DIS-EASE
Jonathan Metzl’s work is phenomenal; sobering and clarifying at once. As a psychiatrist trained in the social sciences, he interviewed White men in the American South and Midwest for his book Dying of Whiteness. These were poor White people whose health was seriously declining, but who were nevertheless insisting that Obamacare be retracted, even though they would personally suffer, if not die, by such a retraction. Metzl was struck by this apparent contradiction: why would you support a policy that will literally, and quickly, kill you. He concluded that Whiteness works by looking not after any singular White person but about Whiteness itself. Here is Whiteness not as a property of White persons but as an ethic, as a principle, as an organizing framework. So much so that individual White people are will-
ing to give up their own lives to sustain it. It’s a bit like the “selfish gene” argument, the gene that will work to perpetuate itself even if the organism in which it is hosted dies. I think that that’s a very useful way to think about Whiteness because of it points to the link of Whiteness with an indifference to human life. It is this indifference that I couldn’t get over in watching the video of George Floyd’s murder. We know that George Floyd had suffered from COVID. But COVID is not what killed him. Floyd survived the virus, a virus that may well have been facilitated, if not produced, by neoliberal practices like climate change, globalization, and American governmental policies that are very much predicated on White supremacy. So here you have this virus and
Valerie Connor, Belfast, Howth Head, Ireland 36
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SUMMER 2020
this Black man, already belonging to a social category that we know is especially vulnerable to illness and to death. Still, he does not die from the virus per se, he dies under the knee of a White man who chillingly and indifferently keeps his hands in his pocket as he’s killing him. This nonchalance, the gratuitous, non-contingent violence is a particular kind of violence; not just killing, but also a display of sovereign power. Derek Chauvin is White, but the two of the three other officers at the scene of Floyd’s death, who have all been charged with aiding and abetting second degree murder are in fact people of color. That this is so dramatically underscores that what is at issue is not the racism of individual White men (though there is surely a lot of that going around) but a systemic racism that can be activated by people who are not themselves White. z
