Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland, by Jonathan M. Metzl
Trevor was dying. Liver disease and hepatitis C were the causes. Tennessee had not accepted the expansion of Medicaid provided for in the Affordable Care Act, and thus Trevor, a 41-year-old white Tennessean, had gone without health coverage. He strongly supported the decision of his state’s Republican officials on this matter. Had he lived a few miles away, in Kentucky—whose then-governor, a Democrat, had expanded Medicaid with an executive order—he would have been eligible for coverage and thus care that might well have saved his life.
But Trevor wouldn’t have accepted it. He “would rather die” than “support Obamacare or sign up for it.” Why? “We don’t need any more government in our lives,” Trevor answered, before fleshing out his response and fully revealing his thinking: “And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” And there you have the argument of this book in a nutshell. As the author, a physician with a Ph.D. in American Studies who currently serves as the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, puts it, “Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in [the racial] hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.”
More broadly, Metzl explains, his research reveals “a reality that liberal Americans were often slow to realize: Trump supporters were willing to put their own lives on the line in support of their political beliefs … make tradeoffs that negatively affect their lives and livelihoods in support of larger prejudices or ideals.” The author “track[s] the full extent to which these political acts of self-sabotage came at mortal cost to the health and longevity of lower- and, in many instances, middle-income white GOP supporters—and, ultimately, to the well-being of everyone else.”
Metzl digs deep into the material effects of various Republican policies in three GOP-run states: Kansas, Missouri, and Tennessee. These policies “gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals.” It was about “owning” those groups, apparently. The author adds that “the victories came at a steep cost.” He cites the result of cuts to health care programs as well as the prevention of the expansion of systems that would deliver care, gutting the spending on infrastructure and education, allowing greater damage to the environment and the enactment of pro-gun-rights policies. The result, backed by the data Metzl carefully lays out, was quite clear: More people died, and more people’s overall health suffered significantly, among both lower- and middle-class whites as well as the people of color toward whom many of them aimed their resentments.
In other words, those economically vulnerable whites who support policies that end up directly harming them are “literally dying of whiteness.” They are voting not just against their economic self-interest, but also “against their own biological self-interests.” As Metzl also notes, “anti-blackness, in a biological sense, then produces its own anti-whiteness. An illness of the mind, weaponized onto the body of the nation.”