued college education.7

Budget cuts also narrowed people’s expectations for what was possible from school in the first place and of what it cost to get there.

Parents and students rarely know how things worked before they became stakeholders.

Recognizing the negative impact of large class sizes and high student-to-teacher ratios can only happen if parents and students know what the class sizes were before they got there. A decline in a state’s national education rankings is often invisible to people on the ground.

Teachers, of course, often remain in place and experience these kinds of changes firsthand. However, a number of teachers told me that attempts to make parents and students aware of the impacts of reduced funding were often met with derision.

At the most basic levels, money pays for the stuff on which schools run: books, chalkboards, playgrounds, teacher salaries, buses, lunches. On a less basic level, money represents an investment in future generations. Spending cuts, as we will see, often threaten—and directly impact—both of these modes of currency.

it’s hard to ignore the degree to which it seems to be okay to put in place policies that impact kids in negative ways, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those kids tend to be blacker and browner than the children of the people who are putting those policies in place.

Social science research demonstrates another benefit of education: a correlation with well-being and longevity.

The percentages of students with high school diplomas, some college, or BA degrees fell steadily, and Kansas plunged from near the top of the nation to near the bottom in many indicators of an educated workforce.

Dropout rates for black males were high to begin with—black male students dropped out at rates nearly double those of other students in 2010. This trend improved annually in the years leading up the cuts, spiked dramatically in the year after, and then returned to trajectories found prior to the cuts by 2016. Meanwhile, in a show of resilience, African American women were the lone group whose dropout rates remained largely the same between 2010 and 2016.

Booker T. Washington once put it, “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”

dropout rates for both Latino males and females—rates that had shown tremendous improvement pre-Brownback—jumped markedly. Did cuts to ESL and other support programs put these students at an inherent disadvantage?

The cost of higher education rocketed ahead of inflation; working-class people became saddled with student debt as a result of seeking better lives for future generations. Meanwhile, overblown press reports about liberal bias in colleges and universities made higher education seem like an effete Democratic way to spend the formative years of one’s life.

the problems with education did not result from rising costs or inherent evils with education per se. Rather, public education became less efficient, and often more expensive, because of policies that Brownback and then Trump supporters voted for.

Defunding education also deeply impacted minority and immigrant populations who, as the Pew poll suggested, remained strongly in support of education as a way up and out. Blocking these pathways was, in many subtle and historical ways, part of the overall aim of the Kansas budget cuts. But once again, austerity proved a poison pill for everyone.

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.

My husband and his brother, and my nephew and all of his friends, are gonna support Trump no matter what he does. It’s not all that much about his policies or anything. They just feel like, as white men in America, their voice wasn’t being heard. Trump gave them their voice back.

the kinds of mortal trade-offs white Americans make in order to defend an imagined sense of whiteness. 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.

Campbell’s concerns about safety reflected not simply a concern about black protesters but also a sense that she was responsible for her own security—within a city that had long been divided by race and class in ways that created an often-untenable divide among communities.

St. Louis is described as one of the most segregated cities in America, a city with a massive racial split in which high crime, poor health, and low economic mobility reside mainly on the black side of town and privilege and opulence on the white side.

Reductions to police funding and infrastructure carried lethal implications for minority populations in places like Ferguson, where, to make up for lost revenues, police shifted from protective models of public engagement to oppressive and financially predatory ones.

Yet liberal initiatives in the United States often fail because they try to do too much at once, such as trying to provide health care or education for wide swaths of the population, without addressing the underlying social or economic systems that produce poor health or low educational attainment in the first place. Liberals also frequently fail to explain adequately the every day benefits of their initiatives for everyday people in ways that resonate or that address historically based tensions or concerns.17

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?

New York Times articles detail how Democrats suffer at the ballot box by emphasizing “pluralistic” issues such as immigration rather than “practical ones” of greater interest to working-class white voters.

Americans were more than twice as likely to blame “illegal gun dealers” and “mental illness” than politicians, policies, or the NRA for mass shootings.28

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.29

the notion that a large-scale social program might disperse their social capital, or would benefit people like Mexicans, welfare queens, or immigrants who they believed were gaming the system, provided greater pull in shaping their negative opinions about the ACA than did the pressures of their own circumstances.

What was the mortal cost to us, as a communal body or the idea of a nation, of defining our sense of greatness by dehumanizing “other” groups of persons—rather than by building just and confident institutions? What further acts of self-sabotage or self-denial were required to keep the system afloat?

prey to prefabricated and manipulated polarizations. Let us hope, for all of our sakes and for the future of our nation, that the white America of which I am a part can find a politics worth living for, rather than one whose enormity is marked by increasingly autoimmune forms of conflict, disempowerment,