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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

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. This point is often overlooked by progressives who reflexively argue for government health care for all without taking account of the racial and historical intonations of federal health care networks in places like Tennessee. Here, seemingly self-evident arguments about communal well-being and shared risk engender specific forms of white anxiety. This was because, in our focus groups at least, cost connected everyone. Cost was an economy in which the well-being of white men always depended on the responsible actions of everyone else, including Mexicans and welfare queens. Debt in the context of health care suggested that, even though some owed more and some less, the health of white Americans was always and already beholden to others.