Hi, I'm Jonathan Kapart, and welcome to Cape Up.

Health care in Tennessee, guns in Missouri, tax cuts in Kansas.

Professor Jonathan Metzel at Vanderbilt University focuses on those three areas in his book,

Dying of Whiteness, how the politics of racial resentment is killing America's heartland.

Using compelling data and focus groups, Metzal shows how white people are willing to die

rather than be connected to or finance policies they believe are giving resources to people they view as undeserving.

Find out more about this important book right now.

Jonathan Metzel, thank you very much for being now.

Jonathan Metzel, thank you very much for being on the podcast.

It's great to be here.

Okay, I've been raving about your book for months now,

and it is really an important book. The name of the book is

dying of whiteness how the politics of racial resentment is killing America's

heartland and you start off the book by telling the story of Trevor. Talk about Trevor.

Sure. Well, basically the impetus for the book came from a series of focus groups that some colleagues of mine and I were doing in

kind of rural Tennessee where we were talking to medically ill poor white and

black Americans about the Affordable Care Act and we just found you know some very

dramatic stories which I recount in the book but I think probably one of the most powerful stories

was one of a man named Trevor who I called Trevor in the book who was suffering from liver

failure and a bunch of other chronic conditions and he really would have benefited from this was

in the year 2011 at the time what the Affordable Care Act potentially was offering,

which was increased access to physicians, financial help because he was facing medical bankruptcy.

...