Racial Resentment and Public Health

A storm cloud over canola fields.

Jonathan Metzl, professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and director of its Center for Medicine, Health, and Society and the author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland (Basic Books, 2019), argues that right-wing policies are adversely affecting the health of their supporters. "Many of the problems I encountered were caused by Democratic administrations, ...but these policies of rejecting health care reform, allowing free flow of guns, ... and inflaming the racial issue are the problem."