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

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

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Overview

A physician's "provocative" (Boston Globe) and "timely" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times Book Review) account of how right-wing backlash policies have deadly consequences — even for the white voters they promise to help

In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, right-wing policies put these voters' very health at risk—and in the end, threaten everyone's well-being. Physician and sociologist Jonathan M. Metzl travels across America's heartland seeking to better understand the politics of racial resentment and its impact on public health. Interviewing a range of Americans, he uncovers how racial anxieties led to the repeal of gun control laws in Missouri, fueled massive cuts to schools and social services in Kansas, and stymied healthcare reform across the country. Although such measures promised to restore greatness to white America, Metzl's systematic analysis of health data reveals they did just the opposite: these policies made life sicker, harder, and shorter in the very populations they purported to aid. Thus, white gun suicides soared, life expectancies fell, and school dropout rates rose.  

Now with a new foreword on the backlash to the American pandemic response, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation, rather than chasing false promises of supremacy. 

Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541644977
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	120,256
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jonathan M. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and director of its Department of Medicine, Health, and Society. He is the author of five books and a prominent expert on gun violence and mental illness. He hails from Kansas City, Missouri, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Introduction: Dying of Whiteness 1

Part 1 Missouri

The Cape 23

Risk 35

Interview: I Can't Just Make It Go Away 55

The Man Card 61

Interview: We Gotta Take Up Arms 79

Preventative Medicine 83

Interview: The Biggest Heart 91

What Was the Risk? 95

Interview: The Whys and What-Ifs 111

Trigger Warnings 115

Part 2 Tennessee

Unaffordable 121

Cost 127

In the Name of Affordable Care 131

Focus 139

Socialism 147

Everybody 157

De-Progressive 165

The Numbers Tell the Story 171

Part 3 Kansas

Beneath the Surface 191

There's No Place Like Home 193

The Kansas Experiment 199

Interview: A Downward Cycle 207

Austerity 209

Interview: A Bad Rap 219

The Schools 223

Interview: The Race Card 237

Congestive Heart Failure 241

Interview: No Matter What He Does 263

Millions of Millions 265

Conclusion: The Castle Doctrine 269

Afterword to the Paperback Edition 285

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 295

Index 339

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/28/2019
In this groundbreaking work, Metzl, physician and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, demonstrates the “mortal trade-offs” white Americans make when they vote with the goal of restoring their racial privilege and end up endorsing “political positions that directly harm their own health and well-being.” Metzl methodically and adeptly marshals statistical evidence that policies promising to bolster white Americans’ status have instead made life “sicker, harder, and shorter” for all Americans. He finds that, in Missouri, under the lax gun laws white voters favored, white men became 2.38 times more likely than men of other races to die by firearm suicide. In Tennessee, opposition to the Affordable Care Act “cost every single white resident of the state 14.1 days of life”; many white Tennesseans, Metzl writes, “voiced a willingness to die, literally, rather than embrace a law that gave minority or immigrant persons more access to care.” A “Tea Party-fueled” gutting of school funding in Kansas greatly increased the number of people dropping out of high school, which “correlates with nine years of lost life expectancy.” This tightly constructed analysis of the unexpected consequences of American political behavior exemplifies excellence in argumentative writing, on a topic of cultural significance. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, the Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Traveling through the American heartland, a physician deconstructs how right-wing policies have fatal consequences, even for the voters they purport to help. Metzl paints a blistering portrait of a subculture so in thrall to racist ideology that they willingly invite raising gun suicides, poor healthcare, and falling life expectancies."—Esquire

"Provocative... brings a unique blend of psychiatric insight and data analysis — as well as some nifty philosophical insights into what people mean by concepts of risk, cost, and community — to a problem that will no doubt persist even beyond our current presidency."—Boston Globe

"Groundbreaking.... Metzl methodically and adeptly marshals statistical evidence that policies promising to bolster white Americans' status have instead made life 'sicker, harder, and shorter' for all."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Remarkable...Through field interviews, research and public-health data, Metzl shows that whites are harming themselves along with everyone else, and in drastic ways...A weighty but smooth read, devoid of polemics or jargon."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A provocative, instructive contribution to the literature of public health as well as of contemporary politics."—Kirkus Reviews

"Dying of Whiteness unveils how the very policies marketed to white people as 'making America great again' end up harming the well-being of whites as a demographic group. This is must reading for anyone interested in understanding the current racial landscape of the United States."—Jelani Cobb, Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism, Columbia Journalism School

"Copious data have long shown us the deadly effects of racist health policies on African Americans. But in Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan M. Metzl powerfully shows us this coin's reverse: the deadly effects on white populations of contemporary policies promulgated by vengeful politicians to 'restore' an imaginary white superiority, and embraced by resentful, marginalized whites. Dying of Whiteness illuminates the dual devastation wrought by policies that limit access to care for the poor of every race."—Harriet A. Washington, author of Medical Apartheid

"In his pathbreaking and provocative book, Jonathan M. Metzl draws on his dual acuity as physician and social scientist to help make sense of the urgent issue of our time: how individuals not only act against their self-interests, but also support policies that contribute to their own early demise. A threadbare social safety net, further unraveled by virulent racism, has given way to an ailing body politic. Empathetic and poignant, this vital work exposes how an investment in whiteness works to the deficit of us all."—Alondra Nelson, Columbia University and Social Science Research Council

"In this paradigm-shifting tour de force, Jonathan M. Metzl brilliantly illuminates the shocking ways that white supremacy, through backlash governance, kills white people too. Moving deftly between mountains of data and compelling storytelling, Dying of Whiteness makes a vital contribution to our national conversation about racism and its discontents. Metzl uncovers the contemporary paradox of whiteness: a struggle to preserve white privilege in the midst of the declining value of whiteness. This is a must-read if you want to understand how race and the color line operate in twenty-first-century America."—Dorian Warren, president, Community Change, and co-chair, Economic Security Project

"Dying of Whiteness brilliantly demonstrates the tremendous impediment that white racism and backlash politics pose to our society's wellbeing, at a time when many white Americans quite literally would rather die than support policies they see as benefiting people of color. Jonathan M. Metzl issues an urgently needed call to acknowledge the deadly toll of investing in whiteness-and to work collectively toward a just society that would be healthier for everyone."—Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body

From the Publisher

As a stand-in for both the researcher (physician and author Jonathan Metzel) and his research subjects (Trump supporters), narrator Jamie Renell avoids what would be the disastrous flaw of turning either party into caricatures. Dr. Metzl never stoops to ridicule, even when calling out the delusion and racism behind the tenacious support of lower- and middle-class white Americans for certain policies—in particular, those related to guns, health care, and “small government”—which are quite literally killing them. Through Renell’s composed and compassionate narration, we hear not a strident pundit but rather a physician confronting a metaphorical patient with a diagnosis of self- harm. Renell handles both the many interview exchanges and the delivery of supporting data with equal ease. K.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

As a stand-in for both the researcher (physician and author Jonathan Metzel) and his research subjects (Trump supporters), narrator Jamie Renell avoids what would be the disastrous flaw of turning either party into caricatures. Dr. Metzl never stoops to ridicule, even when calling out the delusion and racism behind the tenacious support of lower- and middle-class white Americans for certain policies—in particular, those related to guns, health care, and “small government”—which are quite literally killing them. Through Renell’s composed and compassionate narration, we hear not a strident pundit but rather a physician confronting a metaphorical patient with a diagnosis of self- harm. Renell handles both the many interview exchanges and the delivery of supporting data with equal ease. K.W. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

2018-12-11
Nationalism, meet mortality: A social scientist and psychiatrist examines the interplay of racial identity and health.
Metzl (Center for Medicine, Health, and Society/Vanderbilt Univ.; The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, 2010, etc.) identifies several public health trends related to white identity politics and the left-behind sentiments of its adherents. One epidemiological chain goes like this: Whites without opportunity in the hinterlands drop out of high school at ever higher rates. According to studies by the author and others, "failure to attain a high school diploma correlated with nine years of life lost, in conjunction with rising rates of smoking, illnesses such as diabetes, and missed doctor visits." Want to guarantee a disaffected white rural populace? Slash the education budget, as former Kansas governor and Trump appointee Sam Brownback did. Similarly, Metzl lucidly examines rising rates of suicide by gun, noting that from 2009 to 2015, "non-Hispanic white men accounted for nearly 80 percent of all gun suicides in the United States, despite representing less than 35 percent of the total population." Although gun suicide is a clear threat to the public health, "whiteness" includes adherence to views that privilege the Second Amendment at the expense of any public good. In other words, although everyone knows there's a problem, the problem is variously attributed to nonwhite criminality or mental illness, not the easy availability of guns and lack of background screening. Furthermore, writes the author, the numbers point to the fact that "non-Hispanic white, male, self-identified conservative Republicans over the age of thirty-five overwhelmingly owned and carried the most guns in the country." Opposition to the Affordable Care Act has hinged on the notion that the undeserving (read: nonwhites) are free riders on a system that the government has no business being involved in. And so forth. While Metzl notes that white identity politics has enjoyed great successes, he concludes that they come at significant cost and "heighten the calculus of risk."
Long on description, shorter on prescription; still, a provocative, instructive contribution to the literature of public health as well as of contemporary politics.

Kirkus Reviews

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

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

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