My good friend Ian Reifowitz, Professor of Historical Studies at S.U.N.Y. Empire State College and the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump posted a review of Jonathan M. Metzl latest book titled “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland” that at first saddened me but then gave me hope.
Ian summarizes the premise of his book with his first few paragraphs.
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.”
That is depressing, right? One is so preoccupied with a loss of status whose privilege only provided a semblance of prosperity and superiority to too many, that they would knowingly vote against their interest. If one does not care about their own lives or the lives of their loved ones, what else is left?
I have used my activism and my radio/media show “Politics Done Right” to intentionally include Conservatives, including Right-Wingers, and Trumpist. In fact, many progressives give me hell for engaging calling it a lost cause and a waste of resources. On first reading of the review, that conclusion seems justified. The fact is, I’ve planted many seeds and quite a few sprouted.
My sadness evaporated once I accepted the premise of the book and then concocted a solution to continue the work of encouraging people to converse on a more human level. So I have hope.
These people are currently hastening their demise to ensure “lesser people” don’t get the benefits they would want under different circumstances. So where is the hope?
We do not get to them by making them love themselves less. After all, they are willing to cash in their lives, to hurt others they deem not as privileged. So my hope is simple. Make them realize the “the other” is more like them than the Plutocrats.