In a world where #BlackLivesMatter has become an existential argument, it's an unspoken truism among people of color: White people will kill to protect their position atop the social order, especially if they feel threatened by people who aren't white.
In his remarkable new book, "Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland," Jonathan Metzl argues they're willing to commit suicide, too — and the primary means of self-destruction is the ballot box.
His thesis: Conservative whites who hate taxes, gun control and government programs such as the Affordable Care Act are guzzling an elixir that Republicans say will Make America Great Again. But instead of restoring a mostly white (and largely imaginary) era free of rap music and Spanglish, Metzl writes, the toxic brew is shaving years from those voters' lives, damaging their health in measurable ways.
Dividing into case studies, "Dying of Whiteness" examines three political issues with broad support among white voters: expansion of gun rights in Missouri after the #BlackLivesMatter protests in Ferguson; Tennessee's decision to opt out of Obamacare; and former Gov. Sam Brownback's fiscally bloody tenure in Kansas — the GOP "experiment" that promised boom times after to-the-bone tax cuts.
Politicians sold those policies as safeguards against criminals, moochers and Big Government, Metzl writes, but the intended effect — punishing and endangering the health of poor minorities, choking off taxpayer-funded institutions that help them and helping to calcify institutional racism — is barely disguised. Through field interviews, research and public-health data, Metzl shows that whites are harming themselves along with everyone else, and in drastic ways.
Slashing Missouri's already lenient gun-control laws unleashed a dramatic spike in white male gun-related suicides there. In Tennessee, one of several red states that rejected Obamacare, mortality and preventable-disease rates ticked up among poor whites when the Volunteer State turned its back on the program, leaving billions of dollars in health care subsidies on the table.
Kansas' radical tax-cut experiment crippled its economy and its once exemplary public school system, pushing up class sizes and dragging down graduation rates for white students.
The cut-your-nose-off harm that whites are doing to themselves, Metzl writes, is hard to see but impossible to miss when you crunch the numbers. It's the self-destructive price, he adds, of protecting "an imagined place atop the racial hierarchy — that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness."
