‘Dying of whiteness’: How Trump and the GOP tapped into white America’s suicidal crusade to maintain white supremacy

TANA GANEVA
21 FEB 2019 AT 13:01 ET

Early in his book, “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland,” physician and social scientist Jonathan M. Metzl introduces a Tennessee man named Trevor. Trevor is 41 and dying of liver disease. He lives in a low-income housing facility and he doesn’t have health insurance.

“Had Trevor lived a simple thirty-nine minute drive away in neighboring Kentucky, he might have topped the list of candidates for expensive medications called polymerase inhibitors, a life-saving liver transplant, or other forms of treatment and support,” Metzl writes. But Tennessee officials repeatedly blocked efforts to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

But Trevor is not mad at the state’s elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he tells Metzl. “I would rather die.” When Metzl prods him about why he’d choose death over affordable health care, Trevor’s answer is telling. “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

Over the course of almost a decade, Metzl crunched mortality statistics and spoke with people in the South and Midwest. He sought to find out how—and why—many low-and-mid income white Americans embrace values and back politicians who institute policies that are literally killing them, from lack of health care to gun de-regulations to shoddy infrastructure. Metzl shows that from a public health perspective, the dogma propagated by Republicans is literally toxic to a majority of their constituents.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/dying-whiteness-trump-gop-tapped-white-americas-suicidal-crusade-maintain-white-supremacy/