“You can’t hold a man
down without staying down with him.” ~ Booker T. Washington
Source of book: Borrowed
from the library
I have been saying for a
number of years that rural white America appears hell-bent on committing
suicide. They consistently reject policies that would help them, and embrace
policies that harm them. And they do this because their desire to maintain a privileged
position over people of color outweighs their apparent financial and physical
well-being.
This book is all about
that, detailing both the statistical realities and the psychological basis for
this seemingly illogical way of being.
Jonathan Metzl is a
psychiatrist who teaches at Vanderbilt and heads their research Center for
Medicine, Health, and Society. For this book, he and his team of researchers
went through mountains of data looking for trends and correlations related to
the specific issues he addresses. He also interviewed hundreds of people, held
focus groups, and was able to put together an extensive picture of what people
were saying about their lives and decisions.
The book looks at three
specific states, and three specific policy decisions. Metzl has lived in each
of the three states, which is one reason he chose them - his personal
experience led him to wonder why each was making policy decisions that were
clearly and obviously hurting people - including the people who most supported
the policies.
First, Metzl looks at gun
laws in Missouri. (He was born in Kansas City.) Until the late 1990s and early
2000s, Missouri had some of the strictest gun laws in the country, with
particular restrictions on handguns. However, this changed, as guns have become
increasingly a psychological crutch deeply connected with male and white
identity.
Second, Metzl examines
the trajectory of Tennessee. At one time, the state attempted a significant
government-subsidized healthcare system (similar to Massachusetts’ “Romney
Care” although with differences.) However, by 2011, Tennessee was rejecting the
Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act, leading to significantly more
uninsured citizens and declining health outcomes.
Finally, the book turns
to Kansas, and the utter debacle of Governor Brownback’s policies to slash
taxes on the rich, and cut infrastructure funding - particularly for the
schools. This one is particularly interesting to me because of an argument I
had with a relative over this. It was one of the first times I realized that
those in thrall to the Right Wing Fantasy World ideology have lost any ability
to deal with facts that contradict their beliefs.
These three are enough
for a book, but I would note that there are a LOT more that Metzl could have
mentioned, particularly if he wrote the book in 2023. (This was 2019, with most
of the research done in 2017.)
For example: Idaho has
lost several maternity wards in their hospitals, and over half of their OBGYNs
intend to leave the state within a year. Why? Because of their restrictive
abortion laws, which prevent doctors from giving medically appropriate care. At
the same time, Idaho has disbanded their commission that investigates maternal
mortality - can’t have the facts come to light. For people of childbearing age,
this will certainly make them reconsider whether to move to Idaho, or stay
there.
How does this relate to
race? Well, prior to about 1978, white protestants were generally in favor of
Roe v. Wade (including the Southern Baptist Convention.) The Religious Right
was founded on a pro-segregation platform, but the leaders knew this was not
sustainable. Therefore, there was a concerted political push to make abortion
the one issue to unite white protestants to always vote Republican - and
feel good about it, despite the obvious racist results.
Another example: Red
states are tripping over their dicks to enact anti-LGBTQ laws….and anti
“Critical Race Theory” laws, which are just a euphemism for excluding the
viewpoints of people of color or any idea that systemic racism exists. However
popular these are with old white bigots, younger people are, on average,
horrified.
Florida has already lost
thousands of jobs from Disney as a result, and, I can tell you that my kids and
their generation are going to be thinking hard about where they are willing to
live. And states full of racist and anti-LGBTQ hate are not going to be on the
list.
Just like Jim Crow set
the South back decades, economically, these policies are going to, in the long
term, cripple white rural America.
Oh, and Trump. Nothing
like putting a grossly incompetent, morally appalling, and utterly corrupt
person in the White House. None of us (who didn’t vote for him) are surprised
he sold state secrets to our enemies, tried to overthrow the government, or
cheated on his taxes. Of course he did. But….as my dad put it, “I don’t like
Trump’s style, but at least he is finally doing something about the Hispanic
problem…” That’s it in a nutshell.
Think about other
policies too: the cost of higher education and student loans, housing
affordability, skyrocketing income inequality, the environment, the far higher
rates of Covid deaths among Republicans because of vaccine refusals - in every
case, white conservatives are killing themselves and their children’s future.
And this is absolutely driven by a fear - nay, a terror - that
somewhere, somehow, a person of color is getting something they “don’t
deserve.”
So, let’s jump in with
some quotes.
In the introduction,
Metzl talks about his interviews, and notes something that has struck me as
well, talking with members of my former religious tribe.
At many points along the way, I became convinced that
reasonable people of vastly divergent, pro-this or anti-that backgrounds might
find middle ground if left to their own devices. But just as frequently, when I
met with middle- and lower-income white Americans across various locales, I
found support for a set of political positions that directly harmed their own health
and well-being, or the health and well-being of their families.
For example, Trevor, who
essentially voted against his own healthcare coverage.
Yet I could not help but think that Trevor’s
deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma
that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be
trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with
private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal
safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs
about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white
Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and other nonwhite others.
Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from
the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with
state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in
this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the
same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.
In my law practice, I
have seen this a lot. I am one of a handful of attorneys in my hometown who
assist clients with qualifying for Medicaid (we call it Medi-Cal here), and I
hear this from time to time: “there are benefits that only those Mexicans get,
while we Americans have to starve.”
This is bullshit on a
stick, of course. If anything, undocumented immigrants are relegated to nothing
more than treatment in the ER if they are actively dying - a moral scandal in
my opinion, since our nation depends on them for many key sectors of our
economy. But it is a perception that persists.
Turning to the gun issue,
Metzl noted that his work was made exponentially more difficult because of a
federal ban on gun-related research.
Yes. You cannot use
federal funds to research guns and gun violence. The gun lobby has essentially
made their industry off-limits for examination. Can you imagine if we couldn’t
research, say, automobile accidents?
Gun regulation is such a
politically sensitive question in the United States that there has long been a
congressional ban on funding for research on the health impact of
firearms.
This, combined with a
ludicrous (and unique) blanket immunity for gun manufacturers and retailers,
shows that guns have a unique place in our society - one governed not by
rationality, but by a deep psychological need.
Metzl further notes that
all three of the issues he examines are inseparable from the history of race in
America. Firearm ownership historically was limited to white people. Health
insurance has historically been a white privilege - only those “good” jobs not
available to people of color under Jim Crow - provided health insurance as a
benefit. And education has and continues to be a racial battleground.
These histories imbue debates about guns, health care
systems, taxes, and schools with larger meanings about race in American and
about American whiteness. The history of race in America also helps explain why
these topics cut to the heart of present-day debates about what it means to
provide resources, protections, and opportunities for everyone in a diverse
society versus providing securities and opportunities for a select few. Debates
over firearm rights in Missouri revolve around questions of “Whose lives are
with protecting?”; over health care coverage in Tennessee around similar
questions of “Whose lives are worth insuring?”; and over schools in Kansas
around questions of “Whose lives are worth funding and educating?”
Metzl laments the fact
that in each of these three states, in the not-that-distant past, moderation
won the day, and people came together to make a better society. Today’s
polarization - driven almost entirely by right-wing demagoguery - has made
finding common solutions near-impossible, because ideology trumps (pun
intended) even one’s own well-being.
Society mobilized to reduce risk and improve health
when toxins dumped into the water, cigarettes, or faulty automobiles led to
declining health. But when the pathogens were policies and ideologies, they
instead laid the foundations for politics furthered at the national level by
the GOP, the NRA, and the Trump administration. In these ways, stories like
Trevor’s come to embody larger problems of an electorate that, in its worst
moments, votes to sink the whole ship (except for a few privileged passengers
who get lifeboats) even when they are on it, rather than investing in communal
systems that might rise all tides. Anti-blackness, in a biological sense, then
produces its own anti-whiteness. An illness of the mind, weaponized onto the
body of the nation.
I think Metzl is also
correct to lay a lot of the blame on the demagogues who realized that they
could attain the massive transfer of wealth upward as long as they whipped up
the emotions of white people into a paroxism of racism and fear of the
other.
Yet the Tea Party, the alt-right, and the populism of
Donald Trump seem to signal a marked shift in the course of American history
and hasten the downfall of what remains of white conservative political
traditions of compromise. In the words of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trump then
became “the first white President” as a result. The results are potentially
catastrophic. I’ve come to believe, and argue in this book, that playing to
white anxieties has implications beyond “whipping up the base” against
immigrants, liberals, and minorities. When politics demands that people resist
available health care, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools their own kids
attend, or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct but are
biologically perilous, these politics are literally asking people to die for
their whiteness. Living in a state or county or a nation dominated by politics
of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable, quantifiable, and increasingly
mortal preexisting condition.
As people in the states
examined in this book are experiencing - and the people of Idaho (and other red
states are about to experience.) Living there will literally be a risk factor
for maternal mortality, chronic untreated illness, suicide, and substandard
education.
Couching politics in racial mistrust also makes it
harder for white America to see how we - and I include myself as a white
American here - would benefit self and country far more by emphasizing
economic, legislative, and everyday cooperation rather than by chasing the
false promise of supremacy. Investing in communal health care solutions,
worker’s rights, better roads and bridges, research into climate change and
opiate addiction, common-sense gun laws, or expanded social safety nets benefit
everyone, not just the immigrant and minority populations or “liberals” that red-
and purple-state white Americans have been taught to doubt or see as taking
more than their fair share of entitlements. In the book’s conclusion, 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.
I will mention here a
truth that is often underappreciated. Here in the US, poverty is racialized -
but not completely. Minorities are more likely to live in poverty than
whites, statistically. But because there are more whites overall, there are
also more whites living in poverty than there are minorities. What this means
is that most policies that are aimed at making life worse for minorities end up
hurting more whites, as “collateral damage.” This is even more so for
infrastructure like schools and healthcare, where only the ultra-rich can truly
replace public goods using their own money.
In the first section of
the book, Metzl starts out by recounting conversations at a support group for
the survivors left behind after a suicide. These stories are harrowing and
achingly sad. Suicide is a tragedy that affects nearly all of us in some way - a
cousin of mine died a few years ago.
But central to the
discussion of suicide, just like that of any potentially preventable cause of
death, is the question of risk. We talk a lot about depression and
warning signs and other factors, but the one taboo seems to be the one Metzl
focuses on: guns.
We can talk about all the
other factors, but woe to the person who points out the obvious: gun ownership
greatly increases the risk of death by suicide. Guns are more lethal than other
methods, and gun ownership increases the risk of a suicide attempt. Why are we
not studying this?
Metzl points out that in
the case of guns, risk is subject to contested politics. To admit that guns
might have a downside, a negative affect, is to commit political treason if you
are a right-winger. This is why I believe that to many, guns are not so much a
useful tool as an idol, a god that promises them something. Metzel explores
this.
Psychiatrists like me sometimes think that men who
outsource their sense of power onto external objects - and particularly onto
objects shaped like guns - do so in ways that convey deeper, gendered
insecurities about potency and perhaps even racial insecurities or projected
guilt. Projecting such profound gender and racial insecurities onto objects
might then render men subject to the maneuvers of marketers, sellers, lobbyists,
politicians, and other manipulators of common sense. Of course, guns are also
incredibly dangerous, but the danger they pose to people who own and carry them
and to their families becomes harder to acknowledge or recognize when these
objects of potential self-destruction carry such weighted connotations.
As Metzl notes in
relation to Missouri:
Here, guns function as totems, symbols of belonging
and of self- and community protection, revered sources of power.
It is this deep
psychological connection that makes common-sense regulation (such as license, registration, and insurance)
politically impossible in this climate. Here again, the ban on research is
problematic.
Politicians and lobbyists then manipulate the
knowledge vacuum surrounding risk to balkanize everyday people on matters of
life, death, and mundane daily routine - matters about which, if left to their
own devices, people could probably forge consensus…The forces that promote (and
indeed, often gain financially from) polarization grow ever-more powerful,
while hardworking people who live at various points along the oft-manufactured
pro-gun-anti-gun continuum are left to fend for themselves.
Before I move on to the
next section, I want to note some key statistics which get buried in the
debate.
First, gun suicides
significantly outnumber gun homicides. This is important, because the
media-driven narrative is the opposite - that gun deaths are mostly
“inner-city” homicides. Although not in the book, another corollary to this is
that very few homicides are by strangers. So the fear narrative that drives gun
culture - the black guy who breaks into your home - is actually rare. More
likely is the domestic abuser who kills his wife. Or the drug deal gone
bad.
But suicides are more
common than the other forms of gun deaths.
Second, and the book
explores this, the demographic that commits suicide by gun is
disproportionately white males. And it isn’t even close. Not just in raw
numbers, but in rates. The primary victims of guns in this country are white
males. The very people who tend to view guns as totems of their masculinity and
whiteness.
Dying of whiteness.
On to health care.
I was raised as a white
evangelical, so I was inculcated with the belief (ludicrous in retrospect) that
to be a Christian was to vote Republican. And yeah, I had an embarrassing Rush Limbaugh phase and all that. It took time
to deconstruct, particularly after having to expend my energy to convince
myself that my parents knew what they were doing when they dragged me into a
cult, denied me a meaningful opportunity for a normal higher education and choice of my own
career, and so on.
I was increasingly
uncomfortable with the GOP as I got into my 30s, as the rhetoric started
shifting away from “give everyone a chance” to “those people are the
problem.”
I ended up breaking
permanently with the GOP in 2013, during the government shutdown over the
Affordable Care Act.
Literally, the GOP wanted
to shutter the government to extort a repeal of a law that, while imperfect (it
is literally based on the GOP plan from Massachusetts), actually benefited a
lot of people. And the GOP had ZERO plan to replace it with something
better.
As we found out during
the Trump administration and the attempt to “repeal and replace” the ACA, all
the GOP had was to gut Medicaid and kick millions of the most impoverished in
the country out of the healthcare system.
Leave aside the fact that
this is beyond morally appalling.
It is also a
fundamentally suicidal approach to building a society. Illness and death cost
us a lot, in productivity, economic production, and general well-being. And
emergency rooms crammed with the uninsured is hardly the way to deal with the
issue. What is needed (and is still needed) is a form of universal
infrastructure for healthcare - just like literally every other first world
country (and some of the third world) has.
So why can’t we have
that? Well, as Metzl examines - and this is 100% backed up by my own
conversations with right wingers - a lot of white people do NOT want to share
with minorities. Full stop. They are willing to pay twice as much as other
countries for inferior care, put up with a labyrinthine insurance system
created to deny needed care to save money, and even die of lack of care…..as
long as we aren’t spending tax dollars on those “dirty Mexicans.”
Here is Metzl on the
Trump era repeal attempt:
A constant theme emerged from the almost unimaginably
dysfunctional process of trying to sink people’s health care with no real
alternative in place: every single GOP proposal, initiative, or inaction
carried negative consequences for Southern white working-class populations who
formed the core of Trump’s support base.
What the actual fucking
hell???
It is absolutely clear
why:
In a variety of complex ways, white populations
frequently justified their support for anti-ACA positions not through the
benefits that expanded health care might have for themselves or their families
but through concerns about threats to their status and privilege represented by
government programs that promised to equally distribute resources or imagined
health advantages. We often found that no ivory-tower health-policy explanation
of the ACA’s potential benefits came close to challenging concerns about ways
that health insurance came from the administration of an African American
president or placed white Americans into “networks” with immigrant and minority
populations.
That’s it. Full
stop.
The history of healthcare
in the US bears this out. Harry Truman tried to enact universal healthcare in
the 1950s - to match Europe, Canada, and Australia. But it was defeated in part
because of the lobbying of the (all white) American Medical Association who
didn’t want to have to treat African Americans. This is still the
defining narrative in our healthcare debate. White people who want special
socialism for them, while excluding the “undeserving” minorities.
For that matter, every
complaint about “socialism” comes down to that. Because there isn’t a viable
socialist movement in the US - no mainstream politician of either major party
is calling for the government ownership of the means of production. What the
right wing means by “socialism” is their belief that deserving white people are
being taxed to give benefits to undeserving brown and black people. That’s it.
That’s all it is. And this has become obvious in the Trump Era, when right
wingers no longer had to hide the racism behind euphemism and dog
whistles.
Metzl gives further proof
of this by citing the history of the use of “communism” to describe
desegregation - and “mixed marriage.” Yep, interracial marriage was once tarred
as a “communist” plot. But this wasn’t just in the 1960s! A Tennessee pastor
literally said this….in 2014. Twenty Fourteen, for fuck’s sake! My kids were
all born and this evil shit was still being spewed from the pulpit.
The book examines the
battle over the individual mandate in the ACA - that is, the requirement that
everyone obtain health insurance. This is one of the most foundational planks
of any universal healthcare program. It only functions if everyone pulls
together. Letting the (temporarily) healthy skate, while expecting the ill to
pay everything is never going to work - if you get sick, you probably can’t
work (at least until you get better), and thus the US has a situation where a
large majority of individual bankruptcies are triggered by illness - which
causes expenses, loss of income, loss of health coverage, and a financial
spiral.
Metzl calls this
universal mandate a form of “herd immunity” - and the analogy is even more
apropos after Covid, when the same right wingers who refused to participate in
universal healthcare because they would have to share with “those people” also
refused vaccines, because they saw no reason to protect the vulnerable through
herd immunity.
And now, we turn to
Kansas.
Let me start with a
personal story. When I was a kid, we had a favorite uncle (then unmarried), who
did all kinds of fun stuff with us, from beach trips to Peter Sellers movies.
He was also a political worker - he was part of some significant Republican
campaigns here in California, and served as chief of staff for a state
legislator later. Eventually, he got out of direct politics and went into real
estate.
Back in the day, he
seemed like a thoughtful person, and I think I learned a lot about our
political system from him - including how to do door-to-door campaigning, send
out mailings, and register voters.
But as the result of his
involvement, he eventually ended up with his politics reduced to Animal Farm
level thinking: “Republicans Good, Democrats Bad.”
No matter what.
No matter the evidence.
No matter the changing policies (such as embrace of immigrants under Reagan to
vicious xenophobia under Trump.)
For a while, I tried
having arguments with him, but eventually realized that party loyalty - and
ideological loyalty - were the only thing that matter to him at that
point.
The last real argument we
had (before he finally just said something openly racist - a deal breaker for
me as far as friendship is concerned) was about Kansas.
Here’s the scenario:
One form of scientific
experiment is one where you change a single variable and see what happens. In
the best form, the controlled experiment, you do that for one set of identical
groups - change a single variable in one of the groups but not the other, and
see what happens.
Kansas under Brownback
was as close to a controlled scientific experiment as you can get in
politics.
Brownback slashed taxes,
primarily on the rich, promising the same lie that Reagan promised: that tax
cuts would stimulate the economy, thus paying for themselves.
Change one variable, see
what happens.
Other surrounding states
did not slash taxes, so, while there is no perfect identical group, you have
some significant similarity.
So what happened?
Revenue dropped substantially,
while the ultra-rich got ultra-richer.
This drop in revenue led
to significant cuts to infrastructure funding. Roads, bridges - anything that
was a public good.
But particularly to the
schools.
There were two prongs to
this. First, universal, across the board cuts, leading to high class sizes,
fewer non-core programs (sex ed and the arts tend to be the first to go…),
fewer non-teaching staff, deferred maintenance of buildings, and eventually
fewer teachers.
But the other was the
real focus of the Brownback administration. Previously, Kansas recognized that
you have to give additional funding to schools that serve a lower income
population. It takes money to teach English as a Second Language - crucial for
the success of immigrant children. It takes money for special education, and
having a disabled child is a huge financial stress, often leading to poverty.
And, of course, Kansas was ground zero for segregation - Brown v. Board of
Education was a Kansas case. So the lingering results of Jim Crow and
ongoing systemic racism put kids from the more diverse cities at risk for
dropping out or failing.
The point, of course, for
people like Brownback, was that white taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for
“those people” to have their kids educated.
But, since Kansas is
actually still a really white state, the majority of the kids negatively
affected by the specific cuts to city schools were white. And the global cuts
literally hurt everyone. Except for the really rich who could afford a
fancy private school. (Dirty little secret here: not all private schools are
equal. Go to an affordable one, and you find that a lot of the stuff like band
and sports don’t exist at the same level as a public school. All that costs
money…)
So what happened in Kansas,
as Metzl details (with a hell of a lot of statistical proof too) is that Kansas
went from having one of the best public school systems in the US to one in the
bottom third. Scores, dropout rates, class sizes - it all went downhill.
Is this a surprise? It
shouldn’t be.
Eventually, even Kansas
Republican voters got fed up, and started reversing Brownback’s cuts. But
damage to schools doesn’t bounce back immediately. Metzl laments that one
casualty is that a whole generation of children grew up without realizing what
they could have had in a functional school system. This is bigger than
Kansas and bigger than education, of course. Americans cannot even imagine
living with a functional healthcare system, for example.
All this to say that my
cousin and I had this discussion with my uncle, and he never saw the light. The
evidence was clear as day in a controlled experiment that tax cuts resulted in
lowered revenue - incontrovertible proof that Reaganomics is a fucking lie.
(There is also literally 40+ years of evidence from around the globe of this,
too, so Kansas is not an outlier. The rich hoard wealth, not spread it on down.
If “christians” would actually read their bible, though, they would already
know this. Just saying.)
That’s when I realized
there was no further use in discussion with right wingers. Evidence doesn’t
matter. Only ideology - and the ideology that tells them they don’t have to
share with others - matters.
Some money quotes from
this section are worth repeating.
Cuts to infrastructure became increasingly apparent.
Kansas fell below national averages on a wide range of public services,
including public transit, housing, and police and fire protection.
Funny how budget cuts
lead to poorer services. Who knew? Metzl details how road repairs went from
1200 miles a year to only 200, bridge repair and replacement became close to
non-existent, to the point where 3000 are considered structurally deficient.
Dams are also deficient, with hundreds risking significant loss of life.
In an effort to preserve
necessary services, municipalities had to find ways to raise funds. At the
state level, deductions that benefited low income residents were eliminated,
and localities had to raise sales taxes. These are regressive, with the net
result that after the Brownback tax cuts (for the rich), the bottom 40% of
Kansas residents ended up paying MORE tax. The ultra-rich made out like
bandits, at the expense of everyone else.
The conservative white voters who comprised the
majority of Brownback’s base elected a politician who implemented a series of
policies that, at their core, limited social mobility. Brownback’s version of
backlash austerity concentrated wealth at the top of the social pyramid while
starving the main conduits through which immigrant, minority, and poor communities
mobilized upward. This form of anything-but-experimental austerity ensured that
people at the top remained there and people at the bottom were forever looking
up. Austerity codified hierarchy: the rich got richer, and instead of promoting
largesse, tax “relief” made sure that the system that assured their dominance
remained ever-more inevitably in place.
Who wants that? Well,
it’s all about how you sell it.
“School cuts definitely started out as something that
people thought were only geared toward inner-city, black, and Hispanic schools
and districts,” one administrator explained. “That’s how they were sold at
first.”
Education has effects far
beyond social mobility or individual success, however. It has lifetime
consequences for life expectancy. College graduates live on average NINE YEARS
longer than high school dropouts. That’s huge. And those numbers are
widening.
As Metzl points out,
correlation is easy, but the exact causes are complicated and difficult to
trace. However, there are some interesting connections that are easier
to see.
States with the highest education levels also tended
to collect progressive state and local taxes, and invest more readily in
“education, infrastructure, urban quality of life, and human services.” By
contrast, states that cut taxes for corporations and wealthy persons and
reduced government services saw worse health outcomes.
But of course it didn’t
stay that way.
Like gun data in Missouri and health data in
Tennessee, trends that impacted minority populations broadened to impact white
populations as well. Students of all backgrounds and foregrounds, with lives
and futures ahead of them, thereby became cannon fodder in the fight to
redistribute wealth upward.
Booker T. Washington
really was right.
The conclusion chapter
starts with a horrifying story. In the wake of the Ferguson protests, a white
woman and single mother named Becca Campbell bought a gun, and traveled toward
downtown with her boyfriend. Exactly whether she intended to support the
protesters or oppose them is unclear. And maybe she just wanted to watch. But
at some point in the trip, she started waving the gun around, and accidently
put a bullet through her own head.
Metzl posits that she
died of whiteness, regardless of what went through her head before the fatal
accident.
Yet what everyone seemed to overlook in their
interpretation of Campbell’s death is the point I’ve made throughout this book:
we lose perspective when we explain racially charged encounters in the United
States solely on the basis of what exists in people’s minds or on their
individual actions. Doing so blocks recognition of the ways racial anxieties
manifest themselves in laws, policies, and infrastructures - in ways that carry
negative implications for everyone. These latter forms of bias result not just
from personal attitudes or choices but from the investments and disinvestments
that we as a society vote on, implement, and live with in the day to day. In an
increasingly polarized country, such structures silently shape larger American
interactions, surrounding race, as well as intimate encounters that impact how
we live, work, think, feel, and die.
At least in Kansas, Metzl
saw some hope that white conservatives were capable of seeing that they were
harming themselves. Particularly encouraging is that some of the more religious
ones are starting to return to an idea that they are their brother’s keeper -
an idea that has been so difficult to find among white evangelicals in
particular. Here is one quote that acknowledges the problem, and looks for ways
to fix it.
For Barbara Bollier, a GOP state senator, reversing
the Brownback fiscal damage involved combating white racial attitudes that
justified tax cuts through a logic that “minorities don’t deserve my money in
any way, shape, or form…blacks are just lazy SOBs who don’t want to work.”
Bollier, a physician, saw these kinds of attitudes as targets that government
needed to address if it was to create better lives for “all Kansans.”
I too have seen some
people - a few at least - come to this realization as well. Even a few of my
parents’ generation (although I strongly doubt my parents will ever see the
light.) The belief that minorities are stealing “their hard earned money” is a
difficult one to counteract, and the proof is in the way that so many are
willing to die for whiteness - or at least sacrifice their grandchildren to
it.
Someday, when the history
books are written, I think this period of time - my lifetime - will be looked
upon with curiosity - that time that white Americans chose to commit suicide
because they thought their black and brown neighbors would die a little faster.
And the ultra-rich just sat watching it and laughing their asses off at how
easy it was.
As I have gotten older
and have observed multiple decades of the disintegration of morality among the
American Right (and especially white Evangelicalism) I have become more and
more convinced that all stupidity ultimately descends from moral
stupidity.
As Forrest Gump said,
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
I have known many people
with intellectual disabilities, and they are generally not fools. I have also
known plenty of people who had high IQs who were total idiots.
And in every case, the
intellectual stupidity followed on a decision to feed their moral stupidity.
The decision that “love your neighbor” didn’t apply to “those people” led
directly to the cognitive dissonance as the policies they supported harmed
people like them and their descendants. This required an increasing level of
denialism about basic reality, to keep the racist ideology intact.
My parents fell for
Reaganomics, but retained a general morality and grasp on reality until the LA Riots. From then on, it was a gradual
descent into conspiracy-theory land, charlatan cult leaders, and right-wing
nuttery. By Covid, they had bought into all the conspiracy theories, and
apparently believe my family will all be dead of auto-immune diseases in a few
years because we got the vaccine.
But I could list so many
others. My flat-earth aunt…the one whose family would have starved if not for
food stamps, Medicaid, and the Earned-Income Tax Credit (liberal ideas all!),
but who has always railed against the “lazy mexicans” who take all the jobs.
The religious nuts here in town who harass and bully the LGBTQ kids like
mine….and somehow keep getting caught using the N word. And also spout QAnon
lies about liberals drinking the blood of infants. (Hey, look, the old Blood
Libel is back!)
Ultimately, though, even
if moral stupidity triumphs (and I have hope it can and will be defeated), what
will they have gained? The chance to watch minorities die a few moments before
them? A slightly more crushing level of poverty and hopelessness for black and
brown kids than for their own white grandchildren? Their communities dying for
lack of opportunity, education, healthcare? Communities wracked by gun suicides
and opiate overdoses and chronic alcoholism? They make a desolation and call it peace…
Metzl’s vision of a
better future is inspiring. Ultimately, it depends on us humans - white humans
particularly, since we tend to live in denial - realizing that we are all
connected. If any of us fail to thrive, it hurts all of us.
The measure of our
society’s greatness is not how rich our billionaires are. It is the wellbeing
of those at the margins of our society. If they thrive, we all thrive. If they
hurt, it will ultimately hurt every one of us. Rather than insisting on dying
of whiteness, we would do well to thrive as a multicultural society - where
everyone matters.
***
Just one final personal
note I couldn’t find a place for in the main post. As regular readers know, I
have been estranged from my parents for several years. There are a number of
long term reasons, from their rejection of my wife (because she worked outside
of the home and wore culturally normal clothing, among other issues) to their blatant
favoritism towards my abusive narcissist sister, to eventually their rejection
of my transgender child.
But actually, THEY are
the ones who chose to cut us out of their lives. And the reason my dad gave was
that I “insulted” them by repeating in public the disgusting racist things they
said to me where my kids may have heard.
They were willing to
sacrifice our relationship to their loyalty to whiteness – to their belief that
they should be entitled to say hateful lies about people of color without any social
consequences. Our relationship literally died of whiteness.
