Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

In 2014, a white police officer shot and killed unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The resulting protests continued through October and November, creating an atmosphere of unrest throughout the St. Louis area.

On the night of November 21st, 2014, amid this tension, Becca Campbell left her job at a local pub to drive home with her boyfriend. In the car, Campbell took a gun out of her purse, waving it “around her head” and claiming she was “ready for Ferguson.” In a moment of distraction, their car rear-ended the vehicle in front of them; Campbell’s hand clenched, and she shot herself in the head. 

Metzl believes Campbell “died of whiteness” and calls her story “emblematic” of the text’s “larger narrative […] regarding the kinds of mortal trade-offs white Americans make in order to defend an imagined sense of whiteness” (270). To remain “at the top of social hierarchies,” white people in the United States are willing to shave years off their own lives instead of contributing to “an ever-more integrated world” (270).

Importantly, Metzl notes that the “risk” associated with whiteness exists regardless of racial biases. In the wake of Campbell’s death, leftist media outlets attributed her death to racist fear of Black protesters, while conservative media claimed she was protesting “for racial equality.” These multiple interpretations illustrate the extent to which “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,” thereby rendering invisible the structural manifestation of American “racial anxieties” (271).

St. Louis is a highly segregated city with issues like crime rates, health outcomes, and socioeconomic status adhering to strict racial lines. In the years preceding the Michael Brown shooting, these disparities were exasperated by “draconian tax and budget cuts” that particularly harmed disadvantaged minority populations (272). Affected police departments were forced to shift to “financially predatory” policing tactics that were “lethal” for minority populations and left white populations feeling unsafe in the face of a smaller police presence. After Campbell was shot, she was rushed to the hospital on roads potholed by cuts to infrastructure spending. Then she arrived at the hospital, where the rejection of the ACA had led to “service cuts and massive layoffs […] and reductions to emergency services” (272). None of this would have saved Campbell’s life, but she was part of a system that “was also itself hemorrhaging vitality” due to “self-inflicted legislative and economic wounds” (273). 

The weapon Campbell used to accidentally shoot herself was easy to acquire thanks to loosening gun laws in the state of Missouri, where “Castle Doctrine” statutes allowed gun owners to defend their homes and even their cars from “perceived intruders.” Accordingly, more “inexperienced” individuals purchased guns, and white Missourians accidentally shot themselves and others “ten times more frequently” than any other demographic (274). In short, “political decisions to slash taxes, defund health care reform, or spread guns” were “tied to promises to ‘restore’ an imagined sense of lost white privilege” (274). However, all too often, white people like Becca Campbell paid for that privilege with their lives. 

Metzl argues that “American human frailty is in part manmade […] by political choices made by us, the white electorate” (275). The risks may be direct or hidden, but they are not limited to certain political parties and ideologies. To combat these adverse effects on communal health, Metzl argues that Americans need “a renewed focus on equitable structures and infrastructures” (276). Undoing systems of oppression and structural racism will make life better for everyone. There are examples of this work being done, such as centrist GOP politicians in Kansas who fought to raise income taxes and “red-state Republican politicians” in Tennessee and Missouri speaking out in favor of expanded Medicaid and tighter gun restrictions.

Metzl imagines a world where Americans could talk honestly about “seemingly intractable social issues” like white gun deaths by suicide in Missouri and create more robust social networks in “racially and economically disparate communities” (278). In the current American reality of polarization, this can “feel utopian.” However, Metzl argues that most of the white individuals he spoke to during his research weren’t overtly opposed to forming “out-group alliances” in their quest for greater safety and security. In Tennessee, for example, a gun safety bill in the wake of a child accidentally shooting his friend had bipartisan support until the NRA threatened GOP lawmakers against forging a consensus. When white America continues to identify with forces like Donald Trump and the Tea Party, the result is “the promise of greatness, coupled with a biology of demise” (281).

Modern-day American politics function on “core assumptions that the happiness of a select few persons takes precedence over the care of a great many others” (281). However, treating whiteness as “a castle under siege” hides the “plagues” that can develop behind the castle’s walls (283), and those who live within the castle become an ever-greater threat to themselves.