Suicide is steadily rising. Many blamed worsening economic conditions for this trend. Sociological theory established clear pathways between joblessness and suicide focused on status threat, shame, and consequent disruption of social relationships. However, recent empirical research provides little support for a link between unemployment and suicide. I attempt to reconcile this contradiction by focusing on white suicide and white employment-to-population ratio. Whiteness is not just a default category but a pervasive ideology that amplifies the effects of status loss. The white employment-to-population ratio represents a form of racialized economic threat and accounts for discouraged workers who have exited the labor force. I use longitudinal hybrid models with U.S. state-level data, 2000 to 2016, and find that decreasing employment is associated with increasing suicide among the white population and white men. I discuss this study’s contributions to the literature on suicide and joblessness and the emerging scholarship on whiteness and health.

自杀率稳步上升。许多人将这一趋势归咎于经济状况恶化。社会学理论在失业和自杀之间建立了明确的途径，重点关注地位威胁、羞耻以及随之而来的社会关系破坏。然而，最近的实证研究几乎没有支持失业与自杀之间的联系。我试图通过关注白人自杀和白人就业人口比率来调和这一矛盾。白人不仅是一种默认类别，而且是一种普遍的意识形态，它放大了地位丧失的影响。白人就业与人口的比例代表了一种种族化的经济威胁，并解释了退出劳动力市场的灰心工人。我使用纵向混合模型和美国州级数据，2000 年到 2016 年，并发现就业减少与白人和白人男性的自杀率增加有关。我讨论了这项研究对自杀和失业的文献以及关于白人和健康的新兴学术的贡献。