RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We are not as divided as we seem, President Barack Obama told a Dallas memorial for five police officers killed by a black sniper enraged at the alleged mistreatment of African-Americans by white police.

But a different Barack Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at a White House barbecue last July 4. Details of Lamar’s performance are not available, but it is unlikely that he repeated this line (from a recent Saturday Night Live appearance): “I put a bullet in the back of the back of the head of the police….It’s a war outside, bomb in the street, gun in the hood, mob of police,” Lamar’s rap continued.

Of course, the president does not endorse the killing of policemen. But a White House invitation to a rapper who brags about such things is a macabre gauge of America’s national mood. Another frequent White House guest is rapper Jay-Z, a former drug dealer who, like Kendrick Lamar, chants about street violence. Homicidal impulses are so common prevalent among black Americans that they have been naturalized into mainstream culture.

There is endless hand-wringing about the source of the fragility of African-American life in America, but one of the causes surely is the notion that homicidal rage is an acceptable response to social problems. A generation ago, it was still possible for a leading black clergyman, Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, to denounce rappers from the pulpit and dump a truckload of rap CD’s in front of the offices of the Sony Corp. in Manhattan. Rev. Butts has been ridiculed in the interim by the likes of Jay-Z and would not attempt this again.

Many African-Americans believe that they are at war and fighting for their lives. Broadly speaking, they are correct. Something is killing off Black America. It isn’t the police, however. Between 2009 and 2012, though, forty black men were killed by other black men for every black man killed by police, according to Prof. Robert Johnson of the University of Toledo. Policemen killed 491 people in 2015, of whom 132 were black. But American police are more likely to shoot white suspects than black suspects, according to a just-released study conducted by an African-American economist at Harvard University.

There are any number of racist policemen, and there are rare instances of police shootings which amount to deliberate murder, but their impact is small compared to the scale of the problem.

The problem, as Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute reported, is that “blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest US counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.”

This is an autogenocide, or genosuicide, in slow motion. Increasing numbers of black Americans are drawn into patterns of life that lead to more failure and more rage. And it will get worse until African-American leaders tell their constituents to stop blaming white policemen and take responsibility for their own lives.

Only 32% of black adults are married, compared to 51% of adults of all other races. Part of the reason is a shortage of appropriate spouses: only 49% of college-educated black females marry a man of comparable education, compared to 84% of college-educated white women, according to a Brookings study. That, in turn, is the sad result of low college graduation rates among black men: the most recent data show that only 34% of black male college students at public universities and 39% at private universities complete a four-year degree program after six years of trying, compared to 60% for white male students, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

The confluence of developments in medical knowledge and military technology enabled doctors to learn a great deal about surgery during the American Civil War. Since, at the war’s outset, very few physicians had any experience treating gunshot wounds, P.J. Horwitz—a Jew from Baltimore and the Union navy’s surgeon general—authored a brief manual on the subject.

At the Start of the Civil War, Few Union Army Surgeons Had Ever Treated a Gunshot Wound By Rebecca Onion

In this three-page, handwritten document, Baltimorean P.J. Horwitz, who served as surgeon general of the Navy for the Union during the Civil War, tries to get his fellow medical officers up to speed on the presentation and treatment of gunshot wounds.

The document is included in an online exhibition,”Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” put together by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. In introducing Horwitz’s treatise, the anonymous curator notes: “At the outset of the war, the Union medical corps consisted of 83 surgeons and assistant surgeons, few if any of whom had ever treated a gunshot wound.”

The basic information in Horwitz’s treatise, written in January 1862, reflects physicians’ need for rudimentary advice, at this early stage of the war. “One of the first things to be done is to stop the hemorrhage, if there be any, and then carefully examine the wound to see that no foreign body is lodged there in, and then after bathing the flesh in cold water, apply to the wound a piece of lint on which may be spread a little cerate [an ointment],” Horwitz writes.

While the medical corps may have started the war laughably unready for the types and volume of wounds it would see, it would make many improvements in the next four years. “Each side was woefully unprepared, in all aspects, for the extent of the war,” argues Robert F. Reilly, M.D., in an assessment of the performance of physicians and surgeons during the conflict. “Despite this, many medical advances and discoveries occurred as a result of the work of dedicated physicians on both sides”—advances including the safer use of anesthetics, the organization of large hospitals, and the performance of rudimentary neurosurgery.

A transcript follows the document images.

Whoopi Goldberg said on the view that black women wearing blond hair weaves amounts to “cultural appropriation.”

“I think there’s a lot of appropriation going back and forth, the weave . . . the weave doesn’t look like this,” Goldberg said, grabbing her own hair, and then adding “the weave kind of looks like this,” while pointing to the hair of her blonde co host.

“If you are going to talk about appropriating and what’s cool and what’s not, then we are all in deep doo-doo because we are doing it to each other constantly. Everybody is appropriating. Japanese are appropriating. Black folks are appropriating. Spanish people appropriate. We are appropriating each other. It’s not just a black thing.”

In an article for Jet Magazine, Zainib Karim stated that although “to the naked eye, Goldberg’s words might hold some truth,” “what she is speaking of is not cultural appropriation; it’s assimilation.”

“Assimilation is the sister-wife that sprung from white supremacist standards of beauty, living, and social practices,” he writes.

Appropriation is, as another View co host, Sunny Hostin, put it: When “a dominant group in society exploits the culture of a less privileged group without understanding that group’s experience.”

Basically, Goldberg didn’t understand that just because someone uses something from another culture, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is engaging in “cultural appropriation.”

But is this misunderstanding really that surprising?

After all, it does seem that, particularly in social justice circles and on college campuses, any use of something from another culture – regardless of the circumstances or intent — is fair game for being called out as “cultural appropriation.” Everything from yoga to toe rings to sumo-wrestling fat suits have earned this label, and perhaps it’s time that more people take a look at actual impacts and definitions before knee-jerk shaming others.

In Dallas, Obama mentioned the name of dead sex offender Alton Sterling more times than those of the murdered police officers whom he was pretending to memorialize. After quickly dispensing with the formalities of eulogizing the slain officers, Obama demanded that “even those who dislike the phrase ‘black lives matter’” should “be able to hear the pain of Alton Sterling’s family”.

Alton Sterling was a convicted sex offender, burglar and violent criminal who was shot while reaching for a gun. His family may mourn him, just as every criminal’s family mourns their own, but it was obscene to class him together with five police officers who were murdered by a violent racist while doing their duty.

It is even more obscene when Obama’s favorite sex offender displaces the murdered police officers.

And yet that was Obama’s theme in Dallas. Murdered police officers were contrasted with dead criminals. The proper thing for Americans to do, as Obama told us, was to mourn both officers and criminals, to respect the sacrifices of the police and the anti-police accusations of #BlackLivesMatter.

Obama did not come to Dallas to mourn the murdered police officers, but to defend the ideology that took their lives. And this is what he has done from the very beginning.

Before the shootings, Obama expressed his “condolences for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile” and insisted that the criminal justice system was racist. His statements and speeches after the shootings echoed the same talking points and spin complete with the claims that accusing the police of racism is “not to be against law enforcement”.

“When people say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter”, he famously said.

That’s true. Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean that blue lives don’t matter. It means that blue lives are evil. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author on Obama’s reading list, wrote of the dead police officers who gave their lives on September 11, “They were not human to me.” That’s the kindest thing that the black nationalists whose cause Obama has championed have said of the police.