Is Whiteness Killing Us? with Dr. Jonathan Metzl

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He's the Judas if there's a top five Judas is he's he's the number one Judas Follow mega and listen to our new miniseries the rise and fall of Twin Hills starting May 21st Wherever you get your podcasts The accusations are stick How do you know? You You You You Welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman if you're hearing this then you're on the public feed Which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements You can get access to the subscriber feed by going to Coleman Hughes dot org and becoming a supporter This means you'll have access to episodes a week early You'll never hear ads and you'll get access to bonus Q&A episodes You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family as always Thank you so much for your support Welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman my guest today is dr. Jonathan Metzel Jonathan is a psychiatrist and author and a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University He's written several books including the protest psychosis prozac on the couch against health and the topic of today's conversation Dying of whiteness how the politics of racial resentment is killing America's heartland Which received the Robert F Kennedy Award for nonfiction in dying of whiteness? Jonathan argues that GOP policies like cutting education funds cutting taxes opposing Obamacare and opposing gun control are hurting the life Expectancy of America's white population in other words hurting the very people who support these policies most He also argues that support for these policies stems from racial resentment a feeling of resentment towards minorities among white people as well here in the discussion I don't agree that whiteness and racial resentment are the best explanations for why the median Republican supports these policies and I also think that concepts like whiteness and blackness are toxic I think people Understandably hear these words as attacks on their racial identities, which they can't control So I think we should just rid the discourse of these words Jonathan obviously disagrees and we'll talk about that that said there are some smaller claims I agreed with Jonathan about like the fact that the easy availability of guns in this country has made suicide easier for people Especially for the very population that opposes gun control laws some of his other claims about the effect of cutting school budgets on life expectancy I found to be poorly supported and you'll hear me press him on that towards the middle of the episode in general I found that there was some distance between the tone of his book and the positions He was willing to defend in the room and I don't know exactly how to handle situations like that as an interviewer Do I just talk to the person I'm meeting in the room or do I hold people accountable to the precise claims that they made in the book? I don't really know anyway I'm grateful to Jonathan for coming on the podcast and I hope you all enjoy the conversation as much as I did So without further ado dr. Jonathan Metzel Jonathan Metzel, thanks so much for being on my show. I'm really glad to be here. Okay, so we're gonna get into your book and I'm gonna put you in the hot seat and Think of it like like defending your dissertation all over again. I was saying before this is the most comfortable hot seat I've ever this is a very comfortable hot seat. So yeah, so before we get to that though I want to know a little bit about your background your biography where did you grow up? How did you come to care about the issues at the intersection of race and health that led you to write this book dying of whiteness? And so how'd you get here? Well, I think there are two parts of that the professional part is I've had this career going back and forth between medicine and social science and politics basically and so and humanities also so I Went through the whole med school route But while I was going to med school I snuck away and got a night degree in Linguistic theory and poetry because I always wanted to kind of add as med school wasn't enough Med school wasn't enough and then I took off some time to do another degree in kind of politics Then I went to residency, but I was actually sounds crazy now going to night school So when did you sleep during your residency? I'm sitting right now. I'm kind of catching up on everything But during my residency I did a degree in poetry theory and then I did a PhD after I finished my residency in Critical race theory and politics And so I've been kind of going back and forth between these worlds and the whole time you're doing that everybody's like What are you gonna do with your life? And it turns out there was a job there was a job And so I started at the University of Michigan I was a professor of gender studies African-American studies and psychiatry for a long time and started a big center there They looked at culture and medicine and then after about the decade of doing that I was recruited to Vanderbilt to start a New center called medicine health and society that again looks at politics race Medicine health and kind of how we got here and so it's been a nice kind of career of building Institutional space kind of a place to study issues that I think are really important for medicine, but also for the world All right, so so we're gonna get into your book dying of whiteness Which this case a couple years old now right came out 2020. Oh, yeah, is that right? So I don't know how fresh it is in your memory But I've just read it and and so my first question is basically about the the overall framework, right? The thesis and I'm gonna summarize it and you tell me if you think this is a fair summary is that GOP policy at the national and local level has had a deleterious effect on White health outcomes on the population level white health white white health outcomes were talking life expectancy disease etc mainly life expectancy and and Suicide rate and we're talking about when I say GOP policy. We're talking about tax cuts We're talking about lacks gun policy And we're talking about opposition to the affordable care act mainly and yet Republicans seem to support such policies and what's going on there, right? You cite the famous book. What's the matter with Kansas overall? That's that's the thesis of your book is that a fair summary? I started adding it up and we can talk about this later But there was kind of an aha moment that kind of led to led to the entire book But I would say at the thesis level I just started looking at the effects of population level health policies like living in a state that Blocked Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act Overturned any any and every gun law on the books blocked Education public education funding was another big one and it kind of led into blocking public health funding Which kind of was a lead up to the pandemic and what I found was the dichotomy that you've just mentioned Which is that on one hand people were supporting these politics They were voting for them and then in the other hand the actual medical biological Effects of those policies on the people who were supporting them were as dangerous as living in a house with asbestos or secondhand smoke Or not wearing a seatbelt in a car. They were literally causing a shortening of lifespan The policies themselves were disease pathogens that were causing you know in some instances The weeks or months or years of shortened life expectancy or shortened quality of life years And so I just looked at it from a data perspective and a political perspective And I've found that these policies were functioning like disease pathogens just like secondhand smoke So we're gonna I'm gonna dig into those specific claims in a bit But I want to get at the big picture framework here So it's one thing to say GOP policy is negatively affecting outcomes for white Americans I think I think many people might agree with some version of that claim. It's another thing to say those policies are Well described as whiteness. What does the word whiteness or the concept of whiteness add to? The diagnosis that GOP policies certain GOP policies are bad for the country I hope I'm very clear in the book and I'll be clear now Hopefully which is that there are many ways to be white in this country you can be white and be communal Generous responsible building infrastructure creating community And so part of the question I ask in the book is why is it that a particular version of what I call White racial resentment this idea of a politics that is anti-government Anti-immigrant very overtly or covertly racist very pro-gun kind of defending a way things used to be that they probably never were for many people Why did that level of whiteness emerge in places where I'm from? I'm from Missouri. I grew up in Kansas City I live in Tennessee. Why did that become the dominant political mode of whiteness in? Purple and red state America and do you mind if I tell a vignette to explain? So the whole book came about because I was doing focus groups around the time that the affordable Caract was coming out and we were doing these focus groups in rural, Tennessee a place that has horrible health outcomes for poor people across the board and part of the story was Leaving beliefs about government aside the people I was interviewing They were they really needed help like people with chronic liver failure kidney failure going bankrupt from not being able to afford their Prescription drugs and I understand government is complicated It's bureaucratic but I would do these focus groups and I would talk to people and I'd say hey There's this new thing. This was like 2012 2013 called the affordable character You're gonna sign up for it and I'll never forget there was a guy a guy named Trevor who I spoke with who had I think liver failure or kidney failure He really needed medical help and he said I realized I'm dying of my medical condition And I said well here's this thing called the affordable care act that might be able to help you you know You might get Medicaid expansion more insurance coverage and he said I know what it would do for me But to quote him ain't no way I want my tax dollars going to help Mexicans or welfare quaints this idea that basically I'm not signing up for a program that might help me if it also also benefits people who I see as Undeserving and I heard versions of that literally hundreds of times across my research where people basically said yeah These communal programs might be helpful for me, but I'm not gonna participate in some program That I feel like there's encroachment of other people and I heard it differently and in different ways for health care So do you think that's like a fair portrait of what the median Republican Republican feels or do you think that's a fringe? I don't know what the minority. I don't know what the median Republican feels I know that every time Medicaid expansion would go up for a vote in Tennessee A state that was literally going bankrupt because it didn't have Medicaid expansion as opposed to Kentucky Which got a lot of help from the Affordable Care Act Tennessee rural hospitals were closing people were getting thrown off insurance rolls the poverty level kept You know encroaching but every time it would go for a vote what it meant to be a Republican a conservative Republican Was to vote for a politician who was not gonna allow Medicaid expansion to happen in Tennessee that happens to this day So in my one question is like is the useful way to frame this whiteness or an I could I can imagine an alternative Framing would be partisanship, right because there are all these I'm sure you know Studies where Democrats or Republicans will be presented some policy say it's a gun control policy You tell them Obama was in favor of it Democrats will vote for it Republicans will say no you tell them Trump is supported the same policy And they'll flip it's it's like this partisan bias where my party is right no matter what and in the policy and Everyone's either watching Fox News on the one hand or they're watching MSNBC CNN etc And and they just do that so is to me that when you tell that story about well I suppose about Trevor he made it specifically about Mexicans and welfare Queens etc So that seems like a racist motive But if if I'm talking about like your typical Republican or your typical Democrat to me It seems like the partisan bias is what would explain those kind of shooting oneself in the foot kind of policies No, and for sure we have plenty of shooting myself in the foot to go around right now I feel like our whole system is set up to not solve problems And so I it's not like and the question of median I mean when I when I say median I'm not talking about the median desires of the aggregate republic And I'm talking about the median effect of the average GOP policy in these states And so and again, I want to be clear I'm not talking about whiteness as a biological category as a genetic category Nothing like that. I'm saying did you support a policy that shortened your own lifespan? And so the the so what is whiteness though? Yeah, so for me again whiteness and I talk about this a lot in the book there It's not like I'm trying to define whiteness on some broad level But I would say again that the politics of what I call racial resentment The idea of a kind of anti-government anti-immigrant pro-gun Make America great again kind of politics that that's really the operative definition in my book In part, but I would also say that that came out in really complicated ways Like half the book probably is about guns where there is a very pronounced racial history of gun ownership Who gets to carry gun in public? Who is coded as a patriot and who is coded as a gang banger? It goes back a couple hundred years in our country And so I look at the history of guns which is very different from the history of health care But but that it's that had its own racial history that shaped present-day politics When I look at schools, there's a history of I look at Kansas because of Brown versus Board of Education So this question of separate and equal and who is who has the right to be separate or equal And so I'm looking at particular states that have particular racial histories about particular issues to say the history of race Not that every person is racist. I don't think that and I also I don't know I think racism in a person is a very it's for me as a researcher very fuzzy Like I don't know who's racist and many people act like they're not racist and they are And I don't even know how to quantify that But I can say that there are racial histories about these issues in these states Which impact the policies and the outcomes and so I'm really looking at them guns schools and health care The racial history of those issues and how those racial histories shaped the politics in the present day I think framing it as sort of dying of whiteness It's a no doubt controversial and to some people probably be offensive way of framing it because They would hear it as you are attacking white people because they're white and I think Analogously if someone said oh, you're you know dying of blackness a lot of black people the It wouldn't matter what you said after that because you're attacking my identity Of course, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing like right As a scholar in America, you can make an argument that's offensive and you can defend it and that in the first amendment protects you But there is I think a burden to prove that like what you gain from it is worth the potential turn off factor To it and I and I wonder about that in a in a time when we are so I would argue hyper obsessed with racial identity and we've cranked it to attend people I can imagine if I was a certain kind of white person I would have to get over the feeling that you're you're asking me to get rid of my whiteness to buy your argument when Really, you know, if you were to make it to me on the basis of like this is a bad policy Then then I might be open to hearing it. I mean, I'm super I hope I'm I won't care in the book and I'll be against it now I'm not asking anybody to apologize for their whiteness I'm obviously a white person and so I don't actually don't like arguments where people are asked to apologize for who they are I'm I don't I don't think that that's taking people where they're at and I and I think I think we I just I mean I've had to public debates about white fragility and things like that And I I don't think that now two things I think are important for this And what number one is I wrote this book 2012 to 2018 And so the book, you know was in in production 2019 So the issues if I had to read if I had to write it now, maybe I wouldn't call it dying whiteness Maybe I would I do think that how come for the reasons you're saying I think that the pandemic the murder of George Floyd All the reckonings all the backlash we've had recently, but I do think my argument holds I mean, I do think that if you look at the pandemic for example, really what I'm asking is Why is the performance of a particular political identity? Which is charged by race at odds with longevity and and I would say that you know You could maybe make the same argument for people who were anti mask or anti-vax that to be a good Conservative citizen and many other people as well by some research accounts led to Shorten lifespan or more health or something like that. So really what I'm saying is why is the performance? So where there's like mask or anti-vax policies were those about race? The history of the book I'm telling in my book and I don't talk about mask or vaxen in my book Because it came out before and so and again, I just cannot be clear enough I'm not talking about every white person everywhere talking about the aggregate effects and also for people who've read the book They know that it's not just like white people are dying of these policies Like when states like Tennessee didn't expand Medicaid the people who were affected the most were black and latino Citizens who had not had health care or education in the first place and the promise of the affordable CAC was that they were finally going to get health care and so people were dying of all different I mean it wasn't just white people who were affected by this but it was Conservative white GOP politics that was blocking health care for for everyone really in a way and so well I mean you had just mentioned sort of vax all kind of I'll pivot to a different question though Another way of looking at this is when I look at say anti-immigrant sentiment in America I don't think of it as a white issue like I think black Americans are pretty have pretty broadly similar attitudes towards border control That you can see that in like the how uh how black Californians voted on on on immigration in the 90s on the california Prop those are resolutions that they have like very broadly comparable, right? So is that about whiteness or is that about a broad and Global tendency that people have to not want more immigration And many and so far as we talk about it as whiteness don't white people feel singled out like hey, hold on My black neighbor doesn't want open borders either. It doesn't want more immigration How come I'm the only one that's called a xenophobe for it? Yeah, yeah No, I mean and many black americans voted for trump and probably will vote for the gop candidate increasing number of latino americans vote for gop So I'm I'm not just saying let's all vote for democrats In fact the book i'm reading now is very critical of democrats for many the reasons we're talking about Which is making moral assumptions about people who are politically different And so it's not like i'm adverse to that argument in fact when we talk again in six months if we do You'll see I have a whole book about About the moral assumptions about public health. I don't think it's neutral And so i'm again. I just i'm not talking about that i'm talking about the health outcomes of policies and the ways that those policies use racial resentment to further their aims of getting implemented in the first place acknowledging that there are I mean, I don't call anybody racist in the book I don't talk about people's individual intentions. I say very clearly I don't know who's racist and and there are many people of many different backgrounds I know from my own life growing up and so and so certainly there are many people But the idea is that these policy positions Are motivated to some extent by racism, right? Like the gun gun lacks attitude towards gun control Tax cuts and lowering funding etc that part of that one part of that is motivated by racism against minorities, right? And racial resentment it's not just racism against minorities. What is racial resentment? I've seen the scales, but can you help people with that help me with that? In a nutshell It's the fear that other people are going to come take your stuff or that people are going to cut in front of you in line in the push for resources I mean when I was doing the affordable character interviews for example people kept telling me black people are having 12 to 14 kids There ought to be a cut-off point somewhere and by the time I go to the doctor They're going to have run out of whatever Fill in the blank and it's not going to be enough for me or something like that So this idea that basically other people are undeserving people are taking away taking your resources your I get that and I get that that's Not quite racism, right? That's something Lesser on the spectrum. It seems to me what you're describing is also how a lot of black people feel about white people In body and in the white privilege meme. It's like the idea is white people are undeservedly taking Resources and stuff that belongs to us, right? But I've never heard it called racial resentment in that direction because again, I think I I fear a lot of this The way these things are named and selectively thrown around the subtext of all of it is that white people are wrong and everyone else Can sleep easy on this issue which strikes me as like a big Problem and and a very divisive way of framing the issue So like is it racial resentment when black people feel this way about white people? I guess the question for me just to reframe your question would be what are my outcomes of writing a book like this And the reason I'm pushing back a little bit is because my book is not white fragility. My book is not even anti-racism I'm not talking about changing people's hearts and minds. No, I get that it's just and let me say I'm not asking you that question, but I do wonder about these things I grew up in Missouri right as I've read about in the book I've seen structures built through Common efforts between people that lead to common infrastructures that lead people to feel like they're in Cooperation with each other not in competition with each other when I grew up Everybody in Kansas City would send their kids to these public funded Taxpayer funded summer camps where everybody in town would send their kids for three weeks to sleep outside and you would meet all kinds of state funded summer camps Yeah, city city funded center camps A school park camp for anybody listening from Kansas City and you would meet kids from every racial ethnic Political backgrounds and it was funded by the city and you would meet you know, you'd make lifelong friends There were public pools that everybody went to in the middle of town Everybody went to these public pools and you would meet you know sports teams all these kind of things And so in Missouri when I grew up a couple decades ago We had a system where taxpayer money was used to create infrastructure where people could meet people who are different than them and not see them as evil And all of that went away the minute we started doing like that You know anti-tax movements like the tea party and the freedom conquests the minute more guns Fletted into the area the minute politics became polarized The first things that got cut were these common infrastructures these infrastructure where people could go And so part of the reason I wrote the book is to say in my own lifetime I've seen us do better and pether McGee makes a similar argument in her book The sum of us about the closing of public pools and I've seen Programs like those summer camp programs that I grew up in Proposed again and again and they continue to get shut down and so what I'm arguing for again I'm not arguing for hearts and minds. I'm arguing Let's build common infrastructure where people can see the value of cooperating Collaborating and not fall back on zero-sum formulations where we feel like racial groups are in competition with each other Or people who are politically different than us are bad people in a way, which is our which is what our whole system is right now When they were proposing the affordable care act the first time around you know 2008 910 They had this idea How can we get people in a city or a community to work together to improve their health outcomes across the aggregate level of a community? And so what they did is they had this plan that was if an entire town builds bike lanes that connect different neighborhoods Builds public parks. They lower their emergency visits They lower their blood sugar and their systolic blood pressure if the entire town does this Then everyone gets a tax cut the whole town will get a tax cut because you're wasting less money on er visits And I thought man, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Um, I'm a structuralist I'm not I'm not trying to again change people's heart Whatever, but I will say this is exactly what I'm talking about Which is this idea that we could build structures where people were cooperating toward a common aim, right? Everybody wants a tax cut and I thought man, this would be great. This would be a way to get people to To cooperate even if you're not talking to them about their deep-seated fears or resentments But instead build these structures now the thing I'm telling you with the affordable care act Was one of the first things that got chopped it never saw the light of day But I kept thinking like that's a modern day example of the thing I saw with the parks and the schools Which is how can we build structures where people are not in competition with each other for resources? Which is the world we have now and I'm not trying to not answer your question I'm just giving you the way I think about this which isn't I mean Anti-resism is one approach which is let's make people aware of things and I think it's super important But I'm saying I think that changing everybody's attitudes is not going to matter If you don't intervene if you don't have a foresight at the structural level To think about how you can get people to feel like they're on the same page And conversely if you want people to be at odds with each other to feel the most resentment between groups The best way to do that would be to drain all the money that people have toward bridges and schools and Health care and parks and give it in the form of tax cuts to wealthy people in corporations So you're draining all the money and then people really are in competition with each other for limited resources And so austerity and what we might call racial resentment or tribal resentment I don't know what you call it austerity is a driver of that of that phenomenon too And so in a way we've just stopped investing in the conduits through which tribes of people feel like they're together We've invested in tribalizing media tribalizing Politics tribalizing judges our whole system is monetized for people to be at odds with each other And and then we're seeing the natural outcome of it And so that was a very long way of saying yes, there are black people that are racist Yes, there are brown people that are racist But what does that tell us that that tells us many things but it also tells us that we're in a system where we're feeling like we're fighting You know, we're six mice fighting for you know two pieces of cheese or something Which is the way the american system is set up right now So if I were to summarize what you just said and tell me if you think is a fair summary Say when we defund things When we defund public education, etc When we when we cut the budget We're all now fighting over a smaller pie in some way and it brings out the worst in all of us It makes us more liable to blame racially and to resent racially and so forth And also we think in terms of competition You're some I think it's absolutely zero zone people are we think in terms of competition with other groups As opposed to thinking man, there's enough for everybody Here's like that. We just not our system right? Well, okay, so if I look at like what I've seen over the past 10 years is that and there's this Gallup poll I often cite just that ask americans like how you feel about race relations and it was basically Most americans black and white like 60 to 70 percent felt good until 2013 and then it just like starts biking It starts sorry nose diving 2013 2013. Yeah, it's like it's a gallop poll They have they've been asking since 2001 and it's just pretty much pretty steady until 2013 and then nose dives From steadily from 13 2013 to 2021 like cuts in half both black and white americans What happened in 2013? So what I would say what happened if 2013 is a couple things I think everyone had a smartphone in their pocket and everyone had social media. Yeah, that's right And so our perceptions Pre 2013 like our perception my perception let's say I was kind of a kid at that time But my perception of race relations would be like how am I treated on a daily basis by my neighbors by my classmates? How often do I experience a racist incident which at that time would have been very rare for me where I grew up? How uh and then like what I see on the six o'clock news, right post 2013 my picture of race relations is like A new article every day from buzzfeed or hovington post A video of a black person getting killed by the police You know every month that circulates on facebook in a matter of minutes And could be even a misleading or out of context clip and the alga alga alga Algorythmically boosted content is precisely the content which is most divisive If you live in red america the stuff you're getting is like, you know a constant drip of articles about illegal immigrants committing crimes, right? And you're seeing that pre 2013 You wouldn't have seen that so alga rhythmically boostedly in your pocket all the time everyone filming everyone and I think that led to In substantial measure it led to the blm movement. So I don't think the blm movement is the cause I think it's also caused by the same phenomenon Which is like this social media smartphone revolution and to me that is by far the bigger driver of poor race relations today then like uh You know budget changes or gop budget cuts and such like so what do you think of that? I mean it's interesting if you think about You know, I was talking my last very long answer was about structure and it seems like the entire monetary structure of Intergroup relations now is monetized around conflict And so the social media is a great example If you go on and you say i'm a democrat but some republicans are nice You'll get two re two clicks it won't make any money for anybody It's the algorithm will not support you saying that um If you go on and say i'll work down the street and i'm damn republican threw some shade at me and blah And then people respond to that and then it goes on it kind of circulates That's how people make money. So we the social media algorithms Depend on conflict which of course is so ironic because social media was supposed to be this thing that Fuddles all together that kind of thing but so that money that sold And so conflict is the way we learn about other groups right now a lot of times In some ways not all been some ways. It's how we think about them, but it's not just social media I mean think about our political system for example people are elected to go in and hold the party line They're not elected try being a centrist try being you know mit romney or somebody you're seen as a trader And so our whole political system is who's going to go in and be the most the most ardent defender of For me and against you judges never used to be politicized but now judges It's not like oh i'm going to go in and listen to the argument and let's let the chips fall where they may Judges are elected based on the ideologies that they go into uphold So we have a political judiciary media environment and many other environments where there's a tremendous amount of money in In polarization in us versus them in winning verse by However much and then pushing the other side down or something like that and so just social media reflect that does it cause that It's probably a little bit of both but again, I don't mean to over idealize kansas city But I will say I've read about this in the book I was looking back through the election process and in mersuri it before 2000 if there was a chairmanship of a key political committee that was within 500 votes of some Some vote for some kind of seed or something like that They would rotate the chairmanship of the committee every month a power sharing agreement because they figured hey A lot of people care about this on both sides. So everyone should get their say in a representative Democracy again, these are like the good old days But I would just say that we don't have that now It's kind of like like trump like get me one more vote than the other guy so I can wipe them out And so our whole system there's just there's no reward for compromise in our system Which leads to exactly that tribalism and social media is exactly an example of that. Okay, so That said the book you wrote was largely about gop policy, right? So in it's a book democrats would have liked and and republicans would have would have hated certainly I mean, I wouldn't I've been I've done a lot of I've been on a lot of conservative media I've gone back to the communities I've interviewed and talked to them about the book We've read the book together So I wouldn't say I wouldn't say that I try to be very respectful of the people i'm writing about I don't I try not to I try to listen to people I write in the book a lot that if I would have met people Who I meet in the book on social media. We would have hated each other but When I live with them, I realize like there are all these other most people get along and realize Most people get along real life and even just last week I was back engaging with some of the people I talked to in in the gun section and so I I hope that GOP people wouldn't wouldn't hate the book. Yeah, I think I meant less rank and file voters But your I mean I think some of your claims about a gop policy are Strike me as a bit extreme in in the sense that it's like there's kind of blood on the the hands of some of these policies And I think I agree with that in some cases and maybe less in others. So for example The idea that cutting the the budget for a school will lead to Uh more dropouts, right a higher dropout rate and a higher dropout rate is associated with Uh, uh, if you don't drop out of high school you you say in the book Uh, that's associated with a nine year nine years less life expectancy So like five to nine. Yeah, five times. So let's assume it's nine or whatever and then you say Well, I think it was Kansas, right? Kansas cut the budget a couple hundred six hundred six seven hundred kids couldn't Didn't graduate high school as a result. So taking that at face value that led to 6 000 white lost life years, right? But it seems when I hear that I think the hidden premise here is that Not uh, is that not graduating high school causes you Causes your lifespan to go down by nine nine years when I feel that that's probably more likely a correlation Right? Like it's probably like poverty causes you to not graduate high school and causes your life expectancy to be lower, etc And yet the way that that's framed it's basically this policy is taken out 6 000 years off of your life and that that feels like a very you know, like I think dubious way to frame it and hopefully we'll get to guns because I feel like the data is really Really strong on guns, but I would say that so the shortened lifespan from high school dropout is that and i'm clear about this That's not my research in other words. I'm using somebody else's model of another published model Which basically said that if you just study people who don't make it through high school dropout before high school They have worse job worse diet worse s works worse s worse us access to health care and so In a couple of models in these public health articles that I was talking at which I kind of say, okay Let's take that let's take that at face value even though that could be true that could not be true I that was not the research I was doing but I'd say let's just take that at face value because I guess It does kind of make maybe emotional sense when you think about it like if you don't have a job If you don't have a job if you like poverty maybe is linked to not graduating high school It's not it's not causal, but I said let's take that number at face value But I but I think the data that is really strong which was my data Which is the fore and after of draconian budget cuts to Kansas the Kansas public education system So I can say that the before and after of literally eviscerating public school budgets in Kansas led to changes in you know increasing class size decreasing teacher funding decreasing after school programs I mean all these kind of things That led to worse schools schools closing and people started not making it through high school So I said let's just take this five to nine year data What I can show you is the before and after of these tax cuts what happens? And then I just applied those two things to each other And so I'm not saying that dropping out of high school caused that to happen, but I can tell you it does read that way I have to I can't let you off the hook because it really does read that way What I can tell you is that cutting the budget cutting the budget leads to dropouts I have very strong data about that cutting the budget that's interesting in its own right and cutting the budget leads to Decreasing employable skills, right? That's the other thing we see in Kansas is that skills like science Proficiency critical thinking reading all those things start falling on national tests on fourth eighth and twelfth grade national tests They all start falling after the budget cuts. No, I don't know I didn't go in and say like oh you took these ten dollars in this test score But I can tell you if you look at the graphs in the book It's pretty powerful what happens to education outcomes and dropout rates after the tax cut So that I will definitely go to the mat on and then I said let's do a thought experiment Which is here's this whole body of literature that says that these things lead to shortened lifespan I see that as a debatable point. I'm very happy to debate that I don't think that it's a leads to be but I do think that if you apply these two things Which is here's the thing that I know caused high school dropouts and here's a literature that says that dropping out causes this Let's merge those two things and see what we find But again, I think the thing that I would want to stand firm on is massive budget cuts defunding an education system leads to worse outcomes So right before we get to gun control because this is your area What did you what did you make of our sort of national covid policy re School closures because this is it was a point of contention and at the beginning the people saying open open schools Were quite vilified like the the emily oasters of the world And then and again, I I imagine you'd be probably closer to this literature than I am I'm not like reading all the papers or anything, but my my impression has been that there's an emerging consensus that school closures That went on too long had had a deleterious effect on test scores on, you know, learning loss this learning loss problem So how have you viewed that? It's not my research You know, the interesting thing for me about the pandemic is that I was I go back and forth between New York and Tennessee so I was I had a blue state red state pandemic for the most fresh I've heard stories of people that they will go to a red state and get yelled at for wearing a mask And then they'll come to New York and get yelled at for not wearing a mask Which I was once or twice outside outdoors, of course It was interesting because I will say the first three four months of the pandemic I was in brooklyn and it was probably the most one of the most terrifying things I could ever imagine It felt like what it just felt like the end of the world sirens were going all the time People we knew died people's parents were dying. It was it was literally terrifying I don't think I don't know I feel like when I got back to Tennessee they had had a pandemic but it was it was not quite what New York City There was nothing like that. And so there was this moment of terror Where you just wanted the monster to stop eating people like it's just honestly That's what it felt like and I feel like those first few months in other words I keep thinking like what would the pandemic have been like if it would have started in Miami or in How do you think it would have been different? Just New York was like the worst place for it to start because of the population density Because of the ways that like in another city you could just get in your car and go to the drive through New York a lot of people don't have cars The whole city is based on things that work for a city But we're also like incredibly good for covid transmission And so the time that we were the most vulnerable was the time where the pandemic first hit And so I I guess I feel like when I was in New York There was something terrifying about letting kids go to school because then they were going to come back and like kill the whole family Like it's just kind of what it felt like and then when I got to Tennessee It just felt like I mean it was six months maybe into the pandemic at that point People live much more spread out. They have their cars The pandemic wasn't being reported in the same way And it just felt like a totally different experience And so I I don't know I feel like I feel like so many of the policies that we had in the beginning of the pandemic Were like those urgent New York early months kind of things and the assumption was well That's what's going to happen to the rest of the country if we don't stop this now I don't think it was like mean spirited I think if somebody from like rural Tennessee would have been in New York for the first four months of the pandemic They probably would have been really scared also because it was just it was really scary And so I guess it's just we had different pandemic experiences in the country And the hard thing was we tried to mandate policy for all these different areas without realizing the different regions We're having different pandemic experiences. I I don't know about schools Obviously, I think probably holding out kids too long did have I mean it seems In disputable now that that had bad educational outcomes But but it's just funny to think of like where that where that all came from and I don't know If you were to ask me two months into the pandemic when those sirens were 24 seven I would have been like kids never go to school again and just came home Yeah, and I was very in favor of the first lockdown as a New Yorker and Even with hindsight, I think look hindsight is 2020, but I would defend it on the grounds that I'd rather in the very early days of a pandemic. I would rather overreact than underreact Given that perfect reaction generally isn't on the menu in In an evolving situation. I would rather err on the side of overreaction And then once we really know what we're dealing with we know have more data after a month or two That's when it should we should try to get the optimal Policy so I because I know some people were against the first lockdown I think that argument become the anti lockdown argument becomes much more persuasive when you talk about the second Lockdown or third lockdowns that certain places had and the virus itself Stopped infecting the lower lungs, right? Which meant that if it was an upper respiratory infection like the in the later strains Yeah, the later strains So it was also literally a different kind of pandemic a couple of months into the pandemic and so um So I just I just think we we we too easily can flake things now I'm a huge critic of different aspects of the policy, but I do feel like there's a fair bit of monday morn monday morning quarterbacking Be linked to my book. I would also say that We don't know the effect of what the pandemic was and a place like tennessee or or florida a lot of places that kind of Eviscerated the data gathering gathering process But I would also say that the flip side of this school argument which again I'm admitting there was probably mistakes made but uh But we had a chance to like expand medicaid in non-expansion states for example when there was a pandemic and everybody needed health care And we politicized the pandemic from a conservative angle also in ways that I think are kind of falling out of this conversation about overkill Which certainly we did but like we had a moment in May june july to like give everybody health care in this entire country for example Which is something we should have done on the flip side like maybe the pandemic would have been a lot better if people didn't wait until they were Needing to be in the ICU before they went to the hospital and things like that So I just feel like there's a lot of blame in retrospect because we felt back we fell back on these political identities We politicized the pandemic we did so let's get off the pandemic And get on to gun policy, which is a major theme in the book I guess the question is you know first question is just make the case to Asceptic listening imagine there's someone i'm not really a big gun guy myself and i'm pro Common sense gun control measures. I think it should be much harder to get a legal gun than it is And it's insane that we have people mentally ill kids walking into a store Basically coming out with a gun and then killing people whether that is for mentally ill reasons or for hate crime reasons It should be harder to get a gun than to Get like a car right it takes a while to go wild for me to get my driver's license Right i had to go through all these hoops and the hoops create a higher barrier to entry for dangerous people for people who who want to do harm with that And you have insurance for your car and you have to reach a certain age when you get your car like all you know We know how to do it. Yeah, so anyway that that's my position on the issue But can you make make your case to a gun skeptic that or to a gun control skeptic that guns are a threat to the white population health or population health in general Well, I again I grew up in Missouri and I was born on an air force base Like it's not like I have not I've been around guns a lot my entire life It's not like i'm anti gun I know a lot of people who own guns who have guns for hunting or because they've been handed down in their families So I grew up in a place where a lot of people own guns. It's not like I thought every person Oh, you're right person with a gun you're some kind of problem But in the book I tell the before and after story of what happened to Missouri where i'm from Missouri had a permit process in place until about 2008 Which was a process where if you wanted to buy a gun just like you were just saying you had it was Less than a driver's permit, but it wasn't nothing right you had to do a questionnaire get a very cursory background check The question was basically are you going to kill somebody yes or no? It was you know, it took I interviewed people who were part of it. It was like swipe or no swiping You had to tell the truth right? Well, I mean it was it was a joke because I talked to people and they were like yeah It was largely proforma and we do proforma things I mean think about when you go to the airport and they used to ask you like is anyone unknown? Do you pack your bag like nobody who is gonna blow up the plane is gonna say oh yeah actually Osama bin Laden Thank you for asking but there was like a just a there was a level of oversight that was not just about an individual making up their own choice Which gave the state data it gave the state information There was also information on particular guns so that if a gun was involved in a crime They knew who's at least who owned the gun and so they could maybe track back and find the person who committed the crime And so there was this process which was far from perfect But it didn't really bother anybody I interviewed a lot of sheriffs and a lot of pawn shop owners Because they were selling a lot of guns in bersuri and they were like yeah This whole thing took about five minutes every time you'd make a gun sale It really wasn't that big of a deal when they had nothing to worry about if you weren't a criminal and where etc Yeah, exactly. And so but then there was this move to overturn Every gun law and and and it was driven not just by the politics of monsuri The supreme court was involved in in some cases where did that come from before? The late 1980s. I want to say we we have a second amendment, which is like a rorschach test Anybody who thinks they have a definitive interpretation is lying because it's it's very vague the second amendment But we interpreted this idea of of militias We interpreted it to say that was for militaries and then in about the in about the 1980s The NRA which was a sportsman's organization before started saying well We can get involved in the political arena by pushing this narrative that the second amendment actually is meant to call individual People militias that it's actually about the rights of citizens not about the rights of armies And so this was a push that they funded politicians. They funded they it was I was looking at it in the book they claimed to have uncovered new and never before seen evidence that the original framers of the constitution Intended for the second amendment to mean the individual right to carry arms They still have not released what that information is but people bought it and or in hatch led a committee on the senate Joe Biden was on that committee at the time And that was a push for when ronald reagan started to get involved in politics He became an nra funded politician And so there was a push starting in the 1980s that basically gun ownership was an individual right that was against the government Not to support not to support the government you're defending yourself against the tyranny of the government government Which people didn't think in 1970, but they did by the year 2000 One quibble though like the pre The 1970 take on the second amendment wouldn't that have been our state is potentially having a militia to defend ourselves against say the federal government or no I mean just with that art with that fly right now Well, it wouldn't flan now I'm just saying in your framework where it first was about a militia and then it became about personal individual gun ownership through this lobby Even when it was about a militia it could could have still had like an anti federal government There are two rationale. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously the word militia is because it was all all of this was was made One like a state militia would have been super important in 1770s Sarah 1780s But but also, you know people who studied the history of the second amendment There's the braid book I cite in the book about how really the aim of this militia argument was to empower people to Be able to track down escape slaves. So the militias were it was not fighting the british It was to punish escape slaves And so there's a whole history of kind of what that word militia means that is not neutral But but I would say that you know on the other hand, you know, I have to say I have a problem when people make these arguments from history, right? Because for example vievec Ramaswami, I think he was speaking at the NRA last week and he goes Well, actually gun control laws have a racist history because after the civil war as you know, the black codes were instituted To control whether black people could get guns, right? And and occupational licensing laws have a racist history for that reason Does that mean we should feel weird about those policies today? I would say absolutely not And again people on the left made the same argument. Well, did you know the police originated in slave patrols? It's like I don't care actually. I don't care that doesn't that shouldn't inform my perspective on these issues today Right, right. I mean the kluclex clan the night writers They were in part their aim was to take guns away from black people, right? So there's a whole history a racist history of taking guns away from black people when there's a racist history to like every policy The ones whoever you are the ones you like have a racist history Look up plan parenthood's co-founder You genesis or whatever the ones you don't like have a racist history. So let's all chill with this But I would say the the key point for me is before Before this started happening and really it kind of reached its pitch in 2008 when the supreme court passed Really a landmark Gun case that basically said the individual right people have a right to have a gun in their home Which was never kind of policy before and you can just look at Why people own guns like pew opinion polls for example if you look before all this happened Maybe 80 percent of gun owners said they owned guns for hunting and I think it was 16 or 17 Percent of people owned guns to protect themselves against other people and now self-defense is the main It's like eight to one and so interesting So the more there were guns the more people started to fear Oh, the other guy might have a gun also, which I think is kind of off for the races So I saw a guardian article and I don't know if folks trust the guardian necessarily But it said in 2001 there was a 58 increase in black gun ownership Which is staggering to me if true now i'm not saying one 2021 Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. That is true. That's amazing to me That's like that's I can't believe I hadn't heard that fact and something like 30 percent of no, maybe maybe I think it was 24 percent of black people say they own guns as opposed to 36 percent of white people according to pew and that that's uh I mean the article had various theories about why that is what what's causing this huge bike But basically it's like people are afraid they watch the news black people are afraid They're going to get killed by they see a mod of arbary get killed by a white guy in 2020 I believe it was and they think I need a gun White people they see crime on the news. They see people they see someone get shot by an illegal immigrant or something They think I need a gun um no matter how likely how rare this actually may be for their family and look I don't I actually I don't think it's necessarily the wrong decision to get a gun because I just you know I saw I saw the other day people in san francisco They're like their houses are getting robbed and the police don't even come because they have so neutered and Destroyed their their police force. It's like if you if you want to get a gun to protect yourself I get it on the other hand. There's this risk that you talk about in the book of um like accidental Gun deaths people not securing their guns properly and all the rest so well and let me be clear by far the biggest Cause of gun death in this country not even close his gun suicide And so and no I agree with you if I lived in a place where people were getting their homes broken into eight times and the cops weren't coming But I also think the very fact that we're at that stage shows the breakdown of the social infrastructure in other words I think social spaces should be safe the minute we're having individuals by guns to protect their property and the stuff you're talking about about black americans buying guns There in my new book i'll come out in six months and i've got a lot on this But there were very conscious marketing campaigns by the nra targeted at black americans Using george floyd imagery to basically say the cops aren't going to protect you and so you need a gun or something like that So there are a lot of factors as to why were they wrong? I'm not sure that was wrong Do you happen in minneapolis? You know like they destroyed the police force historic crime rates single the biggest One-year increase in the homicide rate according to pewin 2020 again, you know one can blame it on the targeted ads But it's like reflecting a truth. Yeah. Well, I would say the minute we're having Individuals are on themselves for issues that should be solved by social and and communal infrastructure We have a bigger problem and so I say it should be solved by the police I think it's be I think you're beating around the bush I think crime should be responded to by the police and there should be enough police in every city to respond quickly to a 911 call And the reason that's not the case is squarely on the defund the police and blm movement of the past three years I don't think it's that complicated. Yeah, but I would also say that you cannot separate that from You know, there's a lot of sociological research that basically says if you invest in neighborhoods high crime areas become less high crime the more you invest in roads and schools and Stores and things like that. So I think that it's not just about the police But anyway, the point the point I was making before we got here was that by far the most gun death is gun suicide It's not even close and so the what I start looking what I look at and that's overwhelmingly a white issue, right? White white male issue it was in my book. I mean, maybe that'll change now because My book that analysis ends in 2018 and I would just say that gun suicide People were being targeted with you know, the people are out to get you you need a gun people were over arming themselves There were guns everywhere and then when there was a moment of crisis they you know the average story a gun suicide the story isn't The story isn't I've been in therapy for 20 years and finally I did it. The story is I got really drunk I got fired from my job. I found out my wife was having an affair. There was a gun on the nightstand It's 59 minutes or less in a moment of overwhelming crisis And so the people who had that life event and there was a gun on the nightstand were the people who were committing suicide And so it'll be interesting to see with all these black gun owners now for example What happens to black gun suicide if my data is right black gun suicide will go up also because the the risk factor for For gun suicide is having a gun in a moment of crisis But I would say that when all the rhetoric about guns is a gang banger is gonna break in your home or you know carjak you You're you're not recognizing that the biggest at least from a health perspective the biggest risk of guns is actually turning the gun on yourself It's interesting. That's a very interesting prediction about black the black suicide rate And I'm curious of what when would you like check it check in on that to see if if you were right because that's a very interesting prediction I don't have 10 years from now 10 years from now with the black. Yeah. Well, yeah, so that's interesting because you do see Certain countries like south korea with very high suicide rates, but no gun ownership japan japan Yeah, okay, so japan is japan as well and so it's clearly possible But you're saying the way that most suicides are happening and they're so to speak crimes of passion And if there's nothing around to kill yourself with and it and the feeling passes And many many people wouldn't do it. We have the same rates of suicide attempt as other places But for example overdose is the most common suicide attempt method how fatal do you think it is? Overdose I well because I read your book. I kind of know the punch. Okay. It's like 4% Yeah hanging it's hard to do Um, I mean people will we have the same member of suicide attempts as other places, but gun suicide is 96% fatal like it's just it's very lethal means and so we're providing people with the lethal means with while we're Increasing their anxiety and their mistrust and decreasing public health infrastructure and mental health awareness and things like that and so it's just a toxic mix the numbers we're seeing now I I never thought in my career. I would see the level of gun deaths and level of gun suicides Like like what we have now. We're well above 5,000 a year the gun deaths the gun death rate is probably about 50,000 a year Which is much higher suicide success rate than it is in a place like japan or korea? Yeah, that's a great point. So just backing up suicide in general What is your theory of why white people are more likely to commit suicide? Full stop then black people in his banix. Well in my research So there were these famous papers from Journal of American Public Association and other places from the 1990s that said that a gun in the home is a risk factor for a successful Successfuls of where they use suicide completed suicide. So having a gun around increased your risk of dying from suicide It also increased the risk that there would be a fatal partner violence Shooting for example if there's a gun there was a higher chance that there would be a partner shooting Now it seems kind of obvious right because it's probably um hard to have a partner shooting if there's no gun But but I would say that this these two papers two or three papers really started the public health on one side and Nra on the other side the whole debate about why public health is anti gun started from these papers because they were saying You're pathologizing gun owners now the irony is what they said in those first papers in the 1990s Colormen other authors their kind of famous papers was 100% true Which is that having a gun in the home increases the risk of having a Completed suicide in the home and so I think the presence of a gun in a moment where there is an overwhelming Crisis an overwhelming sense of this. I don't think there's anything racially distinct about having a life crisis I do think having a gun in your nightstand was something more white americans in They had in the time of my research So they had means to a completed suicide in a way that other people didn't know black americans were much more supportive of gun control Because they had seen the effects of gun crime in their neighborhoods and they supported more policing for a long time And they felt like getting the guns out of their neighborhoods made their neighborhoods safer There was a lot of feeling for decades before 2020 um black americans were much more supportive of gun control because they had seen what having no police and and because there was far more gun homicides Yeah, yeah, exactly I mean so I think it strikes me that could be one cause of the higher white Suicide rate and probably is but I don't think that can explain all of it I think so for instance if that explained all of it you would expect there to be a higher rate of You know like white interspousal homicides then black interspousal homicides And I don't actually have the data on that I don't know But I know the overall black homicide rate is you know seven or eight times the white rate So I mean it seems to me if you equalized guns by race We might still see a higher white suicide rate that there might be some other component going on Do you think do you think that's right? I mean that would be interesting to see I think it's also more basically So the numbers I looked at said 36 percent of white americans have a gun and 24 percent of black americans have a gun 12 point percentage difference, but the suicide rate gap is like it's like a factor of two or something It's like it's larger than would be suggested if guns were the only cause So do you have theories about other potential additional causes of the black white suicide gap? Yeah, I mean again. I'm really curious about the next 10 years I would say that There are these books about the deaths of despair for example and racially disparate white deaths by particular kinds of overdose There are books about feeling like You're in a community that's been left behind by globalization or by all these other factors And so um, you know the disparate white death rate You know, there's a lot of economic literature out there right now that I think I think it'll be interesting to see I think it'll be interesting to see what happens. I mean if you're suggesting that that's not Separate from the anxiety and anger that like trump tapped into by people feeling like never they'd never been listening before and they were being totally Passed over. I don't know if that leads to suicide rates, but I certainly think I wasn't suggesting that I was just just a genuine question because I don't I don't have a strong theory Yeah, so although I the whole deaths of despair thesis seems like a lot of a lot of people find that true Yeah, I mean, I'm not from a very little personal firsthand experience with those communities Although, you know, I'll sound like a coastal elite which I am saying this but I've like driven through places where there used to be a factory Fly over I didn't fly over I drove through and they do seem They look like places that used to be thriving and are not and I could see how that could lead to deaths of despair. I mean so broadly, right your book is about the the policy threats to White population health it seems to me the biggest one over the past 10 years has been these deaths of despair the opioid crisis You saw life expectancy in the white population just going up and up and up and up pretty much for decades until a few years ago and my my I thought the consensus on this was that opioid opioids were the main cause So my my last question would be really like one. Do you agree with that overall picture as that being the biggest threat of the past 10 years or the biggest And if so, who is to blame for that? I think the deaths of despair work is super important And and it's not like I'm out there disputing it by saying no, it's kind of it's not a it's not a competition I I think what you're suggesting is true, which is guns and opiates are kind of part of the same coin in a certain kind of way I certainly think that deaths of despair are are a huge issue in other words like I I can't remember In my lifetime or really any lifetime the demographic majority group in an industrialized country having a four-year or greater life A drop in life expectancy. It's it's unimaginable. It's absolutely unimaginable. And so I do think that there's a sense of opiates Certainly being a massive issue that have been propagated from Pharmaceutical companies and some very well-known actors given what we what we know now and Physicians and everything else. I don't think it's just coming over the southern border I think it's many players were involved in creating that that problem And it let and it contributed to a kind of sense of hopelessness left behindness that is I think guns suicides are part of that same coin So it's not like I'm voting one or the other I do think that the numbers of guns suicides in Missouri when I was doing my research was was for me breathtaking honestly And it wasn't like oh, it's better or worse than then Addiction, but I would say it just it just felt like the middle of our country is falling apart And we can't let this happen right and so part of my argument. I'm not trying to play gotcha politics with white people I I am a white person. I am from the midwest What I'm saying is the minute we stopped investing in infrastructure people people feeling like they're part of some kind of Infrastructure that is going to thrive or has a possibility of a future This is the outcome of what we're seeing and so I'm not trying to avoid the question I mean I both of these things are problems and they're probably both a reflection of the same larger issue Okay, so before I let you go, what's your next book about and do you have a title for that or anything? What is that coming out? I'll have a title for you next week but I'm looking at A mass shooting that happened in Nashville the Nashville Waffle House mass shooting a naked white man went into a waffle house and shot he killed four young adults of color and The automatic narrative that everybody told was it was racism Which it was but I step back and I and I I look at how That story when you really look at the story of what happened in one mass shooting It's much more complicated than the binaries we put over it are about Common sense gun laws and NRA and stuff like that So it's in a way what i'm showing is when you really unpack a story It's far more complicated and actually this good guy bad guy narrative that we have on both sides Is not helping anybody because what I show is liberal gun policy Also totally missed the boat of trying to what would it take to not have this crime happen It wasn't just about background checks and red flag laws. It was actually about understanding community safety Well on that note, Jonathan Metzle, you're out of the hot seat. All right. Thanks. That was great. All right. Thanks. Thanks Thanks for listening to this episode of conversations with Coleman If you enjoyed it Be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content If you really want to support me consider becoming a member of Coleman unfiltered for exclusive access to Subscriber only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time ♪♪♪