American Democracy is Dying of Whiteness
This week’s New York Times Opinion column by Dr. Christina Greer sums up the current state of things in our country. It is time to stop asking, “How can this be happening in America?” when the reality is that it is another step back in a country that has never embraced “liberty and justice for all.”
Jonathan Metzl shows the fatal statistics surrounding “White America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy” in his book Dying of Whiteness. A quick moment of fatal irony around this book is that it won an RFK Book Award in 2020 for its insights into human rights. Here we are in 2025 and RFK Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a white man who seems vastly underqualified to be in the position he is in. In this position, he is espousing theories that are contradictory to decades of research on vaccines for children that keep them safe from deadly diseases. Anyway, Metzl's book gives numerous examples of how white Americans will vote against mental healthcare, physical healthcare, infrastructure, gun safety measures, and other issues in their best interest to ensure that people who do not look like them cannot get ahead.
As Greer highlights, “Far too many well-meaning white Americans have been what I like to call ally ostriches, believing in progress while burying their heads in the sand when discussions around the past become uncomfortable.” We see headlines of this every day as books that dare to divert from a theme of white male exceptionalism are pulled from bookshelves in schools or government institutions. (Note: I did not think these things happened in an actual democracy).
Greer’s essay concludes with the following: “American democracy must be tended to with eyes open to the future and lessons learned from the past.”