{"id":47208,"date":"2020-01-24T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=47208"},"modified":"2020-01-22T21:53:44","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T02:53:44","slug":"dying-of-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2020\/01\/dying-of-whiteness\/","title":{"rendered":"Dying of Whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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The critical theory of racial identity politics has come for the medical profession.<\/p>\n

The prestigious British medical journal\u00a0The Lancet\u00a0<\/em>has published a positive book review of Jonathan Metzl\u2019s book\u00a0Dying of Whiteness:\u00a0 How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America\u2019s Heartland.<\/a><\/p>\n

It associates the health problems of America\u2019s white working class\u2013opioid addiction, alcoholism, liver disease, heart problems, and suicide\u2013with gun ownership, racism, and right wing politics.\u00a0 It then ties them all together into a diagnosis of \u201cwhiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The review in Lancet, by Rhea W. Boyd, entitled Despair Doesn\u2019t Kill, Defending Whiteness Does<\/a>, seems to take the idea even further:<\/p>\n

For humans to use whiteness to manufacture access and privilege, they must engineer scarcity and loss. This entanglement between access and scarcity, privilege and loss, means white people\u2019s unearned advantages have always been tethered to a legacy of untold deaths. This is not the result of an emotional positioning, but a structural one. In Dying of Whiteness<\/em>, Metzl intricately outlines this structural framework but too often anchors it to an emotional foundation his analysis both critiques and depends on. This is perhaps why his conclusion is to \u201cPromote more healthy and self-reflective frameworks\u2026of structural whiteness\u201d when the only solution is to eliminate whiteness all together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0Eliminate whiteness all together?\u00a0 You mean, as in genocide<\/em>?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The notion that whiteness is a disease would seem to go against the claims that white people are \u201cprivileged.\u201d\u00a0 If poor Southerners\u2013the focus of the study\u2013are so plagued by disease and \u201cdespair,\u201d how are they privileged?\u00a0 If race is at the root of their problems, why aren\u2019t affluent middle class white progressives, such as most of the readers of Lancet<\/em>, also afflicted in the same way?\u00a0 And why are working class blacks also plagued by many of the same problems?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Comments James Freeman in \u2018The Consequences of Structural Whiteness are Fatal\u2019:\u00a0 A famous medical journal succumbs to radical politics<\/a> in the Wall Street Journal<\/em> [subscription required]:<\/div>\n
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If someone set out to create a more offensive and less defensible version of Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201cdeplorables\u201d argument, they might end up with this Lancet essay. It arrives dressed up in the language of medical research, but readers should not expect to be presented with any more of a fact-based argument than Mrs. Clinton offered. . . .What does Dr. Boyd\u2019s claim that \u201cthe consequences of structural whiteness are fatal\u201d have to do with medicine or scientific knowledge?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Progressives used to champion the working class.\u00a0 Old-school socialists like Bernie Sanders and New Deal democrats like Joe Biden still do.\u00a0 But as the progressive movement gets taken over by the well-educated, affluent\u2013and white\u2013elite, advocates of identity politics often have only disdain for their social inferiors.\u00a0 The working class of all races does have big problems, but these \u201cdeplorables\u201d are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity.<\/p>\n

The contempt they feel from people who consider themselves to be their \u201cbetters\u201d has driven many of them into the arms of Donald Trump, who does treat them with dignity and whose policies advance their interests.\u00a0 Their support of Trump, of course, makes the elite treat them with even more contempt.<\/p>\n

Associating a race with disease\u2013a disease that needs to be wiped out\u2013has long been the stock in trade of racist rhetoric, including the anti-Jewish writing of anti-semites.\u00a0 It\u2019s disconcerting to find this kind of propaganda in a leading medical journal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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