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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

most people vote for an interest (guns, religion, abortion, taxes, and so forth), even if it’s not one that I myself would choose.

Kentucky, Louisiana, and Kansas suggest that the path to a forward-looking vision for America may well depend on renewed investment in what sociologist Eric Klinenberg describes as social infrastructure, or the kinds of structures that create common cause across social, economic, and cultural divides: schools, libraries, parks, daycare centers, financial and health-related safety-net programs.

The negative health effects of structural whiteness—and of the resultant imagined pressure of having to stay on top—appear to be growing. A recent analysis in Social Science and Medicine by Siddiqi and colleagues found that growing “deaths of despair” in white populations in the United States link, not to traditional social and economic population health indicators, but instead to a “perceived decline in relative group status on the part of whites.”