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

by Jonathan M. Metzl Narrated by Jamie Renell

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

Publishers Weekly

★ 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.)

From the Publisher

"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

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

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170264988
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	823,758

Videos