The medical journal, The Lancet, has become lefty political of late, not just with climate change, but with racial identity issues. For example, the latest controversy involves a review of Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, (Basic Books, New York, 2019), by Rhea Boyd: “Despair Doesn’t Kill, Defending Whiteness Does” (January 11, 2020). First, Metzl takes the predictable line that America’s refusal to ban guns lies with white supremacy, and defending the racial hierarchy. Gun control is s symbolic issue reflecting white privilege, even though most gun deaths are of Whites, who “die for a cause.” This is a crazy thesis that is refuted by the work on the gun issue by John Lott and many others, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, that has resources to debunk every assertion made by Metzl against private firearm ownership. He should consider debating them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott
http://jpfo.org/
However, the issue now is with Rhea Boyd, who said on Twitter that whiteness needs to be eliminated, but she deleted the tweet when the storm blew in:
I’m about to say something you might not be ready to hear.
But I'm going to say it anyways.
Despair isn't killing white Americans. The armed defense of structural whiteness is.
The solution?
Eliminate whiteness all together.
Thread.
— Rhea Boyd, MD (@RheaBoydMD) January 10, 2020
Yes, that is MD, a doctor.
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/01/12/lancet-only-way-stop-racism-eliminate-whiteness-all-together/
Then there is The Lancet review, which Breitbart has nicely summarised, with all the disgusting, inflammatory parts:
“In his book, Metzl argues that white mortality is up in the United States ever since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, since in order to “maintain an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy,” white Americans who harbor “racial resentment” support policies that seem to limit the freedoms or resources available to non-whites, even though such decisions threaten their own wellbeing as well. “From expansive gun legislation to broad divestment in government programmes, Metzl characterises white liberties that endanger white lives or imperil white futures as ‘dying of whiteness,’” Boyd observes. While in her review Boyd fundamentally agrees with Metzl’s contentions, she believes that he is too soft on whites by attributing whites’ self-destructive white political actions to “racial resentment,” which “erases white agency through emotional euphemism.” “At times, Metzl artfully articulates and historicises the racist origins of white interest in firearm fanaticism and ‘small government’ politics,” Boyd writes. “At others, he turns to ‘racial anxieties,’ racially charged ‘fears,’ or ‘racial resentment’ to describe white people’s political investment in white racial dominance.” Boyd decries the “common practice” of mis-attributing “white self-destruction and violence to psychological states” or obscuring “the impacts of defending whiteness through emotional euphemisms.” Drivers of white mortality such as suicide, chronic liver disease, and drug and alcohol poisoning have been described as “diseases of despair,” Boyd notes, while they should be classified as “diseases of disproportionate opportunity (to wield firearms) and access (to prescription opiates).” The real focus should not be on “mental illness,” “distress,” or “white fragility” underlying increasing white mortality, she contends, but rather on the fundamental “legacy of death in whiteness’s wake.” It is a mistake — she asserts — to “assert that resentment, despair, or any emotion that arises from being ‘left behind’ accounts for white Americans’ self-destructive actions, violent politics, or declining population health.” The real population that has been left behind are blacks, she argues, but the difference is that blacks have consistently supported policies that benefit everyone while whites only support policies that benefit themselves. And so, “despite suffering at every turn of every decade of every century in this nation, generations of Black Americans have sought political reforms that expand electoral participation, increase government protections, and extend public resources beyond their individual or group benefit,” she claims.”
Thus, even from white suffering, Black victimisation flows. But, wait, there is more:
“Therefore, “scholars, the media, and the public” have failed to understand “the evolving ways white Americans continue to mobilise to maintain or extend the exclusive advantages whiteness offers those who can become white, even as those advantages place them in increasing proximity to death.” The simple fact is that “despair isn’t killing white America, the armed defence of whiteness is,” she writes. Thus, death “is the inevitable consequence of the full realisation of structural racism and the exclusive rights and resources it offers those who can become white,” she continues. Boyd goes on to propose a theory would challenge even the most race-obsessed, in part because it lacks any kind of rational intelligibility. “For humans to use whiteness to manufacture access and privilege,” Boyd suggests, “they must engineer scarcity and loss. This entanglement between access and scarcity, privilege and loss, means white people’s unearned advantages have always been tethered to a legacy of untold deaths.” Despite his noble efforts to understand the evils of structural white racism, Boyd suggests, Metzl fails because he anchors it to an emotional foundation, which leads him to conclude that more healthy and self-reflective frameworks of structural whiteness are needed. In reality, Boyd concludes, the only real solution “is to eliminate whiteness all together.” The fact that some people think this way is frightening enough. That the Lancet, which once represented serious medical journalism, would decide to publish it points to a devastating deterioration of the institutional academy as reasoned discourse gives way to incoherent ranting.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33147-2/fulltext
There have already been systematic demolitions of Boyd, notably by Steve Sailer at Unz.com.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/lancet-despair-doesnt-kill-defending-whiteness-does/
And, of course, there is the rejoinder, that Black on White crime dwarfs, proportionate to the populations, White on Black crime, and that even the MSM sometimes say that the main killers of African Americans, are other African Americans:
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/22/the-need-to-discuss-black-on-black-crime/
https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
https://nypost.com/2017/09/26/all-that-kneeling-ignores-the-real-cause-of-soaring-black-homicides/
“The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 on Monday, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicides last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015. Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks.
The same is said in an article sitting behind a paywall, The Washington Post.com, October 24, 2017, “America’s Big Issue is ‘Black Africans’ Killing Each other.” No discussion of this from people like Boyd. But, what does eliminating whiteness mean? It cannot just be the elimination of white privilege, because no matter what Whites do, they have this like original sin. Thus, the thesis must be one of racial genocide, that eliminating whiteness is code word for eliminating Whites, for whiteness is just a property of white particulars. Maybe that is why American Whites want their guns. After all, just imagine talk about eliminating some other coloured people; that would be genocide. So, what is good for the goose, is good for the gander.
https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-12-13-truths-that-we-the-people-have-spontaneously-come-to-realize.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/10-self-evident-truths-we-people-have-spontaneously-come-realize