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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

In the 1890s, Durkheim, the sociologist, introduced the concept of anomie to describe a crisis of disconnect that emerged between personal lives and social structures. Durkheim wrote in an era of mass industrialization, a time when workers and collective guild labor found themselves left behind by evolving economies. 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.”36 Anomie seems an apt description for the experiences of working-class white communities in places like Missouri during the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The value of many goods and services these communities produced diminished in the global economy.