Jonathon Metzel's Dying of Whiteness

Racism's Effects on Whites

Just like people are unique and dynamic, so is each racial group.  Therefore, racism affects each group differently.  Surprisingly, however, even whites can be affected negatively by racism towards nonwhites.  One person studying the effects of racism on whites is Jonathon Metzel, a sociologist, and a medical doctor at Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Jonathon Metzel, Sociologist and Medical Doctor

As both a sociologist and a medical doctor, Metzel explores the connection between racism and the negative effects on society, especially among whites.  In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Dr. Metzel finds that the life expectancy of white Americans has gone DOWN for three years in a row, 2015, 2016 and 2017.  (This was even before the Covid-19 pandemic!)   The last time that life expectancy went down in the U.S. for three years in a row was one hundred years ago because of World War I and the influenza outbreak of 1919.  The reasons that it is going down again now are surprisingly related to race.  This has not happened in 100 years and it is almost unheard of in the developed world.! Life expectancy should be going up.

Here is the introduction to Metzel's book.  If you read the last 2 pages of the reading (18-19), Metzel explicitly states that,
It is not liberal or conservative politics in general, but a specific type of politics:

"It is best to avoid knee-jerk assumptions that more money or health care are automatically good....There are far too many examples of liberal or Democratic initiatives that result in poor health for minority and low-income populations...When politics demands that people resist available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools, or make other decisions that are perilous, this is literally asking people to die for their whiteness." 

I argue that the way forward requires a white America that strives to collaborate rather than dominate, with a mind-set of openness and interconnectedness that we have all-too-frequently neglected. 
This is not to suggest that everyone become a Democrat - far from it.  Rather, our nation urgently needs to recognize how systems of inequality we build and sustain aren't benefitting anyone...."

Chris Hayes had Dr. Metzel as a guest on his podcast called Why Is This Happening?

The transcript is available here in case you want to read along while you listen, or in case you simply prefer to read the interview instead of listening.  But you can also listen to the podcast on Apple here and on Stitcher here.  If you listen to the interview, it runs for about 50 minutes.  Note that this is just an interview with Metzel.  For a full understanding of Metzel's findings, see his book, Dying of Whiteness.

Here is the episode embedded:

 
Here is a preview of the interview:

Trigger Warning:  **This conversation explores death by suicide and gun violence**

Life expectancy in America has gone down three years in a row. You might expect to see shorter life expectancies in the aftermath of war or famine — to witness it in an industrialized nation in the middle of an otherwise prosperous era, however, is unprecedented. It is a distress signal that something has gone horribly wrong. 

Jonathan Metzl traced that distress signal to its origin and found something remarkable. He writes that the policies promising to Make American Great Again, policies rooted in centering and maintaining the power of whiteness, are shortening the lives of the white Americans who vote for them. From supporting conceal carry to cutting social services, Metzl explores just what policies white voters are willing to risk their lives for. 

Anne Case and Angus Deaton (mentioned in Metzel's book) detail the rising death rate for whites without a college education.  Here is an explanation from the Brookings Institution.  And here is Deaths of Despair, a 2020 book that Case and Deaton wrote as a follow up to their ground-breaking 2015 study.

Here is a summary of Case and Deaton's work,

Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.

1.  Thoughts on the book?  What surprised you? What do you have questions about?

2.  What is Metzel's overall thesis?

Dr. Jonathon Metzel, Sociologist and Medical Doctor

In his book, Dying of Whiteness, Dr. Metzel finds that the life expectancy of White Americans has gone DOWN for three years in a row, 2015, 2016 and 2017.  (This was even before the Covid-19 pandemic!)   The last time that life expectancy went down in the U.S. for three years in a row was one hundred years ago because of World War I and the influenza outbreak of 1919.  The reasons that it is going down again now are surprisingly related to race.  This has not happened in 100 years.  And it is almost unheard of in the developed world.  Life expectancy should be going up.

For more about Metzel's book see the link to his introduction and the guide below:

Here is the introduction to Metzel's book.
Pgs 2-3
As a sociological study, what methods does Dr. Metzel use?  (pg 2 and 6)
What is the paradox that he finds?  What are some examples from the reading?
Is Trevor an example of the paradox? Why?  Why not?

Pgs 4-5
What was Trevor explicitly and implicitly dying from?
How was Trevor's situation an example of Du Bois' "wages of whiteness"?
What are "white 'ways of life'"?

Pgs 6-9
How does gender play a role?
What are the five trends (evidence) that influence Dr. Metzel's overall claim?
What are the threats to white authority?

Pg 10  How does white backlash politics influence whites to vote?

Pg 11-14  What states does Dr. Metzel focus on? What issues in each state?

Pg 15-16  What type of racism is Dr. Metzel most focused on in the reading?

Pgs 16-18 Why is "whiteness" an important consideration in Dr. Metzel's research?

Here is Robin DiAngelo speaking about the importance of acknowledging race.

Racial resentment = Deaths of Despair + Anti-Gov + Guns = Lower Life Expectancy

I.  Racial Resentment Politics

As we learned in our social class unit, the middle class has been declining and social class inequality growing for the last 50 years.  But that inequality combined with the election of America's first black President brought fringe agendas into mainstream politics:

Note that the discontent in social class discussed applies to all Americans in the bottom 80% of income regardless of race, however, there are unique racial dynamics that intersect with social class.  As Adam Serwer notes in the Atlantic, America has only been a true democracy for 50 years.  During the 50 years that economic equality has been declining, we have seen a slow nudge toward more social equality.  Movements like civil rights and BLM have created some progress that is not lost on the whites who feel like they are not getting ahead financially.  Additionally, the 1965 immigration act opened America's doors to a more diverse but higher social class of immigrants.  Whites see these people as nonwhites who are doing economically well in America (i.e. Asian doctors, engineers, and other professionals). And, politicians have been using coded racial language since the 1970s to use white racial resentment to create political support.  Nixon's Southern Strategy is one of the most prominent examples of this.  Mother Jones details a history of the politics of racial resentment going back to the Nixon campaign here. 

Notre Dame Sociology professor Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

Review of the book in Contexts here.

Below are some other examples of political fringe messages or conspiracy theories that paint Obama as un-American:

From Vox, How Southern Racism Found a Home in the Tea Party (2016).

Obama was portrayed as Kenyan and socialist.

Obama was accused of being Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Castro all in one!

Obama was portrayed as both Nazi and Communist  (never mind that these two were enemies)

Obama is Chinese communist.

Obama is Russian.

Tea Party Patriot ads that were distinctly anti-Asian featuring fictional Chinese executives speaking Mandarin and boasting about how much land they bought in Missouri.
Local nbc affiliate reported on the story here.
Asian community leaders spoke out about the ads here.

One example of conspiracy theory politics which attempted to use race to raise doubts and fears about President Obama is that if elected in 2012, he would institute Sharia law in the United States and destroy democracy:

Here is one website detailing the claim and disputing it:

Another example is the following book from former Assistant US Attorney published during the Obama administration which tried to cast President Obama as a Muslim terrorist.  From Wikipedia, 

"throughout the Obama administration, McCarthy promoted views about the Obama administration's advancement of a "Sharia Agenda", arguing that radical Islamists were working with liberals within the United States government to subvert democracy in the West. 

And the Annenberg Center's FactCheck.org details the dogged claims that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States who was anti-American.

Obama was portrayed as not American.

Birtherism

The most persistent and damaging conspiracy theory was that President Obama was a Muslim who was not born in the United States as such, was anti-American detailed by this website.  

The most public figure promoting the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States was Donald Trump who began his political campaign with an egregious campaign of racial resentment known as birtherism.  This trope follows a long line of viewing "real Americans" as white and because President Obama's father was born in Kenya, the trope falsely pushes the idea that there is no way that President Obama could be American.  (It should be noted that during the 2008 primary election, even the Clinton campaign engaged in the same politics of racial resentment when they circulated a photo of Mr. Obama visiting Africa and wearing traditional garb as an attempt to paint him as unAmerican.)  The Guardian details the history of Trump promoting birtherism here.  And from the Atlantic, here, and birtherism on ABC news here.

At the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama joked about the birtherism although his memoir details how hurtful it was.  But some reports say that it was at this dinner that Mr. Trump decided to run for President.

If there was any doubt that Trump's rise to political power was about racial resentment, the photo below is from the first day after Trump's election.  That is just one of a whole list of racist hate that was manifest on the first day after his election documented at Medium here.  This is just one example that the 2016 election was about racial resentment.  

And this twitter feed documents similar incidents.

This post from buzzfeed documents middle schoolers chanting Trump catch phrases in a way that alarms the parents of the school on the day after his election.

This article from Raleigh documents that the KKK celebrated Trump's win in 2016.  "Trump, a Republican, was officially endorsed by the KKK during his campaign."

The FBI has warned repeatedly that white nationalist group are the biggest threat to domestic security in the US. 

Threats to white authority.

There are numerous examples that show the use of racism throughout the Obama administration, including this article from NBC news here.

Ian Haney Lopez is a constitutional law professor from University of California Berkley.  His book, Dog Whistle Politics, shows how racism has been used subtly since Richard Nixon and the "Southern Strategy".  This subtle racism is sometimes called dog whistles - phrases that only register with some people who are tuned in to hear them.  For example, a politician can say, "welfare costs too much taxpayer dollars" and a neutral person would hear simply that paying money to the poor is expensive.  But to those who believe that the poor are mostly black, this phrase says that Americans who are black are taking advantage of tax payer dollars.

Michael Tesler shows in his book Post-Racial or Most Racial how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times, racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of prominent politicians and the parties to issues seemingly unrelated to race like assessments of public policy or objective economic conditions. Some people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told he belonged to Ted Kennedy. More broadly, Tesler argues that the rapidly intensifying influence of race in American politics is driving the polarizing partisan divide and the vitriolic atmosphere that has come to characterize American politics.

Dr. Carol Anderson is a history professor from Emory University who has research and published about the reaction of whites to black civil rights gains.  She calls the backlash by whites reacting to black gains "white rage" as detailed in her history book at the left.  Below is a summary of her claim:
"Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.
Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage." 

Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right

In her 2016 book, renown sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains the deep story behind the Tea Party support and the rise of Trump which stems from growing social class inequality happening at the same time as civil rights equality which leaves many White Americans feeling like they are left behind by the government and that they are "strangers in their own land."

At the 2017  annual conference, I had the privilege of helping to facilitate a three-session symposium on the teaching of high school sociology.  Our keynote speaker was Arlie Russell Hochschild.  Dr. Hochschild is a professor emeritus of sociology at UC Berkley.  She is a renowned ethnographer.  At NCSS 2017, she spoke about her most recent work, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right.  What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel.  It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not.  What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real.  Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain, 

In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.

Here is a funny take from comedian Hari Kondabolu about the growing threat to white authority:

II. Deaths of Despair

Anne Case and Angus Deaton (mentioned in Metzel's book) detail the rising death rate for whites without a college education.   And here is Deaths of Despair, a 2020 book that Case and Deaton wrote as a follow-up to their ground-breaking 2015 study.  Here is an explanation from the Brookings Institution,

Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.

The combined effect means that mortality rates of whites with no more than a high school degree, which were around 30 percent lower than mortality rates of blacks in 1999, grew to be 30 percent higher than blacks by 2015.

Here is Case and Deaton explaining their work on Youtube:

Analyze each of the following graphs that display Case and Deaton's findings about "deaths of despair".

III. Anti-government (Healthcare) Movement

Middle and lower-income people experienced negative effects from white backlash policies. Welfare backlash tied to white fear of declining status published in the Journal of Social Forces from Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley.
“This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups.”

The findings, published in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.

More whites than any other race use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), but the Trump administration is proposing cuts.  How might this be evidence of Dr. Metzel's claim?

IV. Guns

Dr. Harel Shapira's research from University of Texas Austin highlights the way that gun schools teach gun owners to embrace guns.  See a brief clip of his explaining his research here (and embedded below).  And this story from Quartz about the way NRA ads promote a generalized and vague us vs. them conflict.  One ad that drew the most criticism is here.

Media Matters highlights the many ways that NRA ads try and use fear to influence voters here.

In Missouri, policy went even further than Dr. Shapira's research by passing a law allowing permitless carrying of guns,
Missouri now joins Idaho, West Virginia and Mississippi as one of four states to adopt “permitless carry” in 2016, bringing the total number of US states to 12. Missouri Democrats strongly opposed the law, calling it a “perfect storm” that would cause fatal shootings—already a more common cause of death in Missouri than car accidents.

Guns and Health, Harvard Medicine;

As physicians, we too care about your protection. Our mission is to treat disease, promote quality of life, and prevent injury and death. We discuss matters of health and safety in a confidential, non-judgmental fashion. We ask about depression, domestic violence, and drugs. We make recommendations about practicing safe sex and wearing seatbelts. But some feel that physicians should not talk about guns. In fact, Florida has passed a law limiting such discussion. But guns do affect health and safety. In the United States, the number of deaths from guns continues to climb (now at roughly 33,000 per year, far more than any other developed country per capita) and is expected to surpass motor vehicle deaths for 2015. It is the second leading cause of death in children....the more households that have guns within a particular state, the more gun deaths there are — even after adjusting for crime, unemployment, urbanization, alcohol, and poverty.

 Gun Violence: A Public Health Problem, American Psychological Association

Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S., American Public Health Association

Firearm injuries are a serious public health problem, Center for Disease Control

Gun violence is a public health crisis American Medical Association

Gun violence is a public health issue American Academy of Pediatrics (link includes advocacy suggestions)

Gun Violence Exposure Associated with Higher Rates of Mental Health-Related ED Visits by Children UPENN Medicine

Epilogue:  Dying of Whiteness during the Covid-19 Pandemic

And as a follow-up to Metzel's book, just two years later, a global pandemic hits the US.  But many Americans see the health measures being suggested by the government as an infringement on their rights.  They showed up en masse to protest in Michigan.


How does this quarantine protest exemplify Metzel's thesis?

The protesters brought AR-15 rifles with scopes and muzzles, along with other weapons and assault gear. Most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides followed by accidental deaths. These men are advocating for premature death by implicitly supporting guns and explicitly supporting ignoring medical professionals. Both will lower life expectations for white Americans. 

The NY Post also reported about the protest.

NPR covered the protest as well.

5.  How are the freedom protests during the Covid-19 quarantine an example of Metzel's findings?

And the pandemic has driven gun sales to an all-time high reported by NPR, The Guardian, and the NY Times

Dr. Oz was on Fox News with Sean Hannity to say that "opening schools is 'appetizing' because it may only cost us 2-3% in terms of mortality." That is 1.7 million students dying!

And deaths of despair reached an all-time high during the pandemic:

From the Kaiser Family Foundation:  

From the Washington Post:

And the CDC reports that in 2020 alone, US life expectancy declined by a year and a half!  This decline was the largest single year decline since WWII and it set the US life expectancy back to 2003 rates!

The decline in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 can primarily be attributed to deaths from the pandemic, as COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths or 74% of the decline. An estimated 11% of the decline in life expectancy can be attributed to increases in deaths from accidents/unintentional injuries. Drug overdose deaths account for over one-third of all unintentional injury deaths, and last week NCHS reported an all-time high of over 93,000 overdose deaths in 2020.

Other contributing causes of death to the decline in life expectancy in 2020 include homicide
(3.1% of the decline), diabetes (2.5%), and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (2.3%).

6.  Any questions about how racism affects Americans who are white?  Anything you want to know more about?

This follow up analysis from The Conversation (2023 ) shows the trend is not only growing after Covid but it has gotten worse!