Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

Metzl describes Kansas as “a state awash in nostalgia” (193), perhaps because of the “Oz effect,” or narratives describing a new appreciation for home once the resident leaves. Even Metzl, who grew up in Kansas City, is consumed by the “Kansas nostalgia.” At a certain point in Metzl’s childhood, he and his family moved to the Missouri side of Kansas City. They lived just two blocks from the road that divided Kansas from Missouri, yet he describes a marked difference between the two states. The Missouri side of the road was “unkempt,” while the Kansas side was “cleaner” and better maintained.

As a child, Metzl describes watching friends move to the Kansas side of the city to attend the state’s schools, which were known for “excellent teachers, small class sizes, advanced curricula, and strong track records placing students into colleges” (194). The Missouri side of Kansas City, meanwhile, had a larger African American population and continually struggled “to rectify deep racial inequalities” (195). The flight of white and middle-class Black families left many districts underfunded. Families that could afford it, like Metzl’s, sent their children to private schools. Many of the white families that abandoned Missouri settled in Kansas, where they viewed the higher tax rates as “an investment in their children” (194).

Metzl notes that nostalgia usually “arises from false memory” (195), representing a desire to return to an “idealized” yet non-existent past. However, when Metzl returned to Kansas as an adult in 2017, things felt “tangibly different.” Gone were the well-maintained roads and the state’s “can-do attitude.” Instead, Metzl was met with “resentment” as he talked with residents across the state about the massive tax cuts enacted by the state’s conservative GOP government. Many of the Kansans Metzl spoke with continued to support the tax cuts, but unlike Missouri and Tennessee, Metzl also “found deep layers of buyer’s remorse” (196), especially regarding the decline of the state’s schools.

In 2011, Kansas inaugurated Sam Brownback as governor, beginning an era of “tax cutting, pro-corporate, austerity economics” (199). As a conservative senator, Brownback had a reputation for working on bipartisan legislation; however, running for governor, he tapped into the “resentment of government overreach” that had been growing in Kansas since Barack Obama’s election in 2008 (200).

Once in office, Brownback’s agenda centered on the philosophy that tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations “[boosted] economic growth for everyone” (200). In what came to be known as “austerity fever,” Brownback spent his first year in office repealing regulations on corporations, slashing spending on social programs, eliminating state jobs, and vetoing the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. He sent back grants from the federal government, loosened gun restrictions, and began “an epic defunding of state government” (201).

In 2012, Brownback signed into law one of the largest income tax cuts in history, which primarily focused on reducing tax rates for the wealthiest Kansans. He argued this tax “relief” would stimulate the state’s economy and create new jobs. Then, Brownback signed a “controversial school finance bill” (201) that further defunded public schools. It quickly became apparent that much of the state’s “wasteful” tax spending had gone to maintaining infrastructure like roads and bridges, and by 2013, the effects of the cuts were already being felt by Kansans driving on the state’s increasingly potholed roads and “structurally deficient” bridges.

As the cuts took effect, Kansas’s economy “imploded.” Kansans were motivated to “[place] individual wealth management ahead of communal good” (203), leading more people to “game the system.” Accordingly, the state experienced extremely high revenue loss and an ever-worsening budget deficit. In place of the promised job growth, Kansas lost jobs, and Brownback’s approval ratings began to fall, making him the most unpopular governor in the country by 2016. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign “touted the ‘Kansas model’ […] as a preview of Trump’s economic plans for the nation” (204).

Brownback’s cuts had direct effects on Kansas’s public schools. The first round of cuts removed around $200 million from education spending, and the state continued to make national headlines over the next few years as the austerity measures led schools to eliminate special programs, cut lunch options, fire teachers, and shorten school years. By 2015, the state faced stalling graduation rates and a drop in reading and math scores for 4th- and 8th-graders. Then, Metzl writes, “things got really bad” (206).

Chapter 22 is an interview with a public high school finance officer from Topeka in August 2017. The officer claims that the poorest 40% of Kansans actually saw their taxes go up between 2015 and 2017, in large part due to elevated sales tax meant to patch holes in the state budget. The wealthiest Kansans enjoyed their tax cuts “up until the point where their schools started sucking” (207). Suddenly, issues like rising class sizes and tuition costs began alarming wealthy Kansans. This, coupled with the palpable effects of defunded infrastructure, led many to demand that the state put them “back on the payroll” (208). The interviewee suggests that Kansas “needs an educated workforce” and worries that the state is facing a “downward cycle” that will make life hard in the state if it isn’t reversed (208).

Metzl tracks the phenomenon of enacting economic austerity measures, usually reserved for times of crisis, in otherwise thriving economies. When Brownback was elected in 2011, the country was recovering from the 2008 recession; however, the policies he enacted mirrored the kind of resource limiting more common in wartime or during “structural budget” crises. Lacking economic reasoning, Metzl suggests that a key tension driving austerity politics in the United States is “its connections to, and implications for, race and racism” (210).

In the United States, white men generally benefit disproportionately from tax cuts, while women and minorities suffer when these cuts lead to reduced public services. Lower-income white populations also tend to be negatively affected by tax cuts, which has “long vexed” liberal politicians because they continue supporting GOP tax cuts. These white voters are usually motivated by a combination of anger that the government is supporting individuals who don’t “deserve it” and “guilt that they themselves need help” (211). These dynamics played out in Kansas as tax cuts exacerbated economic disparity between racial groups.

This trend was most apparent in the public school system. Before Brownback’s election, the Kansas public schools were funded based on the number of students, plus extra funds based on factors like the number of “immigrant, poor, and at-risk students” (213). However, Brownback replaced this system with block grants, dropping funding by more than $600 per student across the state. Schools in poorer districts suffered more, and by 2017 the disparities were so extreme that the Kansas Supreme Court ordered the state to reverse budget cuts that “disproportionately harmed minority, low-income, and immigrant children” (214).

The racial undertones of Brownback’s school funding were made more explicit by various racist remarks made by the Kansas GOP and Brownback’s signing of various anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bills. Brownback also paved the way for the rise of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who came to power on “a wave of white resentment against the state’s changing demographics” (216).

Metzl argues that Brownback’s agenda wasn’t driven by overt racism, but the tax cuts allowed Brownback “to enact an agenda with significant racial implications without expressly needing to talk about race” (216). Although most Kansans seemed to genuinely believe their lives would be better with less government intervention, the outcome of their vote was a series of policies that “limited social mobility” for many demographics. Metzl argues that “austerity codified hierarchy” by concentrating wealth at the top and eliminating paths of upward mobility for those nearer the bottom of the social pyramid.

Schools, which “represented the promise of future betterment and upward mobility for minority and low-income Kansans” (217), were hardest hit by Brownback’s austerity. Kansas was the home of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that reversed segregation in public schools, suggesting that education “carried profound unspoken resonance” (218) and hinting at why white Kansans might have been eager to support Brownback’s proposals. However, the system eventually “boomeranged” as “communal resources,” like education, began to decline (218).

Chapter 24 includes excerpts from an interview with a parent in Olathe, Kansas, in August 2017. The interviewee shares their view on the benefits of “small government,” arguing that it gets “a bad rap” from “fake news and liberal media” (219). The parent explains that they “absolutely want to make sure that [their] kids get the best education” (220) but voices suspicion that many of the government’s funds go to school administrators and custodians.

When Metzl asks how “minority populations” might have been impacted by budget cuts, the parent recognizes the disparities between school districts. They mention wealthy districts in oil-rich western Kansas compared with poorer districts that were probably “hurt” more by tax cuts. The speaker argues that “the voices of the immigrants are super important, [and] the voices of the people in western Kansas are super important” (221). They claim the “equity problem” between school districts needs to be addressed.

During the early 20th century, Kansas was known for its innovative public schools that championed “educational advancement for minority populations” (223). In the 1950s, Kansas received national attention when Oliver L. Brown and a dozen other African American parents filed a class action suit arguing that their children should be able to attend the all-white public school near their homes instead of taking a bus to the all-Black school a mile away. The lawsuit, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, arrived at the US Supreme Court, which ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional.

While many Kansans believe that “school segregation was a Southern practice” (224), the state continued to struggle with issues of equitable education. Conservative legislators repeatedly introduced “race-neutral policies with racially discriminatory effects” (224), like shifting funding away from urban school districts. When Brownback came along, he “cut deeply into these historic fault lines” (224), undoing funding structures that were meant to ensure equity between poorer inner-city districts and wealthier suburban ones.

Metzl describes how Kansas’s public schools were successful largely due to the state’s history of “powerful Republican traditions” that “mixed religion, pragmatism, and social action to bolster relationships” in the community (225). Public education was a “community resource,” and schools were viewed as “symbols of communal investment and civic pride” (225). Therefore, once Brownback’s cuts began to affect Kansas’s public schools, his support began to diminish. The decline of public schools made the effects of Brownback’s tax cuts palpable and consequential. Test scores of Kansas students began to fall, reaching the bottom 10 among US states for a number of key metrics.

Across the state, Kansans began to doubt “the Kansas experiment.” Many GOP centrists voiced “disbelief” that the state had devastated its public schools. They began to worry “about the long-term health effects of tax and budget cuts” (228), suggesting that decreased access to quality education would affect Kansans for years to come. By 2017, frustration among Brownback’s base was peaking, and “a coup was brewing in the state legislature” (231). The GOP-dominated state legislature repealed many of Brownback’s tax cuts, raising the top income tax rate to repair the state’s budget. For some, this reversal represented the triumph of “common sense and neighborliness” (231), but hyper-conservatism in Kansas was not yet dead.

The problem created by starving Kansas’s public schools would not be fixed with a simple relocation of funds. The period of defunding had “narrowed people’s expectations” for education and “of what it cost to get there” (232). Since parents rarely know what a school is like until their child is enrolled, “a decline in a state’s national education rankings is often invisible to people on the ground” (233). Furthermore, it is difficult to factor in the “long-term effects” of budget cuts on students’ educational outcomes.

In summary, Metzl suggests that “backlash governance was wearing out its welcome” in Kansas (235) as middle-class white Americans began to directly experience the negative effects of austerity. Not all Kansans experienced a change of heart, but many began to reflect on “what kind of communities and polities they wanted to live in” (235). However, Metzl notes that this reflection was only spurred by the “deep awareness” of how the policies affected white voters personally. By then, much “damage was already done” (235).

Chapter 26 recounts an interview with an African American school administrator in Wyandotte, Kansas.

Responding to a question about the role of race in the Kansas tax cuts, the administrator tells Metzl that the school-age population is more diverse than the general population of Kansas, and that few of the individuals who make up education committees actually have children in the public school system. Therefore, there is sometimes “a lack of understanding or empathy” for the children who depend on public education (237).

The administrator expresses his hesitance to “[pull] out the race card” but claims it’s not “a coincidence” that Kansas’s educational policies disproportionately disadvantage “blacker and browner” students (238). He references the conservative argument that schools must be “held accountable,” but points out that this invokes white, middle-class ideas of stability in school-age populations. In reality, many less-resourced communities might have school-aged populations that move frequently, making “accountability” difficult to pin down. He argues that policy often “ignores a lot of the reality that kids face” (238), leading to programs like school choice that draw more resources away from struggling districts.

In this chapter, Metzl calculates the “value of an education” and the subsequent cost of losing that education. People of different races, political ideologies, and socio-economic backgrounds are united by the understanding that education is a way to better future generations. Studies have also shown that education can be a key predictor of health outcomes later in life. Metzl cites a study led by epidemiologist Emily Zimmerman that found several correlations between health outcomes and levels of education. For example, Zimmerman found adults in the United States without a high school diploma died on average nine years sooner than those with a college degree.

These kinds of studies inspired Metzl’s team to examine the “silent long-term consequences” of Brownback’s tax cuts in Kansas. Much of this research was “speculative,” as it is difficult to pinpoint specific educational indicators, and their link to poor health might take years to materialize. Furthermore, educational statistics sometimes become difficult to track because educational data often “reflects ideological battles about power, wealth and influence” (243), and metrics are shifted or interpreted to suit the political party in power. Therefore, Metzl's team focused on findings that “suggest general associations between education and health rather than hard-and-fast causes and effects” (244).

The first trend they uncovered was that Kansas students continued performing “relatively well” despite the crushing effects of tax cuts. However, Kansas struggled to keep up with other states, which began “leapfrogging“ Kansas’s students in national rankings. These states that ranked higher than Kansas had higher per-student spending and increased total revenue by several percentage points more than Kansas between 2008 and 2015. In just a few years, Kansas went from ranking sixth in the national ranking to somewhere in the mid-20s.

The next number that Metzl and his team analyzed was 4th- and 8th-grade math proficiency scores. These scores had been improving in Kansas; however, starting in 2011, the lines flattened out and began to “decline considerably.” The decline was especially apparent in minority students, with up to 43% of African American 4th-graders scoring below “basic.” The scores of Kansas students on national college prep exams fell, and the percentage of students with high school diplomas, some college education, or Bachelor’s degrees steadily declined. The state went from near the top of the nation to the bottom in the rankings of many indicators of an educated workforce.

Metzl and his team next calculated high school graduation and dropout rates and correlated this with Zimmerman’s data suggesting US adults without a high school diploma can expect to die nine years sooner than those who graduate college. They plotted their data to illustrate the actual rates of Kansas’s public schools, as well as a projection of what graduation rates would have looked like following trends set before Brownback’s tax cuts. African-American and Hispanic/Latino groups were most adversely affected, but Metzl notes that these policies “had tremendously negative effects for white populations as well” (254): An estimated 688.39 extra white students failed to graduate high school after the tax cuts were enacted.

After calculating the total of additional students who failed to graduate high school between 2011 and 2015, Metzl’s team calculated the approximate years of life lost based on the correlation of Zimmerman’s education and life expectancy analysis. After just four years of budget cuts, Metzl estimated that 18,550 years of life had been lost due to rising high school dropout rates, and “systemic changes across public education [had] reverse[d] progress on multiple levels” (258).

Metzl argues that lower taxes came “at the expense of underfunding key elements of the state’s infrastructure—and at the expense of long-term well-being” (259). Even though austerity in Kansas “proved a poison pill for everyone” (261), “the Kansas experiment” soon played out nationally as conservatives across the country argued that “education itself was not worth the investment” (259). By 2017, surveys showed declining support for higher education across the country as conservative media complained about “liberal bias“ in educational institutions. Metzl’s research “highlighted problems with the GOP turn against public education” (260). He points out that the media and many politicians try to blame schools for the failure rather than the policies that made “public education less efficient and often more expensive” (260).

The long-term effects of the budget cuts began to show sooner than anticipated when Kansas and Missouri pitched a joint proposal to become the home of Amazon's second headquarters. However, Amazon declined, citing worries “about the area’s relative lack of highly-skilled, highly-trained employees” (262). In general, however, the effects of Kansas’s dwindling education system are “difficult to discern from the outside” (262). Metzl compares the defunding of public schools to global warming, suggesting that “the threats of educational disaster seemed, at the individual level, almost impossible to discern” (262). However, the numbers warned “of ever-more students falling through the cracks” (262).

Metzl interviews a Kansas City parent in September 2017.

Metzl asks the parent about Governor Brownback’s new assignment as “an ambassador for religious freedom” in Washington, DC (263). The parent says that Brownback was “an absolute disaster” for Kansas and expresses relief to have him out of the state. She complains that Brownback “destroyed” Kansas’s formerly “great” public schools and hopes that “Trump will straighten him out” in Washington (263).

When she expresses her support for Trump, Metzl notes that it is “interesting” that so many Kansans support Trump when many of his policies mirror “the very policies that got Brownback into trouble” (264). The interviewee tells Metzl that he’s “probably” right, but that the men in her family will “support Trump no matter what” because “as white men in America […] Trump gave them their voice back” (264).

Kansas illustrates “the extent to which American polarization thrives by resisting compromise or closure” (265). Issues that relate to the “common good” become mired in politics that “vacillate endlessly, exhaustingly, between ever-shifting poles” (265).

As Metzl finished writing about his experiences in Kansas, the state’s ultra-conservative secretary of state, Kris Kobach, was running for governor on a platform that included defunding public schools even past the level of Brownback’s tax cuts. He engaged in “white backlash” and “white ethnonationalism” rhetoric and employed members of a white nationalist group on his campaign. Metzl contacted several Kansans he had previously interviewed to learn their opinions on Kobach. Those who supported him spoke of “individual protection and gain” (266), suggesting, for example, that “illegal immigrants” were costing Kansans “millions of millions of millions of dollars” (266).

On the other hand, those who opposed Kobach were in “disbelief” that Kansas public education was facing more threats after they had just begun to recover from Brownback’s damage. The election represents clear divisions between Kansans that will continue to fester if the “deeper biases and ideologies” are not addressed (267). Without contemplating the core of their differences, “American whiteness itself and its ever-perilous, doubly unconscious hold on power remained the condition that always, always needed to be defended” (267).