Jonathan M. Metzl

A physician reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Esquire and the Boston Globe In the era of Donald Trump, many lower- and middle-class white Americans are drawn to politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Physician Jonathan M. Metzl's quest to understand the health implications of "backlash governance" leads him across America's heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise.

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

Dying of Whiteness

Katy Watkins

When I began to sift through the statistics for gun injury and death in Missouri, I quickly realized that the primary victims of gun mortality were not criminals or inner-city gang members, as the NRA and some politicians implied. Rather, as gun laws were liberalized, gun deaths spiked… among white people. This was because white Missourians dominated injuries and deaths via gun-related suicides, partner violence, and accidental shootings—and in ways that outpaced African American gun deaths from homicides.

I found that, when tracked over time, racially driven policies in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas functioned as mortal risk factors for all people who live in these states. This is because illness and death patterns that followed actions such as expanding gun proliferation or massive tax cuts mimicked those once seen in relation to other man-made pathogens, such as water pollution, secondhand smoke, or not wearing seat belts in cars, or during certain disease outbreaks. Society mobilized to reduce risk and improve health when toxins dumped into the water, cigarettes, or faulty automobiles led to declining health. But when the pathogens were policies and ideologies, they instead laid the foundations for politics furthered at the national level by the GOP, the NRA, and the Trump administration.

In his seminal work on Reconstruction, historian W. 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.

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