Review: 'Dying of Whiteness,' by Jonathan M. Metzl
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His thesis: Conservative whites who hate taxes, gun control and government programs such as the Affordable Care Act are guzzling an elixir that Republicans say will Make America Great Again. But instead of restoring a mostly white (and largely imaginary) era free of rap music and Spanglish, Metzl writes, the toxic brew is shaving years from those voters’ lives, damaging their health in measurable ways.
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Politicians sold those policies as safeguards against criminals, moochers and Big Government, Metzl writes, but the intended effect — punishing and endangering the health of poor minorities, choking off taxpayer-funded institutions that help them and helping to calcify institutional racism — is barely disguised. Through field interviews, research and public-health data, Metzl shows that whites are harming themselves along with everyone else, and in drastic ways.
Slashing Missouri’s already lenient gun-control laws unleashed a dramatic spike in white male gun-related suicides there. In Tennessee, one of several red states that rejected Obamacare, mortality and preventable-disease rates ticked up among poor whites when the Volunteer State turned its back on the program, leaving billions of dollars in health care subsidies on the table. Kansas’ radical tax-cut experiment crippled its economy and its once exemplary public school system, pushing up class sizes and dragging down graduation rates for white students.
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While the results of Metzl’s epidemiological study aren’t all that surprising, the good doctor writes without judgment. That’s
despite some of his subjects who cling to paranoia despite personal circumstances: people who lost loved ones to gun suicide but reject gun control; chronically ill Medicaid patients who argue that the nation can’t afford subsidized health care; tax cut-loving suburban parents shocked to find that their kids now experience the same appalling classroom conditions common in poor urban districts.
As a result, reading “Dying of Whiteness” brought a quote attributed to the civil rights activist, educator and scholar Booker T. Washington:
“To keep a man down,” he said, “you have to stay down with him.”
http://www.startribune.com/review-dying-of-whiteness-by-jonathan-m-metzl/506550832/
