The once prestigious Lancet medical journal has published a bizarre book review asserting that “white Americans continue to mobilise to maintain or extend the exclusive advantages whiteness offers those who can become white.” The Lancet selected Rhea W. Boyd, a Minority Health Policy Fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, to review a 2019 book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl, whose thesis is that “right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences — even for the white voters they promise to help.” In his book, Metzl argues that white mortality is up in the United States ever since the 2016...