More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 22 - December 24, 2022
Succinctly put: a host of complex anxieties prompt increasing numbers of white Americans like Trevor to support right-wing politicians and policies, even when these policies actually harm white Americans at growing rates.
Thomas Frank, in his modern classic What’s the Matter with Kansas?,
Increasingly, we now hear that people with racist attitudes fare poorly as well. Racist views make people “sick” and “unhealthy,” neuroscientists claim, because the psychological effort of discrimination can raise blood pressure or cortisol levels and heighten risk for heart attacks or strokes. “Harboring prejudice may be bad for your health,” neuropsychologist Elizabeth Page-Gould writes, because racially prejudiced people experience such “biological reactions… even during benign social interactions with people of different races.”15
In his classic text The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger
writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump then became “the first white President”
I’ve come to believe, and argue in this book, that playing to white anxieties has implications beyond “whipping up the base” against immigrants, liberals, and minorities. 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. Living in a state or a county or a nation dominated by a politics of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable, quantifiable, and
...more
the JAMA found that gun violence was the least researched major cause of death in the United States as measured by the number of papers published, and the second-least-funded cause of death related to its death toll. It was as if someone placed a silencer on knowledge.15
Roughly 85 percent of firearm suicide attempts result in death. For this reason, firearms rank at the top of what researchers call “case-fatality charts” that list the percentages of people who die from the different methods of suicide. As suicidologists describe it, guns top the list because of their “inherent deadliness,” “ease of use,” and “accessibility”—in other words, because of many of the same qualities that draw people to guns in the first place.19
Put another way, 92 percent of gun suicides in the United States were committed by non-Hispanic white persons. These percentages were dramatically higher than those seen in other “race” groups in the census database—such as gun suicides committed by persons categorized as black, Asian, or Native Americas.
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.
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.
John Lott in More Guns, Less Crime.
the findings of the study are relevant to physicians as it provides further evidence that reducing access to a firearm can prevent suicide.
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.
PYLL stands for “potential years of life lost,” and 75 represents the average life span in the United States. PYLL calculates the average number of years that a person would have lived had he or she not died prematurely by unnatural causes.
The data overwhelmingly suggests that more guns mean more deaths, and particularly so for the very people whose privileges and potencies Man Cards and pro-gun policies claim to restore.
Here, guns function as totems, symbols of belonging and of self- and community protection, revered sources of power.
conversations surrounding pro-gun and anti-ACA politics in Southern and midwestern US states: both asked working-class white Americans to put their own bodies on the line in order to “defend” conservative ideologies.
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
Once again, concerns about autonomy closely aligned with concerns about the costs marginalized others might inflict upon the men in the room.
Issac Bailey, author of the memoir Proud. Black. Southern.,
historian George Lipsitz once termed a “possessive investment in whiteness.”7
The authors ultimately found that all-cause mortality declined by a whopping 6.1 percent, or 19.6 per 100,000 people, after expansion, including a 4.53 percent decline for white residents and an 11.36 percent decline for nonwhite residents.
Sommers wrapped up his findings by arguing that more health insurance roughly correlated with less death because insurance “leads to increased coverage, and such coverage leads to better access and more utilization of clinical services, including office visits, with resulting gains in self-reported health status.”
This translated to as much as 14.1 days of life per white Tennessean.
And here as well, blocking health care for “Mexicans” and “welfare queens” came at considerable cost to white populations in Tennessee.
not only did people in Kentucky have more access to physicians and medical care compared to Tennesseans, but Tennesseans paid more for what care they did receive.15
our relationships with friends and family all have considerable impacts on health… the context of people’s lives determine their health, and so blaming individuals for having poor health or crediting them for good health is inappropriate. Individuals are unlikely to be able to directly control many of the determinants of health.24
Community investment thereby worked against the forces of structural racism that rendered the suffering of persons at the lower ends of the economic spectrum as uncovered and, all too often, invisible.
Ralph Ellison described such suffering in the prologue to Invisible Man thus: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” The second-order social benefits of the ACA helped to “see” the unseen.
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.
Thomas Frank narrates his modern classic What’s the Matter with Kansas?
Kansas became a frequent landing place for white flight. Its stronger tax base and significant state investments in education yielded significant results for student outcomes.
In the US context, much of this work highlights how tax cuts disproportionately benefit rich white males at the expense of other groups of people in society. Tax cuts also lead to shortfalls in government services and programs that frequently assist women and minorities.
writer J. D. Vance, author of the widely acclaimed book Hillbilly Elegy,
In Red State Religion, sociologist Robert Wuthnow describes how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, powerful Republican traditions in Kansas mixed religion, pragmatism, and social action to bolster relationships among neighbors, friends, and fellow churchgoers.
“School cuts definitely started out as something that people thought were only geared toward inner-city, black, and Hispanic schools and districts,” one administrator explained. “That’s how they were sold at first.”
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.5
Students of all backgrounds and foregrounds, with lives and futures ahead of them, thereby became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward.
Yet when we started to add it all up, a new aggregate price tag for tax cuts began to emerge. More smokers, diabetes, and missed doctor visits. More people in menial jobs. Eighteen thousand, five hundred fifty lost years of life after only four years of budget cuts—and using data that conservatively addressed rising dropout rates and not the larger figures of falling graduations.
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.
police shifted from protective models of public engagement to oppressive and financially predatory ones.
Ultimately, “it dawned on me, and now seems so obvious, that white politicians were the ones pushing for all the guns, and gun violence was a societal issue that reflected mainstream white values and problems too.”
What might American politics look like if white humility was seen not as a sellout or a capitulation but as an honest effort to address seemingly intractable social issues?
Or a gun lobby that, even as it protects Second Amendment rights, engages with its members about a larger question: Why do we feel we need so many guns in the first place?
On stepping down from the US presidency in 1809, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to his republican supporters that a primary lesson he learned as head of state was how “the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”
Behind these agendas are core assumptions that the happiness of a select few persons takes precedence over the care of a great many others. Human life has suffered as a result, as has the notion that good government protects and promotes well-being in the first place.23
