Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Over 400 years ago, the tobacco industry helped fuel the trans-Atlantic slave trade, stealing Black families — men, women and children — from their homelands and trafficking them to the Americas to grow and harvest the highly profitable crop — without payment for building this nation’s wealth and worse, with no regard for their lives. Today, slavery is an evil relic of our past that haunts the present as Big Tobacco continues to abuse Black bodies and discard Black lives.
For more than six decades, Big Tobacco has appropriated our culture, spent millions of dollars to study the lived experiences of Black Americans and bombarded our communities with marketing for menthol cigarettes. Contrary to popular opinion, menthol cigarettes are not an inherently “Black thing.” While we have invented many products and technologies that have never been attributed to our people, menthol cigarettes are not one of them. Instead, through targeted advertising, sponsored events, free samples and retail promotions, the tobacco industry has dealt this poison with the explicit intent of maintaining a loyal consumer base and, just like any savvy drug dealer, hooking each generation.
The decades-long campaign has worked. Today, 85% of Black smokers use menthol cigarettes. In the 1950s, just 10% did. This marketing has been pervasive, yet it’s only one of the deceitful tactics in Big Tobacco’s playbook.
As a tobacco researcher and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, I know all too well how the tobacco industry works. Wielding its billions of dollars with no regard for the human cost, the industry has repeatedly infiltrated Black communities, providing much-needed financial support to Black civil rights…
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