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

“These histories imbue debates about guns, health care systems, taxes, and schools with larger meanings about race in America and about American whiteness. The history of race in America also helps explain why these topics cut to the heart of present-day debates about what it means to provide resources, protections, and opportunities for everyone in a diverse society versus providing securities and opportunities for a select few.”

Metzl argues that racial histories of issues like gun control, healthcare, and school funding are responsible for the political polarization they create today. These issues are fundamentally linked to white American identity and the place of whiteness in the social hierarchy, leading to The Societal Impacts of Racial Resentment. Therefore, changing these policies to create a more inclusive society threatens fundamental ideals of white identity and superiority.

“Instead, racism matters most to health when its underlying resentments and anxieties shape larger politics and policies and then affect public health.”

This is another key point that Metzl makes throughout the text. While racism is certainly damaging on an individual level, it becomes most dangerous when racist ideology shapes public policy, creating structural systems that negatively impact population-level health.

“At the same time, I cannot help but notice that, unlike my imagined lung cancer or impaired driving meetings, not one person makes a critical comment about guns, bullets, gun manufacturers, or gun laws. No one suggests that rethinking the role of guns in personal and public life might impact suicide. The comments that people make focus entirely on individual-level stressors, warning signs, and plans of action, never on larger societal ones.”

While studying the prevalence of white male gun death by suicide in Missouri, Metzl is primarily concerned with how the risk factors for gun death by suicide might differ from other kinds of death by suicide. He notes that individuals who lost loved ones to lung cancer or driving while under the influence might blame these external societal forces and question what they could do to make society safer. However, because of the controversy surrounding issues of gun control, no one who lost loved ones to firearm death by suicide questioned how the role of guns in society might have led to their loved ones’ deaths.

“In other words, the federal ban on funding gun research and the polarization it produces makes it harder to create common knowledge about some of the issues that most affected the people in the room in the Cape library, and the communities in which they strive, work, and try to survive. These were the red-state, pro-gun communities whose Second Amendment rights were never in doubt, but who lived in armed petri dishes with the lights turned out when it came to identifying risk factors and promoting strategies for suicide prevention.”

Metzl argues that the ban on federal funding for gun research further polarizes gun control rhetoric by suggesting that advocating for anything less than unfettered access to firearms is anti-gun. This does a disservice to everyone, but especially those for whom guns constitute an important part of daily life. Guns come with considerable risks, and learning to better understand and mitigate those risks makes life safer for pro-gun Americans. This enforced polarization also speaks to the theme of The Myth of Polarization and the Desire for a Middle Ground.

“Projecting such profound gender and racial meanings onto objects might then render men subject to the maneuvers of marketers, sellers, lobbyists, politicians, and other manipulators of common sense. Of course, guns are also incredibly dangerous, but the danger they pose to people who own and carry them and to their families becomes harder to acknowledge or recognize when these objects of potential self-destruction carry such weighted connotations.”

Throughout the text, Metzl explores how historical narratives of Privilege, Whiteness, and Nostalgia have converged to make certain issues more divisive in the contemporary United States. Since owning a firearm was long a privilege permitted only to white men, the threat of losing access to guns represents a broader threat to white masculinity, and politicians and lobbyists often exploit these connections and anxieties.

“Polarization then leads to an often-absurd state of affairs. Calculations of risk produce ever-safer cars, medications, bike lanes, and building codes. Yet the very idea of even studying risk becomes a risk itself when the conversation turns to guns, laying the groundwork for decisions that seem at odds with individual and national well-being.”

In this passage, Metzl describes how polarization around gun control leads to a nonsensical refusal to acknowledge and address the public health threat that firearms pose. Other consumer products or social structures that impact individual and collective health are rigorously studied and improved upon to reduce risk, while research and discussions around gun control remain taboo in many conservative communities. This contributes to the theme of The Myth of Polarization and the Desire for a Middle Ground.

“As this process plays out, the peril to white men comes not just from the instrument, the impulse, or even the legislation. Rather, privilege itself becomes a liability. White men themselves become the biggest threats to…themselves. Danger emerges from who they are and from what they wish to be. Over time, the data suggests, ‘being a white man who lives in Missouri’ then emerges as its own, high-risk category.”

In this passage, Metzl describes how, in defense of their Privilege, Whiteness, and Nostalgia, white men become a danger to themselves. Acting in reaction to perceived threats from minority and immigrant populations, white men in rural America arm themselves evermore heavily. However, Metzl’s research shows that the danger from these imagined threats is far outweighed by the danger they pose to themselves.

“I can’t help but think that so much of the tension that survivors describe, in the group and in my interviews, arises from the difference between individual and structural explanations of gun suicide. Survivors are stuck between warning signs they might have seen or should have known on the one hand and predetermined factors built right into the laws, traditions, and culture of their communities.”

The time that Metzl spends with Missourians who lost loved ones to gun death by suicide illustrates how much the lack of research into gun violence harms everyone. The “knowledge vacuum” leads survivors to blame themselves for missing conventional death by suicide warning signs that aren’t always relevant in cases of gun death by suicide. At the same time, this focus on individual risk factors hides structural factors that increase risk for gun death by suicide.

“At the same time, people have been told for most of their lives that these products are us, circumscribe us, privilege, defend, and define us. That questioning these products and their role in our lives is a form of heresy. That blaming the gun or the politician or the policy is what liberals do. That giving even an inch on guns means that the squatters and the migrants will overrun the plantations and the farms.”

In this passage, Metzl highlights the social, emotional, and historical significance of firearms in rural America. Guns are more than just weapons or tools; they are an important symbol of privilege, authority, and autonomy. However, all these connotations and complexity make it difficult to discuss the effect of firearms on public health and assess avenues for safer gun ownership.

“Yes, survival and well-being represent core human drives, and protecting the health of yourself and your family remains sacrosanct. Most people, for the most part, want access to affordable health care in order to do so. However, I had seen firsthand how many voters in Trump country felt the burden of centuries of history that charged the idea of government intervention in general, and into health care specifically, with race and class politics—often accompanied by overt xenophobia and racism […] When the ACA came along, the GOP deftly played on this history to instill loyalty for positions that often rendered white working-class bodies expendable.”

In this passage, Metzl describes the various forces at play in the polarization of healthcare in Tennessee. He suggests healthcare in and of itself is not controversial; people want themselves and their families to be healthy, but the complicated racial history of health and government intervention in the South complicates support for the ACA. Politicians like Trump play into these histories and associated anxieties to garner support for their own agendas.

“For many white men in the South, the word government elicits an autonomic peptic response. Like asking about ‘gun control’ in Missouri, phrasing a question about ‘government’ in states like Tennessee hangs heavy with historical inflections. For instance, government invokes the Reconstruction period, when federal forces and Republican governments ‘occupied’ Southern states and pressured them into granting political rights to newly freed slaves.”

Here, Metzl describes the loaded historical ramifications of government intervention in the South. At several points, the federal government intervened to dismantle Southern institutions like enslavement and racial discrimination; however, white Southerners saw this as an attack on their autonomy and way of like. Metzl argues that it is impossible to fully understand white Tennesseans’ opposition to the ACA without understanding this history.

“Everybody. Society. The citizenship. For these men, health care was a utility shared by all, for the benefit of all. Where white men often defined government involvement as a risk or debt, many black men saw a communal safety net as an investment. Expanded health care enabled well-being for highly practical, seemingly nonideological reasons: health care allowed more people to go to doctors and to do so before they became gravely ill, thus saving money and improving quality of life.”

In this passage, Metzl summarizes the opinions of Black male Tennesseans regarding the ACA. In contrast to the white men, who discussed healthcare in terms of a “cost” they had to assume responsibility for, Black men saw expanded access to healthcare as a communal benefit that would make society as a whole healthier.

“Pain affirmed group identity and a position in a hierarchy that, while hardly at the top, was not at the bottom either. No amount of Yankee logic, information, or public health would change that. Safety nets, provider networks, and other grids linked lower-income white men to onetime subordinates turned perceived competitors. Untreated pain, in this one sense, could be read as gain—or at least a victory for stasis.”

Many of the white men Metzl spoke with in Tennessee were uninsured and suffering from chronic illnesses. Almost all of them stood to benefit from the ACA’s proposed expansion of Medicaid. However, Metzl argues that their opposition to the bill, and the suffering that came with it, allowed them to affirm their group identity as white men and remain set apart from immigrant and minority groups. The white groups’ reluctance to think in communal terms points to The Societal Impacts of Racial Resentment.

“Cost, in other words, functioned as a metaphor for concerns about a system that gravely threatened the sense of individualism underpinning particular white notions of health. […] Here, seemingly self-evident arguments about communal well-being and shared risk engender specific forms of white anxiety. This was because […] cost connected everyone. Cost was an economy in which the well-being of white men always depended on the responsible actions of everyone else, including Mexicans and welfare queens.”

Summarizing his argument about the “cost” of the ACA, Metzl explains how the racialized historical context of government intervention worked to polarize the issue of healthcare in the United States. Not only are white Southerners suspicious of government intervention because of the legacy of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, but the nature of healthcare forces citizens to recognize that they are all collectively responsible for the nation’s health and well-being. This concept of healthcare as a network undermines narratives of authority and autonomy that are central to Privilege, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in white American identity.

“From economic or medical perspectives, these claims were made of little more than hot air. But from the perspective of race in America, they seemed all too familiar. 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. And we, as a nation, chose the bottom lines in the charts. In so choosing, voters and politicians who claimed to bolster white privilege again turned whiteness into a statistically perilous category.”

In his study of gun death by suicide in Missouri, Metzl argues that whiteness becomes a significant risk factor when considering steps toward death by suicide prevention. Concluding the chapter on Medicaid expansion in Tennessee, Metzl reiterates this argument, suggesting that preserving the social convention of whiteness becomes hazardous to the health of white Tennessee, reflecting The Societal Impacts of Racial Resentment. Furthermore, politicians like Donald Trump exploit these racial anxieties for their own political gain.

“Nostalgia very often arises from false memory […] a post-childhood longing for an idealized time when things felt coherent; a time that may or may not ever have existed. Yet when I returned to Kansas over the summer and early fall of 2017 to research the final section of this book, life felt tangibly different from the Kansas I imagined from my youth. The roads were splattered with potholes. The collaborative, can-do attitude that propelled people across the flat land seemed replaced by resentment.”

Privilege, Whiteness, and Nostalgia is an important theme throughout the text, as Metzl explains how racial resentment is often based on a past of idealized grandeur. Frequently, however, the “greatness” of this past is imagined or exaggerated. Here, Metzl describes his return to Kansas, where he felt that the state he remembered from his childhood really was better in his memory. Ironically, policies that Trump would later recycle for his campaign to “make America great again” had visibly impacted Kansas for the worse.

“But reality turned out to be less than dreamy for many Kansans. It turned out that, contrary to hyperbolic reports of government waste, the state had frequently used tax revenue to pay for roads, bridges, traffic lights, aqueducts, conduits, and causeways—structures often supported by communal governance, and for which wealthy persons who receive tax breaks do not often clamor to invest their surplus funds. Tax revenue also secured the fiscal reputation of the state, enabling the various lending and borrowing vital to a functioning economy.”

Governor Brownback and his administration argued that the government was responsible for wasteful spending. Tax cuts, they claimed, would stimulate the economy because the wealthy would be eager to invest their surplus funds. However, wealthy Kansans failed to match the communal investment of tax dollars in things like education and infrastructure, which rapidly began to decline.

“Schools represented the promise of future betterment and upward mobility for minority and low-income Kansans. Kansas schools also symbolized far larger, national debates about American equality and investment […] Defunding public schools in Kansas, the home of Brown v. Board, thus carried profound unspoken resonance. This history suggests another reason why white Kansans supported economic and fiscal agendas that offered most of them little in the way of material returns.”

Although Kansas’s plan to defund public schools wasn’t explicitly racist, the tax cuts disproportionately affected children of color. Again, Metzl argues that context is essential for understanding why white voters support certain policies. In the case of Kansas, the state has a long and complicated history with education equity, and education was often seem as a larger symbol of opportunity for economic betterment.

“But here once again, policies that redistributed wealth and resources away from minority populations had tremendously negative effects for white populations as well. As Booker T. Washington once put it, ‘You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.’ In some instances, white populations saw the most dramatic cumulative negative effects of any subgrouping.”

Although minority populations took the brunt of Brownback’s tax cuts, white Kansans also suffered The Societal Impacts of Racial Resentment. In fact, Metzl points out that they experienced the worst “cumulative negative effects” due to making up the majority of the population. This again illustrates Metzl’s argument that backlash policies based on racial resentment backfire on the lower- and middle-income white Americans who support them.

“Much like global warming, the threats of educational disaster seemed, at the individual level, almost impossible to discern […] The data told a different story, one of invisibly slipping skills and invisibly crumbling communities. Of ever-more students falling through the cracks, only to later appear, as if weeds from the underground, working at menial jobs or walking the streets. Or wheeled, short of breath, into emergency rooms.”

Metzl points out that one of the dangers of declining education is its invisibility. On the surface, life goes on as usual. Especially hidden are the health risks, which often fail to materialize until much later in life, when an individual’s experiences in elementary, middle, and even high school are far behind them.

“‘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.’”

This passage comes from an interview with a parent in Kansas City. She admits that Trump is proposing many of the same policies whose consequences Kansans are now dealing with, but that doesn’t damper her support for the new president. Her assertion that male family members feel Trump has given “them their voice back” affirms Metzl’s argument that many white Americans vote not according to policy but in favor of their identity, and in an attempt to preserve the Privilege, Whiteness, and Nostalgia they value.

“But it also seemed clear that no matter the outcome, the divisions that the coming election represented were not going away any time soon—and that, without at some point addressing deeper biases and ideologies, arguments like those championed by Kobach and Trump would keep returning if from the collective repressed […] American whiteness itself and its ever-perilous, doubly unconscious hold on power remained the condition that always, always needed to be defended.”

In closing Part 3, Metzl argues that the popularity of politicians like Trump and Kobach means that, while Americans may have recognized the damage of some key policies, they have yet to address the core problem behind backlash governance. Even though many Kansans regretted Brownback’s tax cuts, their determination to vote for politicians offering more of the same illustrates that racial anxiety remains the primary driving force.

“Yet what everyone seemed to overlook in their interpretation of Campbell’s death is the point I’ve made throughout this book: we lose perspective when we explain racially charged encounters in the United States solely on the basis of what exists in people’s minds or on their individual actions. Doing so blocks recognition of the ways racial anxieties manifest themselves in laws, policies, and infrastructures—in ways that carry negative implications for everyone.”

In this passage, Metzl highlights the collective dangers of policies based on racial resentment. One can die “of whiteness” regardless of personal ideologies or individual actions thanks to The Societal Impacts of Racial Resentment. The defense of whiteness crafts a system that is ever more perilous for all those who inhabit it.