I'm Jonathan Cape Heart. Welcome to Cape Up. Jonathan Metzel is back sooner than I expected because of the coronavirus pandemic. In his book, Dying of Whiteness,

how the politics of racial resentment

is killing America's Heartland,

Metzel, the director of Vanderbilt University

Center for Medicine, Health, and Society put a human face on the opposition to many policies that would save lives and livelihoods.

It was kind of a warning of the lengths to which white working class voters could either have

underlying racism or be manipulated to vote in support of wealthy donors and corporations but against their own life spans and it's just been on steroids since this pandemic started.

Listen to Metzil explain why those anti- stay-at-home protests and state capitals egged on by the president

fit a historical pattern and why the politics of racial resentment is a deflection that works right now. Jonathan Metzel, thank you very much for coming back to the

podcast. It's great to be back. So you were just on the podcast a couple of months ago and I try not to go back to previous guests, you know, sooner than say six months but the situation that we're in right now with

the with COVID-19 sort of demanded that you come back we had on Reverend William Barber talking about the racial

disparities that we have now have been forced to reckon with with the

coronavirus.

And you sent me a message sort of reminding me

that everything that you wrote about in your fantastic book, Dying of Whiteness, is playing out in this coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Talk about that.

Well, the book I wrote, Dying of Whiteness, was really, I mean, who knew at the time?

But what I was talking about in that book was about the ways in which there were kind of undercurrents of white racial resentment that shaped

attitudes among politicians and certain white voters, particularly in middle America, that cause them to what you would think

vote against their own biological self-interest.

And so the story I told in that book was a story about how, for example, working class and lower income white voters rejected the Affordable Care Act, which would have helped them a lot, because they thought that immigrants and minorities were gaming the system.

I looked at the rise of guns as symbols of kind of white self-protection.

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