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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Politics that, all too often, gained traction by playing to anxieties about white victimhood in relation to imagined threats posed by “Mexicans and welfare queens.” Dying for a cause then amounted to a modern-day form of kamikaze.

Trump supporters were willing to put their own lives on the line in support of their political beliefs. As a result, when viewed more broadly, actions that may have seemed from the outside to be crazy, uninformed, or self-defeating served larger political aims.

where on-the-ground white Americans make tradeoffs that negatively affect their lives and livelihoods in support of larger prejudices or ideals. By design, vulnerable immigrant and minority populations suffered the consequences in the most dire and urgent ways. Yet the tradeoffs made by people like Trevor frequently and materially benefited persons and corporations far higher up the socioeconomic food chain—whose agendas and capital gains depended on the invisible sacrifices of lower income whites.

The white body that refuses treatment rather than supporting a system that might benefit everyone then becomes a metaphor for, and parable of, the threatened decline of the larger nation.

pro-gun legislators, the NRA, and gun advertisements touted the abilities of semiautomatic weapons to restore white men’s “privilege” and the “balance of power” in an ever-more-diverse world, even as firearms emerged as leading causes of white, male suicide.

White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was—and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow—increasing rates of death.

This is because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being of US whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.

Scholars and writers have long argued that the Republican Party rose to influence in the US South by taking advantage of white backlash against integration and civil rights to cajole white working-class people to vote against their own financial self-interests. Thomas Frank, in his modern classic What’s the Matter with Kansas?, writes that backlash conservatism rests on the foundation that “ignoring one’s economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed differently it is an act of noble self-denial; a sacrifice for a holier cause.”

Guns, health care systems, and the impacts of tax cuts on schools are decidedly different issues, and the health effects that arise from these issues manifest in divergent ways. Getting shot leads to one form of mortality; not going to the doctor when you get sick or dropping out of high school leads to another.

In these ways, stories like Trevor’s come to embody larger problems of an electorate that, in its worst moments, votes to sink the whole ship (except for a few privileged passengers who get lifeboats) even when they are on it, rather than investing in communal systems that might rise all tides. Anti-blackness, in a biological sense, then produces its own anti-whiteness. An illness of the mind, weaponized onto the body of the nation.

E .B. Du Bois famously argued that whiteness served as a “public and psychological wage,” delivering to poor whites a valuable social status derived from their classification as “not-black.” “Whiteness” thereby provided “compensation” for citizens otherwise exploited by the organization of capitalism—while at the same time preventing working-class white Southerners from forming a common cause with working-class black populations in their shared suffering at the bottom of the social ladder.

Toni Morrison states the inherent conflict of American whiteness bluntly: to “restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves.”

When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness.

when white voters are asked to defend whiteness, whiteness often fails to defend, honor, or restore them.

Located at the junction of the South and the Midwest, Missouri boasts a long history of gun use for hunting, warfare, and dueling. At the same time, through the early 1990s, Missouri’s handgun laws were among the strictest in the nation, including a requirement that handgun buyers undergo background checks in person at sheriffs’ offices before obtaining permits.1 However, in the past twenty years, an increasingly conservative and pro-gun legislature and citizenry had relaxed limitations governing practically every aspect of buying, owning, and carrying firearms in the state. In the six years prior to my 2016 visit to Cape Girardeau, the Missouri legislature ended prohibitions on the concealed and open carry of firearms in public spaces, lowered the legal age to carry a concealed gun from twenty-one to nineteen, and repealed many of the requirements for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits.

And in 2016, Missouri lawmakers overrode their governor’s veto to enact Senate Bill 656, the so-called guns everywhere bill. Among other stipulations, SB 656 eliminated requirements for training, education, background checks, and permits needed to carry concealed weapons in Missouri. Bill 656 also annulled most city and regional gun restrictions, vastly expanded so-called Castle Doctrine coverage—the notion that “a man’s home is his castle and he has a right to defend it… free from legal prosecution for the consequences of the force used”—and extended “stand-your-ground” protections for people who took lethal action against perceived dangers outside the home as well.3

analyzed crime data from Missouri and found that the state’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase (PTP) handgun law “was associated with a 25 percent increase in firearm homicides rates.” Between 2008 and 2014, the Missouri gun homicide rate rose to 47 percent higher than the national average. Rates of gun death by suicide, partner violence, and accidental shooting soared as well. In 2014, gun deaths topped deaths by motor vehicle accident for the first time in the state. News outlets referred to Missouri as the “Shoot Me State.”

For Cassandra, an African American pastor in St. Louis, situations such as the ones described by John illustrated a double standard through which society coded white gun owners as “protectors” and black gun owners as “threats.”

I asked him what guns meant to him, and he immediately responded, “Freedom. Liberty. Patriotism. That’s why we just voted Trump. No way we were going to let ‘Crooked Hillary’ take those things away from us.”

Because of the ban and its downstream effects, researchers rarely study why a small number of gun owners chose to turn their guns on themselves while many others do not. They cannot determine the most effective points of intervention to prevent deaths among lawful gun owners or within particular social networks. They cannot compare various safe-storage methods in rural communities to find out whether gun lockers, trigger locks, or smart-gun technologies work best in households with guns and children. They cannot even receive a grant to study the potential psychological benefits of owning a gun.

Resiliency is important because the vast majority of people who try suicide by means other than firearm survive their initial attempts. For instance, drug overdose, the most common method in suicide attempts in the United States, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.

But gun suicide often has its own temperament, its own pace, its own urgent, mercurial linearity. Turning a firearm on oneself (or a loved one in some cases of armed domestic murder-suicide) can fall into a category that experts call “impulsive”—a spontaneous response to immediate stressors, such as a romantic breakup, job loss, fight, or rejection. One landmark study of impulsive suicide attempts in Texas found that 24 percent of young people spent less than five minutes between the decision to commit suicide and the actual attempt, that 70 percent took less than an hour, and that “male sex” and a history of having been in a physical fight—but not depression—were found to be risk factors for these impulsive suicide victims.

As the Harvard public health research report describes it, gun suicide often represents “an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis.” How do you make a refrigerator magnet for that?20

As a researcher, you can’t help but wonder: How many passing crises or cries for help end up entombed in the death data? How many people just wanted to make a statement, only to become a number in the column for completed firearm suicide? In what ways does the distinction between a cry for help, an accident, and an intended act matter when the outcome is often the same?

While the block on gun research funding might in its conception be aimed at scholars who are ostensibly (and for the most part incorrectly) identified as diehard liberals or anti-gun zealots, its real-world effects were most profoundly felt in the rooms, towns, and communities with the most firearms and the most pressing needs to promote best practices for gun safety and gun suicide prevention. The places that needed the most research and knowledge were the places, like Cape Girardeau, that had the most guns.

A far-ranging 2013 report by the Pew Research Center used US death certificate data to detail how “blacks were 55% of shooting homicide victims in 2010, but 13% of the population.” By contrast, whites were 25 percent of the victims of gun homicide in 2010, but 65 percent of the population.26

a 2015 Brookings Institution report relied on data from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) database to show a remarkable segregation whereby the vast majority (77 percent) of white gun deaths were suicides, while “less than one in five (19 percent) is a homicide.” These figures were nearly opposite in black populations, where “only 14 percent of gun deaths are suicides but 82 percent are homicides.” Broadly put, a white person in the United States is five times as likely to die by suicide using a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.27

that violence is social and structural and that “white” in any case is not a true biological grouping but a social one. Or, as we will see, that politics shape outcomes much more than do genes. The point being that the implicit binary of black aggressors toward others and white victims of themselves should itself be the problem we should aim to critique and change rather than justify and support.33

Yet risk feels particularly complicated in the context of the stories of white firearm suicide. Lessons seem hard to cull when the support groups are comprised only of grieving loved ones because the primary victims do not survive long enough to tell you what was going through their minds. Knowledge about best practices is fleeting because Congress effectively blocks federally funded research on gun-related risk, leading to a knowledge vacuum unlike anything ever seen for every other leading cause of injury and death. Ultimately, risk is embodied not in the imagined intruder but in the person who already lives in the house. Risk then becomes at once prevalent and invisible. Risk is an ellipsis, an evanescent void.

By some estimates, America’s privately owned gun stock increased by 70 million between 1994 and 2014. By 2015, American citizens owned 255 million guns, or more than one for every adult in the country—far and away the highest rate in the world. As Vox’s German Lopez explained it, Americans made up “about 4.43 percent of the world’s population [in 2015] yet owned roughly 42 percent of the world’s privately held firearms.”

Even Dodge City, Kansas, despite its reputation as a town of shoot-outs and chaos, had a mere five killings in 1878 at its peak of violence “due to a lack of duels and six-shooter pistols.” According to Melzer, white Protestant gunslinger heroes were largely invented by writers such as Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour and by 1950s-era movies such as The Gunfighter and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Gun makers, pulp magazines, dime novels, Western movies, and tourist towns “were important contributors to the romanticizing of the gunfighter myth,” he writes, “and the producers of these goods benefitted from its widespread acceptance.”30 The

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.

What if risk emerged, not just from the presence or absence of guns or policies? What if the guns and the policies rendered whiteness itself as a risk?

Guns mark forms of family and privilege that the white Missourians with whom I’ve spoken cling to as an inheritance. Guns also represent trauma multipliers that turn passing moments of desperation into agonizing and permanent loss for individuals and for communities. Joined together, guns come to embody, truly, double-edged swords, inasmuch as the same people and communities who benefit from imagined privileges represented by their guns also live closest to suicide enablers in moments of desperation.

In a variety of complex ways, white populations frequently justified their support for anti-ACA positions not through the benefits that expanded health care might have for themselves or their families but through concerns about threats to their status and privilege represented by government programs that promised to equally distribute resources or imagined health advantages.

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.11

Resistance to government intervention provided a common cause, along with a strength in numbers that, as journalist Daniel Hayes writes about white men in Kentucky, “comes less from unity than desperation.” For Hayes, desperation emerged from nostalgia for vanished, possibly mythical ways of life, in concert with the very real implications of NAFTA, Walmart, and “sustained economic violence at the hands of tyrannical governments of both parties.” In an age of outsourcing and globalization, this resistance became one of white men’s remaining marketable skills, deployed to guard the old ways through modes of resistance and self-sacrifice that made them perfect consumers and foot soldiers for the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association, and the Trump campaign.

The ACA also protected Americans from medical bankruptcies. Researchers estimate that over 60 percent of people who file for bankruptcy in the United States do so because they are unable to pay for medical costs due to a lack of health insurance or so-called underinsurance (insurance not sufficient to cover the costs of a major health incident).

Similarly, a 2013 insurance study found that over 35 million US adults had unpaid medical bills in collections, 17 million suffered lowered credit ratings due to high medical bills, and 15 million used up all of their savings to pay medical bills.

People often get sick despite their attempts to stay healthy. They get sick not because of their poor choices but because they happen to live near plastic factories or drink water tainted with lead, or because of radiation, global warming, or secondhand smoke. Yet this notion of health as a communal responsibility, a network, or an economy remained elusive in the dialogue of the white men in our groups and in the language of Donald Trump.

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.

What we see as homesickness or a desire to return to the old ways represents a state that psychologists might deem a post-childhood longing for an idealized time when things felt coherent; a time that may or may not ever have existed.

The ruling explicitly highlighted how the state system failed to prepare over 25 percent of students in basic reading and math skills and shortchanged half of the state’s African American students and one-third of its Hispanic students.11 The Kansas Supreme Court ruling highlighted just how methodically the Kansas experiment amplified and exacerbated racial and economic disparities. Minority and low-income families regressively payed more taxes and sent their children to worsening schools. All the while, the tax cuts bestowed savings to the well-off—including to lawmakers themselves.

Simply put, white Americans dominated most population categories in Kansas—including that of students in the state’s public schools. What were the effects of falling educational attainment in white-dominated parts of the state?18

Instead, the cuts made the rich richer. Meanwhile, even just four years of school budget cuts set in motion systemic changes across public education that reversed progress on multiple levels, from fourth-grade test results to health classes to high school graduation rates and postsecondary career options. 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.

Among the survey’s many findings was that growing numbers of Southern and midwestern working-class whites (72 percent) said they preferred factory jobs over office jobs (28 percent) and that “when these voters hear people tell them that the answer to their concerns is college, their reaction is to essentially say—don’t force your version of the American Dream on me.”21

For one thing, the problems with education did not result from rising costs or inherent evils with education per se. Rather, public education became less efficient, and often more expensive, because of policies that Brownback and then Trump supporters voted for. Subsequent policies and legislative efforts that increased class sizes and reduced the quality of instruction chipped away at the overall value of what education was and what it did. Conservative rhetoric blamed the objects of tax cuts (schools) while often giving the subjects that implemented the cuts (politicians and policies) a free pass. And

Yet for the most part, the dynamic was difficult to discern from the outside. Even as I drove for interviews at a number of public schools, I could not help but notice the tranquility that the schools projected to the outside world. School buildings seemed immaculate and well maintained. Football teams practiced on well-mowed fields. Students strolled through the grounds laughing with each other on the way to class, their futures but a light weight in their backpacks. 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. Of ever-more students falling through the cracks, only to later appear, as if weeds from the underground, working at menial jobs or walking the streets. Or wheeled, short of breath, into emergency rooms. In

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.

Responses frequently flowed, unprompted, from the wastefulness of public schools to the drains on the system posed by immigrants. Another parent told me that “it costs us so much money, taking care of these undocumented and even just people who are here temporarily, and medical bills and incarceration… all Kobach is saying is one place we’re spending millions of millions of millions of dollars is on these illegal immigrants. That’s part of the problem with our budget.”