"In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy."--Page 4 of cover

"The war is still raging. And [Gene Nichol]'s still fighting." --John Grisham North Carolina has, since 2013, undergone a greater political sea change than any other state. For the first time, seven years ago, state government became completely captured by a radicalized and aggressive Republican leadership determined to produce the most ultra-conservative political regime in the nation. In a remarkably brief time span, Republican lawmakers have moved successfully toward that goal. TheNew York Times refers to the project as "North Carolina's pioneering work in bigotry." Other states have begun to follow what they expressly deemed the "North Carolina playbook." Indecent Assembly lays out in detail, and with no small dose of passion, the agenda, purposes, impacts, and transgressions of the Republican North Carolina General Assembly since it came to dominate life in the Tar Heel State. Nichol outlines, without holding punches, the stoutest war waged against people of color and low-income citizens seen in America for a half-century. All-white Republican caucuses, dominating both houses of the General Assembly, have behaved essentially like a White People's Party, without the nomenclature. Bold steps have also been taken to diminish the equal dignity of women and an internationally famed crusade against LGBTQ+ Tar Heels has capped off what has become a state-based battle against the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Republican General Assembly has not stopped with substantive legal changes. It has attacked the fundaments of American constitutional government. In 2019, the state of North Carolina, in short, is involved in a brutal battle for its own decency. Ifthe contest is lost here, other states will likely abandon defining cornerstones of American liberty and equality as well. North Carolina today is not presented with the mere give and take of normal politics. It struggles over its meaning as a commonwealth and its future as a democracy.