He Wrote About Racial Resentment in the White Working Class. Then White Nationalists Proved His Point.
Authors:
Mangan, Katherine (AUTHOR)
Source:
Chronicle of Higher Education. 5/10/2019, Vol. 65 Issue 32, pN.PAG-N.PAG. 1p.
Document Type:
Article
Subject Terms:
*RESENTMENT
*ATTITUDES of ethnic groups
*RACE discrimination
*WHITE nationalism
Company/Entity:
VANDERBILT University
Abstract:
A professor says the protesters who commandeered his book talk demonstrated the corrosive power of racial resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Full Text Word Count:
1338
ISSN:
0009-5982
Accession Number:
136864668
He Wrote About Racial Resentment in the White Working Class. Then White Nationalists Proved His Point
A professor says the protesters who commandeered his book talk demonstrated the corrosive power of racial resentment.
Jonathan M. Metzl couldn't have asked for a larger megaphone to call attention to his new book on the toxic effects of racial politics.
Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, was speaking at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., over the weekend when a group of self-described "American nationalists" interrupted the event.
Marching in with a megaphone and a videographer, the group of about 10 lined up in front of Metzl chanting "this land is our land!" and reciting white-nationalist propaganda. About five minutes later, they marched out chanting "AIM, AIM, AIM" amid loud boos from the audience.
So this bullshit just went down today at Politics & Prose. White nationalists disrupting @JonathanMetzl talk on his book Dying of Whiteness. Point made. @PM_Learn pic.twitter.com/nucKlrJ8X2
— Catherine Wigginton (@cewigginton) April 27, 2019
"AIM" was a reference to the American Identity Movement, which took credit for the protest on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the group as a rebranded version of Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been targeting college campuses for years. (AIM leaders have denied that they're essentially the same group but say they have welcomed many of Identity Evropa's former members into their ranks.)
Metzl, who directs Vanderbilt's Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, was at the popular independent bookstore promoting his recently released Dying of Whiteness:How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland (Basic Books). Writing as a physician and social scientist, Metzl describes how, in his view, policies pitched to lower- and middle-class white people as ways to make their lives "great again" end up cutting their lives short. Resistance to health-care reform, cuts in school budgets and social services, and laxer gun laws are among the policies of the Trump era that put Americans at greater risk of sickness and death, he writes.
Metzl spoke on Monday with The Chronicle about the unexpected protest, how it plays into the themes of his book, and what it means for campuses facing an emboldened white-nationalist movement.
How did your talk at Politics and Prose take such a disturbing detour?
It was ironic that, at the moment in the talk before the disruption happened, there was an 80-something-year-old man in the audience who had been one of the people who helped bring my dad to the United States after he and his parents escaped Nazi Austria. He was a member of a host family who had basically put his life on the line for someone he didn't know. I was talking about how there were moments of remarkable bravery, even among people in this room, and how America is always at its best when it's at its most bold and confident and open-armed.
While I'm acknowledging this man, all of a sudden there's a commotion in the back of the room and in walk these — I'm pretty sure there were nine men and one woman — with a guy in front with a bullhorn. And they just march in a single-file line and commandeer the front of the room. After this moment of talking about safety and generosity, two seconds later, white nationalists are standing in the front of the room. They had a speech they'd prepared, a little song-and-dance performance. At first, nobody knew what was going on. They were wondering if it was part of the presentation, and some worried these guys might be armed. When the audience figured out what was happening, they started booing.
How did you regain control of the discussion and tie it in with the themes of your book?
After they left, I said, "Let's process what just happened," and we had a community conversation about what it meant. One of the main points of my book is the toxic effects of racial politics. They certainly proved that point.
Ironically, my book agrees with one of the main points they make. The entire book is a catalog of how the lives of working-class white Americans are being made considerably worse. People are dying or living lives of despair and suffering from economic disparities. It's not because of immigrants streaming across the border. It's largely because of the policies put in place by the GOP and the Trump administration, including rejecting health-care reform without offering viable alternatives. People are coming into emergency rooms in much worse shape.
The general argument of the book is that the politics that claim to make white America great again end up, for working-class white people, making their lives harder, sicker, and shorter. If they had hung around, maybe we could have had a conversation about that.
Do you see any connections with the demonstrations that white-supremacist groups have been staging on college campuses?
Bookstores and college campuses are places where people feel safe enough to exchange ideas that might be challenging or hard or uncomfortable. But it was very clear that this wasn't about exchange or openness — it was about intimidation.
I don't have any desire to have any dialogue with them, but I do think there are larger conversations about race and whiteness in America that we need to be having much more publicly. If whiteness is what's at stake here, we should be talking about it because it's obviously a trigger point for many issues now.
Anyone who spends time on a college campus knows that it's a complete mischaracterization to say that challenging ideas are silenced. They are in fact encouraged. This is a time for college campuses to double down on supporting free speech and freedom of expression.
In the past, groups like this have often spread their messages through leaflets dropped in the middle of the night. What does this kind of public confrontation say to you?
I think the problem is that they probably feel emboldened. They might not feel the need to hide behind masks in the middle of the night right now. There's always been this kind of hatred in our country, but it hasn't been as out in the open.
What impact do you think this confrontation, which blew up on social media, might have on the sale of your book? You joked, after they left, that you should take protesters like these around to all your book talks just to illustrate your point.
I heard Politics and Prose sold out of the book. I'm very encouraged by the response I've gotten. I have friends across the political spectrum, and I have conservative friends — we don't see eye to eye on a lot of issues — who reached out to me on social media and said things like "We may not agree politically, but this isn't the America we want." They were making sure I was OK, and I was encouraged by that.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter@KatherineMangan,or email her atkatherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
PHOTO (COLOR): Jonathan Metzl of Vanderbilt U. Jonathan M. Metzl
Footnotes
1 Social media 1: " The general argument of the book is that the politics that claim to make white America great again end up, for working-class white people, making their lives harder, sicker, and shorter." Social media 2: "One of the main points of my book is the toxic effects of racial politics. They certainly proved that point." Social media 3: A Vanderbilt professor says the white nationalists who commandeered his book talk might have found common ground with some of his points if they'd stuck around to listen. One more: 'The politics that claim to make white America great again end up, for working-class white people, making their lives harder, sicker, and shorter. If they had hung around, maybe we could have had a conversation about that.'
~~~~~~~~
By Katherine Mangan
Reported by Author
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