Abstract
Public Enemy #1: How many more? explores historical and contemporary manifestations of the tobacco industry on public health, and specifically Black lives, in the United States. This is reinforced with bold text that serves as a mini poem within the poem, emphasizing tobacco’s impact on mortality. By juxtaposing messaging from the industry with Black American music (e.g., Hip Hop, R&B lyrics), TV culture references, and movements for racial justice, the poem provides an opportunity for critical analysis of the intersections between commercial tobacco, systemic racism, and capitalism. It counters narratives focused on personal responsibility and instead offers a complex, nuanced understanding of how systems of power intersect to harm communities. The title, a hip-hop reference to the group Public Enemy, whose songs include political messages to raise cultural consciousness, is a call to reflect on who is really the most dangerous threat in our society. I intentionally use italics for emphasis and references from Black culture to elevate our lives, voices, contributions, and legacies, which are in no way expendable. Any loss is a societal loss. Birthed from the pains of my own series of tobacco-related familial losses, this poem is a testament that the fight is one of reclamation that must be ongoing and provides an opportunity for reckoning and truth-telling. Like the Public Enemy song it references, Public Enemy #1: How many more? is a battle cry to take system-level action on these intricately woven epidemics to rectify, rather than perpetuate injustice, and advance racial and health equity. To view the original version of this poem, see the supplemental material section of this article online.
200,000 300,000 4. . . How many more before we’re willing to. . .address the density of tobacco retail stores, . . .take advertising off windows and doors, and . . .make it so menthol ain't a flavor no more? How many more ‘disparities’ do we need to identify? How many more ‘priority populations’ need be stigmatized until action is directed at THE SYSTEM allowing Big Tobacco (BT) to thrive? How much longer will folk sit back, complicit, and watch it steal Black and brown lives?
We’ve got to fight the powers that be
1
Silence is violence.
May I have your attention, please?
Will anyone who's lost someone to this Shady system please stand up?
2
Big Tobacco wields its political and economic power, embodying it to produce hierarchies of difference in ours, unnaturally determining which groups of bodies become diseased or die every hour. From literal Black markets to fields, Big Tobacco yields more than leaves to burn. It burns families, communities, and futures too. To BT, young, Black and brown bodies are merely replacements,
3
Widgets in THE SYSTEM it created, De-identifiable faces. Just (no) bodies
Segregated by zoning policies into Black and brown places, Made easy to target in redlined neighborhoods, census blocks, and community spaces. “Blacks are geographically concentrated, which makes them reachable.”
4
People say remembering your roots is a source of power. But it's hard to remember when For BT, remembering its root would mean acknowledging cowards who traded stolen futures, extracting life and liberty, to fuel THE SYSTEM of white supremacy. To make Black and brown people racialized commodities. Tobacco was AND is a labor-intensive crop, with roots of structural violence, the original wage theft, brutal and degrading land toil, child labor so leaves in them Newports don’t spoil.
. . .Dollar dollar bill[s], y’all
5
1619
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The royal crop reigned. Black and Indigenous lives bore the cost. But Kool and Pleasure are all BT wants people to remember. After segregation and denial of access to socio-political and economic systems, Big Tobacco became. . . The Great White Hope, White Saviors, feeling justified because it took advantage of THE (racist) SYSTEM it created and gave some Black people jobs when others would not or paid poorer wages. Morally bankrupt and masterfully corrupt, it funneled money into politicians’ pockets so they'd be pawns,
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robbing ‘we the people’ of votes, of power. Knowing that real power is found in the strength of community, BT forged ties with the National Urban League and NAACP. And funded Black educational institutions and orgs as if they were ‘too thirsty’ to understand what was going on.
8
But Massa’s tools cannot dismantle what he built,
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so donating funds to organizations and the families of those killed cannot assuage guilt. No longer able to peddle poison into communities with van advertising,
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now Big Tobacco and its complicit government lackeys just deny the whole thing– stating there's no racist intent. That the thousands of Black and Indigenous lives stolen each year at the hands of their profits are not at all what they meant. That it’s not by design that their advertising tactics have morphed over time. Check their historical documents, and you'll see how they feel. Keep searching, like Mary J, because their love isn't real.
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Sure, they moved folk on up, like George,
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from labor source in the field to just exploitation through ads and, I suppose, in comparison some believe being the butt of racist tropes and targeted [e]bony advertising isn't as bad. Victory lap –That's a win, right? NO! – The Marathon Continues.
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Industry’s racist, colonial practices are not relegated to history. Ain't no half-steppin,
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they're all in with side-stepping corporate accountability and, victim blaming through trumpeting personal responsibility: Suggesting because some folks are Black or poor, they don't care about their health anymore.
3
“We don't smoke that shxt, we just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the Black, and the stupid.”
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Centuries later, Big Tobacco professed but continues to rob these same lives, literally, of breath just for power. Sitting back still profiting off the leading cause of our death.
First, you get the money.
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$5 million to fight racial inequality
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but menthol doubled in market share between 1963 and 2020.
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The industry puts on a mask claiming oppressors and colonizers just aren't who they are anymore but pre-emption, neighborhoods, and lungs tell a different tale. And, complicit, our inequitable tobacco policies, regulations, and stalled menthol ban show exactly whose lives we believe are still for sale. Our tobacco policies are white-normed. If they’re young and white, Hurry, take up the fight. If they’re Black or brown It’s ok, um, menthol, yeah. . .We’ve got time. While equitable regulatory policies are stuck in paralysis, Big Tobacco is implementing findings from “The Black Opportunity Analysis.”
5
How about. . . Instead of calling the police to chokehold folks selling loosies outdoors,
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you call for policy change.
I can’t breathe.
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Work to tighten the loose rei(g)n of Big Tobacco and bridle the global lies they sell, along with the 2-for-1 deals on the shelves of corner stores, in neighborhoods (and countries) that are predominantly Black, young, or poor. Do more to get the advertising that sullies doors moved from Black and brown neighborhoods back home to Big Tobacco HQ. Limit tobacco retailer density through licensing and zoning policies. Increase the federal tax per pack rather than perpetuate the Black Tax. Target systemic racism as the root cause of tobacco-related health inequities,
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and Hold Big Tobacco accountable for its history of racially profiling minoritized communities.
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Reparations, maybe???
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It's time to find Pleasure in no longer being a generation interested in living in the colony called Tobacco Nation. But it's safe to say that some of our best would rather switch than [stay on a policy] fight
1
so, you turn a blind eye, Say ‘that’s not my silo’ or ‘my hands are tied’ and just sit back and watch half a million people die each year, because of commercial tobacco.
but it looks like somewhere in your inaction those solidarity statements got lost. 100,000 200,000 300,000 4. How many more?
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-hpp-10.1177_15248399241291864 – Supplemental material for Public Enemy #1: How Many More?
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-hpp-10.1177_15248399241291864 for Public Enemy #1: How Many More? by Carrie Rosario in Health Promotion Practice
Footnotes
1.
From Public Enemy’s 1990 track, “Fight the Power”
2.
Adapted from Eminem’s 2000 track, “The Real Slim Shady” which was influenced by K-Solo’s 1990 track, “Real Solo Please Stand Up.”
3.
In reference to the racketeering suit and terminology used by industry to refer to young adults and FUYBAS (first usual brand young adult smokers):
4.
5.
From Wu-Tang Clan 2000 track, “C.R.E.A.M” (Cash rules everything around me)
6.
See: LaVeist TA, Fullilove M, Fullilove R. 400 Years of Inequality Since Jamestown of 1619. Am J Public Health. 2019 Jan;109(1):83-84. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304824.
9.
See: Lorde, A. (2003). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader, 25, 27.
11.
Adapted from Mary J Blige 1992 track, “Real Love”
12.
Adapted from The Jeffersons tv show theme song, written by Ja’Net Dubois and Jeff Barry
13.
From Nipsey Hussle’s 2011 Album, “TMC” (The Marathon Continues)
14.
From Big Daddy Kane 1988 track, “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’”
16.
From Young Thug’s 2015 track, “Power”
20.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
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