Dying of Whiteness

Somewhere between a 3 and 3.5. This is a solid empirical and philosophical exploration of how America's white supremacist institutions can, quietly, harm working class white Americans.

This is not a huge piece of news, but it was a relatively interesting entry into the literature about several things: the rise of (often self-defeating) populism/Trumpism, the decline and demonization of the welfare state, America's (often self-defeating) cultural obsession with individualism, and America's white supremacy. I consider myself a political liberal and used to think I was a “non-racist”; but the last few years have been an awakening (a wokening?!) in terms of just how much America's core institutions and culture are built on racism. Anyway, so I would file this book next to a bunch of others: Albion's Seed, The Unwinding, Rachel and Her Children, Evicted, Usual Cruelty, Between the World and Me... Oh, so many.

It also made me meditate on how capitalism/industrialization and racism grew up together in America, and how racism was used to drive a wedge between the white and black working classes to ensure classism/income inequality would never be addressed. Metzl, the author here, quotes W.E.B. DuBois's “wages of whiteness”.

It ALSO made me think of game theory - where experiments have demonstrated, numerous times, that people will choose to hurt themselves if it punishes a perceived opponent. This book is basically a long catalog of times lower-income white people have opposed policies which would, on the individual level, benefit them - but they've opposed those policies for fear that non-white bogeymen (“illegal immigrants, welfare queens, gang members”) would get them as well.

Specifically, Metzl covers three distinct policies which, in his argument, directly led to avoidable white deaths: (the lack of) gun control in Missouri, opposing Medicaid expansion and Obamacare in Tennessee, and the decimation of public school funding in Kansas. In all three cases, these policies are enacted by conservative, Republican politicians under a narrative of “wasteful” welfare spending or infringement of personal (white) liberties (e.g. to own a gun); and, in all three cases, Metzl links these to avoidable increases in mortality among white populations.

For guns in Missouri, Metzl (who is a psychiatry professor) notes that white men are (VERY) disproportionately represented in suicides by gun. He also advances the idea that suicide by gun is distinct from other forms of suicide - namely, because of its lethality (you almost always succeed if you use a gun to kill yourself, as opposed to e.g. pills), it goes through a different psychological process than other, “non-gun” suicides: it can be the result of an impulse, rather than a longer process of consideration, etc. For healthcare in Tennessee, the link between policy and death is even more obvious: Metzl interviews white men (mostly men, again) in very poor health who view Obamacare as “too costly” and a drain on public resources - even as they struggle to afford their medical bills. And, finally, education in Kansas: Metzl's final interview is with a white woman who lambasts the Kansas governor, Sam Brownback, for his starving of Kansas's previously-great public school system. After Metzl points out that Trump advocates many of the same austerity policies that Brownback does, the woman admits “you might be right, but at least [Trump] gives a voice to unheard white people” (I paraphrase, but she does explicitly say “white”).

In all these cases, Metzl mixes qualitative interviews with more quantitative work, along with some political philosophy musings. During the interviews, he often tries to gently prod people to acknowledge - or at least SEE - how contradictory their beliefs are. A couple times, people come right out and say it: whiteness is more important than everything else. (Indeed, he bookends with two interviews where the interviewee basically says that).

This book came out right before Covid, but the anti-vax movement is similarly tinged with racialized politics: e.g. black anti-vaxers who, remembering Tuskegee etc, are mistrustful; white anti-vaxers who believe their “rights” and “freedom” are infringed if they do something for the public good. And, indeed, white people are dying on this hill. Metzl's Twitter is very active in this regard!

So I thought the qualitative interviews were particularly interesting, and I learned a LOT about suicide and guns (I had no idea white men were so disproportionately represented). I didn't buy the quantitative work, mostly because it was largely descriptive stats and occasional correlations - Metzl didn't discuss causal inference enough to convince me. That said, he did hat-tip Deaton and Case's work on declining white working class longevity in the US, and I'm eager to read that - since I basically trust their empirical/statistical work more.