Running for Your Life: “Dying of Whiteness”

Book titles don’t shock anymore.

Take this title, a Basic Books one written by Jonathan Metzl, a medical doctor with home ties to America’s Heartland, that is due to come out in the spring (2019).

(Fuhgeddabout the fact that in 1990 I began – a since abandoned – book of essays on American travel, with the working title, “Travels Across America’s Waistline.”)

If Metzl’s main title isn’t shocking enough, get a load of the subtitle:

“How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heatland”

So many books, so little time. And some, like Metzl’s I find myself reading the introduction and the conclusion, in part because, well, of the first sentence of this paragraph …

Here’s the money quote from this book, which if you may not have the heart and the stomach to read what stands as a reasonable assessment about just how intractable the problems seem now …

“Why would someone reject their own health care, or keep guns unlocked when their children were home? Yet because of the frames cast around these and other issues hued with historically challenged assumptions about privilege, it became ever-more difficult for many people with whom I spoke to imagine alternate realities or to empathize with groups other than their own. Compromise, in many ways, coded as treason.”

That last line nails it. When next you wonder how we can be as deeply partisan as we are think of this phrase: Leaders, thinkers on both sides of the spectrum see compromise as treason.

Next: Running for Your Life: Straight Talk

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