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Author | Jonathan M. Metzl |
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Working title | Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Medical policy, Public health, Race relations, Political aspects, Race, ethnicity [1] |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Set in | United States |
Published | New York |
Publisher | Basic Books |
Publication date | March 2019 |
Pages | 352 |
ISBN | 9781541644984 1st edition |
OCLC | 1090877404 |
Preceded by | The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease |
Website | Official website |
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland is a 2019 non-fiction book written by Jonathan M. Metzl, a Nashville, Tennessee Vanderbilt University professor of sociology and psychiatry, based on research undertaken in Missouri, Tennessee and Kansas from 2013 to 2018. [2] [3] [4]
In his 2019 non-fiction book, which is based on several years of research undertaken in the 2010s in the South and Midwest states—Missouri, Tennessee and Kansas, physician and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl reveals the unintended public health consequences of some right-wing backlash politics related to taxes, gun control, social safety nets, and healthcare on vulnerable white voters they had promised to help. [5] Through "field interviews, research and public-health data" gathered over the years of travel to these states, Metzl found that some vulnerable white Americans would rather die than betray their political views that have become enmeshed with their own sense of white identity. [2]
Jonathan Metzl, who is a physician and psychiatrist who grew up in Missouri, and earned his medical degree in Kansas City, [5] [2] described how this book emerged from a research study he undertook from 2013 to 2018 in the South and Midwest states, including Missouri, Kansas, and Tennessee. [4] Metzl began his research to enhance understanding of the health implications of "backlash governance". His methods which included field interviews with a wide range of everyday Americans, along with research and public-health data, [2] revealed that racial resentment among lower- and middle-class white Americans, who believe politicians can make their lives great again, led to the enactment of public policy changes related to gun control, the Affordable Care Act, severe cuts to social services and education in states such as Missouri, Tennessee and Kansas, that placed these voters at a heightened risk of death by suicide, gun violence, a decrease in life expectancy and an increase in school dropout rates. He calls on white Americans to reject the racial hierarchies that are leading America's demise.
Metzl, a Guggenheim fellow, a Nashville, Tennessee Vanderbilt University professor of sociology and psychiatry, who earned his PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, has also authored The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease in 2014, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality in 2010, and Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs in 2003. [6]
Esquire and The Boston Globe said it was one of the most anticipated books of 2019. [7] The Globe said that this book goes deeper into examining how "segments of the American electorate support candidates and political ideas that run contrary to their own self-interest". Metzl, from the perspective of a "sociologist and psychiatrist...examines the ways policies of right-wing backlash (pro-gun laws, cuts to education, social services, and health care) affect the lives and life expectancies of these people." [7]
The Star Tribune wrote, "As a physician and psychiatrist reared in the Midwest, Metzl has science and Heartland street cred on his side; as a public health instructor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, his clinical approach doesn't overshadow his skill as a wordsmith. As a result, Dying of Whiteness is a weighty but smooth read, devoid of polemics or jargon." [2]
An April 27, 2019 book launch at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., was briefly interrupted by a group of eight men and one woman, white nationalists, led by Patrick Casey, co-founder of the American Identity Movement (AIM) with a megaphone and a videographer. [8] They formed a line at the front of the seated audience and chanted "AIM", before they were herded from the store by the staff. The entire disruption lasted about a minute. The audience booed them and then continued the discussion about the book. Politics and Prose sold all their copies of Dying of Whiteness. [8] According to The Washington Post , the bookstore owner had trained staff to prepare for white nationalist protests, because there had been protests against a number of books staged at bookstores including their own since early 2019, but they had not anticipated that this book would attract their attention. [9] [10] [11]
The New York Times included the book on its list of antiracist books to read. [12]
As a guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher , Metzl said that the politics that claim to make America great again result in making working-class white lives harder, sicker, and shorter. Metzl said that he devoted seven years traveling through the South tracking what happens when you block healthcare reform for a decade while making huge tax cuts. From a medical and a data angle, these policies were as dangerous to people as asbestos, secondhand smoke and not wearing seatbelts and were contributing to a shortened life span. [13] Other mainstream media outlets interviewed Metzl including The Brian Lehrer Show , in which he described how he along with colleagues interviewed people regarding the ACA. In this interview, Lehrer asked Metzl to describe more about Trevor, a participant in one of the focus groups. Trevor died from liver disease that would have been preventable if he had had access to health care but until his dying breath agreed with the policies that prevented ACA improvements because he did not want his tax dollars to pay for Mexicans or "welfare queens". [14]
Donald Grady Davidson was an American poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
Whiteness studies is the study of the structures that produce white privilege, the examination of what whiteness is when analyzed as a race, a culture, and a source of systemic racism, and the exploration of other social phenomena generated by the societal compositions, perceptions and group behaviors of white people. It is an interdisciplinary arena of inquiry that has developed beginning in the United States from white trash studies and critical race studies, particularly since the late 20th century. It is focused on what proponents describe as the cultural, historical and sociological aspects of people identified as white, and the social construction of "whiteness" as an ideology tied to social status.
Virginia Deane Abernethy is an American anthropologist, activist, and white nationalist extremist. She is professor emerita of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She has published research on population demography and immigration. She ran for Vice President of the United States in 2012 alongside Merlin Miller for the American Third Position, a party that promotes white nationalism.
Jon Ellis Meacham is an American writer, reviewer, historian and presidential biographer who is serving as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral since November 7, 2021. A former executive editor and executive vice president at Random House, he is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor to Time magazine, and a former editor-in-chief of Newsweek. He is the author of several books. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. He holds the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Endowed Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Benjamin "Pap" Singleton was an American activist and businessman best known for his role in establishing African American settlements in Kansas. A former slave from Tennessee who escaped to freedom in Ontario, Canada in 1846, he soon returned to the United States, settling for a period in Detroit, Michigan. He became a noted abolitionist, community leader, and spokesman for African-American civil rights.
Jamie Frederic Metzl is an American geopolitical commentator, author, and former Clinton administration official. He is the author of five books, including science fiction novels and non-fiction.
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit human rights advocacy organization. It was named after United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, a few months after his assassination. The organization of leading attorneys, advocates, entrepreneurs and writers is dedicated to a more just and peaceful world, working alongside local activists to ensure lasting positive change in governments and corporations. It also promotes human rights advocacy through its RFK Human Rights Award, and supports investigative journalists and authors through the RFK Book and Journalism Awards. It is based in New York and Washington, D.C.
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease is a 2010 book by the psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, and published by Beacon Press, covering the history of the 1960s Ionia State Hospital, located in Ionia, Michigan, and converted into the Ionia Correctional Facility in 1986. The book describes the facility as one of America's largest and most notorious state psychiatric hospitals in the era before deinstitutionalization.
Carol Miller Swain is an American political scientist and legal scholar who is a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. She is a frequent television analyst and has authored and edited several books. Her interests include race relations, immigration, representation, evangelical politics, and the United States Constitution.
Jonathan T. Capehart is an American journalist and television commentator. He writes for The Washington Post's PostPartisan blog and is host of The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC.
The white genocide, white extinction, or white replacement conspiracy theory is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that states that there is a deliberate plot to promote miscegenation, interracial marriage, mass non-white immigration, racial integration, low fertility rates, abortion, pornography, LGBT identities, governmental land-confiscation from whites, organised violence, and eliminationism in white-founded countries in order to cause the extinction of whites through forced assimilation, mass immigration, and/or violent genocide. Under some theories, Black people, Hispanics, and Muslims are blamed for the secret plot, but usually as more fertile immigrants, invaders, or violent aggressors, rather than as the masterminds. A related, but distinct, conspiracy theory is the Great Replacement theory.
The Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) was a far-right neo-Nazi political party active in the United States between 2013 and 2018, affiliated with the broader "alt-right" movement that became active within the U.S. during the 2010s. It was considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center's list.
Ibram Xolani Kendi is an American author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America. In July 2020, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University where he serves as director. Kendi was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Kendi has attracted criticism for his alleged financial mismanagement of the Center for Antiracist Research.
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Stephen Tuck is a British historian. He is a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, where he is a Professor of Modern History, focusing on the history of the United States. He is the author of three books about the Civil Rights Movement, and the co-editor of a fourth book about the same topic.
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Jonathan Michel Metzl is an American psychiatrist and author. He is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, where he is also Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. He is the author of multiple books, including The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, and Dying of Whiteness.
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