Commentary

Today marks the final edition of the Bowie Blade-News. I learned about the paper’s fate on June 24, just a few days before the third anniversary of the Capital Gazette shooting, and while the trial of the shooter was underway. The announcement was not unexpected, but I was profoundly saddened by the news and by the ongoing assault on community journalism. Some will say that the Blade won’t be missed or that it just hasn’t been the same paper that it was 10, 20, or 40 years ago. I know it has been a long time since we enjoyed the “On the Road” feature showed us how well-traveled Bowieites were or there were entertaining extended debates in the letters to the editor. It has not been a 3-section paper, completely devoted to the Bowie for a while, but I will be sorry to see it go.

The hint of an education on race and racism I received in medical school involved a historical overview of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and retired eugenics practices. As I rotated on the wards, race came up again as a vague tool to help narrow a diagnosis. New Black patient with severe headache, blurry vision? Think hypertensive crisis. I wasn’t taught why hypertension might be more prevalent in the Black American population. (Hint: Genetics is not the answer.) I was never taught that Black newborns delivered by a white doctor are more likely to die than those delivered by a Black doctor, either

We’ve come long way from the all-white, all-male judiciary that looms large in portraits on the walls of Baltimore County’s ceremonial courtroom, where the investiture ceremony was recently held for Susan Chambers Zellweger to the District Court for Baltimore County. A hundred lawyers and judges, a dozen family members or so, and a couple of politician types attended to watch Ms. Zellweger, a longtime public defender, be sworn in.

Some 50 current members of the Baltimore police force have applied to join a new Group Violence Reduction Unit, formed at Mayor Brandon Scott’s direction. Here’s what I take from that: A good number of sworn officers believe a new approach to law enforcement can reduce crime, change lives and build public confidence in their profession. That’s probably too precious an outlook for people who think police are thoroughly awful. They will interpret the interest in the still-developing GVRU as cops looking for an opportunity to crack heads.