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

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Kansas, the land of Oz, had become a national parable warning of the downside of American austerity economics. Bloomberg News summarized: “The Kansas supply-side experiment unravels… tax cuts were supposed to spur growth, boost revenue and create jobs. The results were the exact opposite.” Forbes detailed how “the great Kansas tax cut experiment crashes and burns.”14

A series of related studies link these trends with geography. Public health scholars Jennifer Montez and Lisa Berkman found that the negative health effects of low educational attainment varied by region and that people living in the northeastern United States “did not experience a significant increase in mortality like their counterparts in other regions.” Similarly, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson found that the states with the highest life expectancies were also the states with the highest educational levels (bachelor’s degree or higher). States with the highest education levels also tended to collect progressive state and local taxes and invest more readily in “education, infrastructure, urban quality of life and human services.” By contrast, states that cut taxes for corporations and wealthy persons and reduced government services saw worse health outcomes.

As Booker T. Washington once put it, “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”

Yet our data highlighted problems with a GOP turn against public education that began in states like Kansas and then spread nationally. 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.

JMM: Many people are. But from the perspective of Kansas… it just seems interesting that many of the same policies that seem to have failed so miserably in Kansas now form the basis for what Trump’s trying to do. Like huge tax cuts for wealthy people and corporations, or defunding schools and proposing block grants. These were the very policies that got Brownback into trouble, no? PA 48: 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.

Indeed, between 2008 and 2013, white persons from Missouri unintentionally shot and killed themselves, their friends, and their family members ten times more frequently than did other groups of persons.

Graphs showing rising morbidity and mortality, or illness and death, which follow these decisions complicate common assumptions about injury or death. We usually define mortality as linked to biology, genetics, fate, accident, or illness. Or we think about death from unwanted intruders, pathogens that invade through the water or the air. Yet the kinds of data I’ve tracked in this book raise the specter that American human frailty is in part man-made, rendered all the more tenuous not by invasions of them, the immigrants or pathogens, but by political choices made by us, the white electorate.