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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

But here once again, policies that redistributed wealth and resources away from minority populations had tremendously negative effects for white populations as well. As Booker T. Washington once put it, “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”

Were the causes of the subsequent health effects anything but politically induced, they would have been the subject of any number of public health campaigns. Beware Budget Cuts: The Silent Killer. But because austerity tied to political ideologies, its pernicious effects were far harder to discern for people on the ground. All the while, the amount of money people saved on their taxes was rendered moot by all kinds of hidden costs. Tax cuts provided moderately lower bills at the end of the year, but at the expense of underfunding key elements of the state’s infrastructure—and at the expense of long-term well-being.

Who knows? Maybe you’re right. You probably are, come to think of it. I just know that it’s not just me. 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.

The language they used to describe agreement with Kobach’s education proposals often emphasized individual protection and gain in much the same way as gun supporters in Missouri justified carrying their firearms in public spaces. Individual gain, they believed, was under attack: “It feels like the world is against the conservatives and all they’re trying to do is give you more money in your paycheck.” Responses frequently flowed, unprompted, from the wastefulness of public schools to the drains on the system posed by immigrants.

Campbell’s tragic story became emblematic of the larger narrative I’ve tracked in this book, regarding the kinds of mortal trade-offs white Americans make in order to defend an imagined sense of whiteness. It’s a narrative about how “whiteness” becomes a formation worth living and dying for, and how, in myriad ways and on multiple levels, white Americans bet their lives on particular sets of meanings associated with whiteness, even in the face of clear threats to mortality or to common sense.

The story of Becca Campbell—and, indeed, of Dying of Whiteness—asks us to consider what white Americans give up when they invest so heavily in remaining at the top of social hierarchies or, more often, in defending a notion of status or privilege that appears under attack.

Reductions to police funding and infrastructure carried lethal implications for minority populations in places like Ferguson, where, to make up for lost revenues, police shifted from protective models of public engagement to oppressive and financially predatory ones. Department and government analyses later found that Missouri police were “being pushed into the role of revenue generators” when dealing with minority populations, leading to “aggressive actions that reflect and exacerbate racial bias.”

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

From a practical standpoint, these beliefs rarely hold up to scrutiny. Not a single high-profile mass shooting in 2018 had to that point been carried out using an illegally obtained weapon. As is often the case in mass shootings, the guns were legally obtained—this is in part what makes them so hard to prevent. The same holds true for accidental shootings. Meanwhile, mental illness is rarely the main causal factor in mass shootings—people who are the most severely disordered lack the capacity to plan complex crimes or are already barred from obtaining firearms.

In the year since the book’s initial publication, hardly a week has gone by without a fresh illustration of my central argument: that the politics that claim to make white America “great again” end up making the lives of the working-class white populations who support such politics harder, sicker, and shorter, and in the end threatens everyone’s well-being. Senseless tariffs, torn-up climate and nonproliferation treaties, nonexistent Trumpcare plans, and any number of other political actions and inactions filter down to affect the lives and livelihoods of many people, including President Trump’s so-called base, in profoundly negative ways. Yet support appears to persist, unaltered.2 News cycle after news cycle then brings a restatement of the same basic question: Why do white Americans seem to vote against their own self-interests? Another typically follows: What will it take to change their minds?

Simply put, Democrats talk a lot about how they can’t understand how Trump supporters “vote against their interests.” My experiences have lead me to avoid this formulation because it presupposes that “we” know what “their” interests are. I’ve come to recognize that most people vote for an interest (guns, religion, abortion, taxes, and so forth), even if it’s not one that I myself would choose.

Health Care for All and the so-called Green New Deal might represent promising new directions for communal betterment—but these and other initiatives will fail, my research suggests, if they’re not accompanied by strategies to combat zero-sum formulations of race relations. All the health care in the world will not, on its own, counter the idea that there are winners and losers in fights for power or resources.

Of course, this perceived decline of whiteness is the exact formulation promoted and amplified by President Trump and by white nationalists who serve in his administration. Their telling of America is one in which white America, and the president himself, remain always victims, always under siege. Trump’s America builds walls to block the “rapists” it imagines flooding into the country from Mexico. Trumpian rhetoric defines white identity not by shared values but by shared resentments.

What was the mortal cost to us, as a communal body or the idea of a nation, of defining our sense of greatness by dehumanizing “other” groups of persons—rather than by building just and confident institutions? What further acts of self-sabotage or self-denial were required to keep the system afloat?