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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

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.