We spend a lot of time talking about the effects of whiteness on people of color but it's important to talk about the impact whiteness has on white people. As a construct, whiteness can only benefit some white people. And even the people who benefit materially are harmed in terms of connection, sympathy, and the demand that you reject your own culture for the monoculture of whiteness. 

Dr. Jonathan Metzl lays out the material ways white people are harmed by their commitment to an ideology that shortens their lives and shrinks their wallets. An association that doesn't serve them yet is somehow worth dying for.

This book gets into data and psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioral neuroscience and trying to figure out precisely what it is that drives people toward a construct that ends in harm. 

Buy Dying of Whiteness