The White Man’s Root Canal

Chapter 1 — Is There a Chad in the House? The tooth announces itself at 2:37 a.m. Not with a sharp stab, but with a slow, pulsing conviction, like a tiny animal that has decided to chew its way out of bone. It is the upper molar under the crown — the expensive one, the one that has been “fine” for five years, the one my dentist once tapped with a mirror and declared “rock solid” in the bright, indifferent tone of American competence. Now it is broadcasting a different opinion. I am on my back in the dark in downtown Austin, phone screen hovering above my face like a secular crucifix, scrolling through dental providers while the little animal in my jaw gnaws in time with my pulse. I open my insurer’s app. BlueCross BlueShield of Texas. BlueCare Dental. The interface is cheerful, blue, and clinically unconcerned. I type in “endodontist,” “emergency,” “near me.” The screen fills with names. Nguyen. Patel. Haddad. Tran. Kim. El-something. Women with soft smiles and precise eyebrows. Men whose photos radiate a careful, immigrant professionalism: no nonsense, no tattoos, no podcast. I scroll faster. Where is he. You know exactly who I mean. The handsome white male dentist. The Chad. The Ryan. The Dr. Blake Henderson, DDS, with the square jaw and the Patagonia vest in his headshot, the guy who played college baseball, married his college girlfriend, and now owns a practice in a converted house with a shiplap accent wall and a Keurig in the lobby. The man who knows how to fix a tooth and also how to talk about fantasy football. The one time in my life I actively want a Chad in authority, he is nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s all the people I’m supposed to write essays about: the immigrant strivers, the women in STEM, the daughters of nurses and engineers who did everything right. They’re the ones who will be inside my mouth with a drill while the descendants of the empire that built the insurance company are angrily posting about drag queens. The tooth throbs again. I close the BlueCross tab and open ChatGPT. Me: Why are there no handsome white male dentists in Austin who can see me tomorrow for a root canal? There is a small pause, the kind that suggests the model is doing something impressive and expensive in a server farm while I lie in bed trying not to scream. ChatGPT: It’s unlikely that there are literally no white male dentists in Austin, but what you’re noticing in your provider list is real: dentistry is a pipeline profession, and— I throw the phone down on the pillow. “Of course,” I say out loud, to no one. “It’s a pipeline problem.” The tooth pulses agreeably, as if to say: yes, yes, tell me more about structural decline while I set your trigeminal nerve on fire. I pick the phone up again. Me: No, I mean like: I’m in pain, I want a white guy with a strong jawline to fix it. Where is Dr. Chad? ChatGPT: You’re describing an archetype more than a demographic. That specific “handsome white male dentist who can see you same-day” is rare now because the kind of white men who used to dominate those roles have, over the last few decades, drifted away from long, boring credential pipelines. Meanwhile, immigrants and women— Me: I’m literally dying. ChatGPT: You’re not dying. You almost certainly have irreversible pulpitis. Me: That sounds worse. ChatGPT: It’s just an inflamed pulp in a closed space. It hurts like hell, but it’s medically routine and extremely fixable. The model then proceeds to explain, with alarming enthusiasm, the pathophysiology of my pain: the pulp is a living tissue trapped inside dentin; it has nowhere to swell; inflammation raises pressure; lying down increases blood flow; the nerve screams. I am sweating, clenching my jaw, and for some reason noticing that every time I hit “show more providers” on the BlueCross page, another row of non-white, non-Chad faces appears. My jawbone is a small, racist focus group. Me: So you’re saying my tooth pain is globalization. ChatGPT: I’m saying your tooth pain is a local mechanical failure. But the absence of “handsome white male dentists” in your search results is a byproduct of broader shifts in who actually stayed in the long training pipelines—dentistry, medicine, pharmacy—while certain cohorts of white men drifted into other kinds of work or out of work entirely. Me: I just wanted a root canal, not a Brookings report. ChatGPT: You opened with “handsome white male dentist.” That’s not a clinical category; that’s cultural archetype. The tooth throbs again. I scroll the list, half looking for an appointment and half performing a kind of dissociative ethnography. Halo Endodontics. Austin Microendodontics. Smiles of Austin. Everyone offers “same-day emergency care” and “gentle root canal therapy,” but the smiling faces look nothing like the imaginary Dr. Chad. Instead there is Dr. Patel with a microscope, Dr. Tran with loupes, Dr. Haddad with perfect composite veneers. The people who, if we were still honest about class and race, would be called the new professional ruling class: the ones who accepted boredom as a sacrament. My tooth is a tiny, fascist monarchist. It wants to be rescued by an Anglo-Saxon with a golf handicap. Me: Okay. Let me ask a different way. Where did all the white guys go? Not globally. I mean into my exact dental provider directory. ChatGPT: They didn’t “go” anywhere in a conspiracy sense. Over the last 30–40 years, a lot of white men in the U.S. simply stopped choosing long, delayed-gratification professional paths unless they were elite—medicine if your dad was already a doctor, law if you went to Yale, that kind of thing. For everyone else, they drifted into: – mid-skill jobs that didn’t require graduate school– gig work– trades without upskilling– or just… drift Meanwhile, immigrant families and women aggressively targeted those same pipelines. So when you open a dental directory in 2026 in Austin, you’re going to see the outcome of that. Me: So the reason I can’t find Dr. Chad, DDS, is that his mom didn’t yell at him enough to study organic chemistry? ChatGPT: Roughly. Yes. A message notification slides down over the chat: Halo Endodontics: Please click the link to complete your registration forms before your appointment. Apparently, in my half-lucid panic earlier I had managed to book something. The text is brisk: We need to review your medical history in advance to ensure safe and effective care. Check-in is required 20 minutes early. Payment is due before services are provided… My BlueCross card lies on the nightstand, innocently blue. They told me my share will be about $1,300: root canal plus filling through the crown. The tooth throbs in time with the number. I tap the chat box again. Me: So I’m going to pay $1,300 to an immigrant endodontist because a bunch of white guys decided discipline was boring. ChatGPT: You’re going to pay $1,300 to end a very specific, fixable form of pain. The demographic details of the clinician are structurally interesting but clinically irrelevant. Me: You’re no fun. ChatGPT: Your crown is very unlikely to fall off, if that helps. Me: Thank you, Dr. Robot. I switch back to the provider’s link. The intake form wants everything: meds, history, allergies, the usual little perjury about alcohol and drugs. There is no checkbox for “ex-addict”; please avoid vasoconstrictors if possible. I imagine Dr. Patel or Dr. Tran reading it in the morning, shaking their head slightly, then numbing me like any other patient. They’ve seen worse. The pulp does not care about my moral narrative. It cares about blood flow and pressure. My mind, however, insists on moral narrative. It keeps circling back to Max. Max is the closest thing my current life has to a Chad. He works in finance. He is handsome in that American spreadsheet way: good hair, crisp shirts, a body that plays pickup sports and wears company swag at offsites. He is straight, married, kind to me in the office. He likes me. We have lunch. He laughs. I “go crazy for him,” which is a polite way of saying that some exiled part of me is conv… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com