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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor wasn’t angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained, “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.4

a whopping 67 percent of US gun owners cited “protection” as their primary reason for owning a gun in a 2017 national survey by the Pew Research Center, while just 38 percent claimed that they used guns for “hunting.” These numbers represented inversions of 1999 survey results, when 49 percent of gun owners cited hunting as the reason for owning a gun while just 26 percent said they owned a gun for protection.33

Psychiatrists like me sometimes think that men who outsource their sense of power onto external objects—and particularly onto objects shaped like guns—do so in ways that convey deeper, gendered insecurities about potency and perhaps even racial insecurities or projected guilt. Projecting such profound gender and racial meanings onto objects might then render men subject to the maneuvers of marketers, sellers, lobbyists, politicians, and other manipulators of common sense.

Politicians and lobbyists then manipulate the knowledge vacuum surrounding risk to balkanize everyday people on matters of life, death, and mundane daily routine—matters about which, if left to their own devices, people could probably forge consensus. All the while, scientific assurances that might help people feel mastery over events unforeseen or appliances untested function instead as variables left up for grabs. The forces that promote (and indeed, often gain financially from) polarization grow ever-more powerful, while hardworking people who live at various points along the oft-manufactured pro-gun–anti-gun continuum are left to fend for themselves.

In the first study, published in 2014, the group used police homicide statistics to focus mainly on Missouri, and, after extensive tracking, “estimated” that the repeal of Missouri’s PTP law was associated with an increase in annual firearm homicides rates of 1.09 per 100,000 (+23%) but was unrelated to changes in non-firearm homicide rates… the law’s repeal was associated with increased annual murders rates of 0.93 per 100,000 (+16%). These estimated effects translate to increases of between 55 and 63 homicides per year in Missouri. These claims built on an earlier paper by Webster, which found that the repeal of Missouri’s PTP law was likely associated with increased “diversion” of guns to criminals.5

Connecticut experienced a drop in its firearm suicide rate coincident with the adoption of a PTP handgun law that was greater than nearly all of the 39 other states that did not have such a law at that time, and Missouri experienced an increase in its firearm suicide rate following the repeal of its PTP handgun law that was larger than all states that retained their PTP laws.6 The analysis ultimately estimated a 15.4 percent reduction in firearm suicide rates associated with the implementation of Connecticut’s PTP law and a 16.1 percent increase in firearm suicide rates associated with Missouri’s PTP repeal. The authors found no such trends in modes of suicide other than that by gun.

In summary, people who reflexively shouted “Gun research doesn’t add up!” were often the same people who supported a ban on effective gun research. It was as if they reprimanded plants for not flowering during a drought while at the same time blocking the trucks that delivered water.

And at this writing at least, WISQARS is an open-access database, so anyone is free to follow through the analysis I describe here or analyze their own trends.

According to a terrorism tracker produced by the nonpartisan New America Foundation, “in the fifteen years after 9/11, jihadists have killed 94 people inside the United States.” According to US State Department reporting, 145 Americans died by “overseas terrorism” between 2007 and 2015, for an average yearly mortality rate of 18, while 70 Americans died via “domestic terrorism” over this eight-year period, for an average yearly death rate of 8.75. (According to WISQARS, the total number of persons killed by terrorism in Missouri between 2008 and 2015 was zero.)

Talking to groups of men in the South is a particular experience if you’re a Northerner. Overt religiosity and conservatism emerge in deep twang. Men often tell you what church they go to when they introduce themselves (“Born and raised here in Murfreesboro, and I go to First Baptist Church, me and the wife too”). A bravado of what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls Southern “muscular Christianity”—crucifix necklaces and forearm tattoos, elaborate facial hair—abuts formal mannerisms and a “yes, sir” or “’preciate that” in every reply. A somewhat contradictory relationship to authority also manifests: men decry government or elitist interference or colonization in one breath and express deep brand or corporate loyalty (“I love my McDonald’s”) in the next. On the whole, many Southern men embody what historian C. Vann Woodward once called the “divided mind” of the South, in which Southerners, and Southern white men in particular, seek the material gains of modern America while still holding fast to mores, prejudices, or historical traumas of their regional pasts.

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.

“Repeal it, replace it,” Trump shouted, “and get something great!”29 From economic or medical perspectives, these claims were made of little more than hot air. But from the perspective of race in America, they seemed all too familiar. Mirroring and amplifying the tensions of our groups, Trump essentially asked lower-income white people to choose less coverage and more suffering over a system that linked them to Mexicans, welfare queens, and… to healthier, longer lives. And we, as a nation, chose the bottom lines in the charts. In so choosing, voters and politicians who claimed to bolster white privilege again turned whiteness into a statistically perilous category. Donald Trump and other leaders may have successfully appealed to long-held beliefs about white nationalism and supremacy. But the data suggests that the policies these politicians supported, and that their supporters voted for, effectively assured that white people, too, would pay more and suffer more and, ultimately, die more in the service of these larger ideals. In other words, from a public health perspective at least, it seems more than possible that the policies and sentiments that aim to bolster the identity of whiteness also effectively turn whiteness itself into a heightened, perilous, and ever-more-costly category of risk.

The notion that education provides lifelong skills, enables civic participation, and fosters advancement on individual levels and societal gain on communal ones unites people of vastly different backgrounds and ideologies.

In 2017, an annual survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed plummeting support for higher education among Republican voters. For generations, voters of all stripes had voiced positive views of higher education and its overall effects on the future prosperity of the nation. But for the first time, a majority (58 percent) of Republicans felt that colleges had a negative overall effect on the country, compared to 36 percent saying they had a positive effect.20

I just think, as a society, not just Olathe or Johnson County, we’re all running fast, lives are more complicated, and we don’t really see anything. And we think, Wow, I don’t want to pay taxes, and my kids seem to be getting a good education. But taxpayers and parents don’t understand how close we are to the cliff, that that won’t be true any longer. Not that it happens all at once; it takes so long to play out. And suddenly, we don’t have a very good workforce in twenty years, and we don’t have doctors, or we don’t have lawyers or teachers. And all we have is a divided upper and lower class.

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.

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.

American whiteness itself and its ever-perilous, doubly unconscious hold on power remained the condition that always, always needed to be defended.

we lose perspective when we explain racially charged encounters in the United States solely on the basis of what exists in people’s minds or on their individual actions. Doing so blocks recognition of the ways racial anxieties manifest themselves in laws, policies, and infrastructures—in ways that carry negative implications for everyone.

“the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

Backlash governance leads to states of denial, displacement, or amnesia, even in moments that demand accountability and self-reflection. In the aftermath of horrific mass shootings, including ones in his own state, Kentucky governor Matt Bevin took to claiming that laws and governments were no match for “evil”—overlooking the ways that this particular form of evil amassed arsenals under the protection of gun laws that conservatives like Bevin created or supported. On leaving the Kansas governor’s office for an esteemed position in the Trump administration, Sam Brownback lambasted a decaying state psychiatric facility as “a pit” and decried the underfunding of state hospitals, prisons, and schools—conveniently forgetting that he more than anyone else created the problem in the first place.24