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Reviewed by:
  • How Cancer Crossed the Color Line
  • Runyararo M. Majoni, BS (bio)
How Cancer Crossed the Color Line. Keith Wailoo. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. 251 pp.

In 2008, GLOBOCAN reported cancer as the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for an estimated 7.6 million deaths.1 Furthermore, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S.,2 where an estimated 560,000 people died of this disease in 2010.3 These alarming statistics motivated my quest to gain a deeper understanding about the origin of cancer. My background in public health and a recent class in health disparities spurred questions such as: Who is affected by cancer? Are there resources to prevent or mitigate the effects of cancer? Are cancer resources fairly distributed? These questions drew my attention to medical historian Keith Wailoo's book, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line.

This 251-page book discusses the impact of cancer on humanity throughout the ages, and it is a fine depiction of how cancer has changed from being a disease associated with industrial and post-industrial societies to a disease that does not discriminate against race, class, age, gender, or color. Wailoo addresses the issue of race and health disparities in relation to cancer, and in six chapters relates how and why cancer crosses color lines.

Chapter one introduces the reader to cancer and reviews how cancer was perceived in the 1920s, when it was strongly associated with industrial societies and more common among White people than others. Many believed and argued that White women were the prime targets of the disease, and that the White women most susceptible to cancer were those who swayed from their expected or traditional roles of being wives and mothers; cancer researchers worried about race suicide as the "carriers of the nation's future" (p. 25) were dying in great numbers. Additionally, shocking accounts of how cancer was treated aggressively with mastectomies, even without confirmed diagnoses, appear in this chapter. [End Page 1440]

The subsequent chapter talks about African Americans, whom many in the early 20th century regarded as primitive. Many believed African Americans to possess an inbuilt immunity against cancer, leaving African Americans primarily concerned about infectious diseases. Wailoo discusses how the migration of Blacks from the Southern states to Northern states, and the habits of civilization that they were adopting, appeared to change their susceptibility to cancer. Cancer scholars wondered whether the escalation in the number of cases of cancer in Black people was due to better reporting and increased life span and not merely migration.

Cancer awareness and self-examination is described in chapter three. Wailoo reports that cancer awareness was initially targeted towards White women, particularly as it concerned breast cancer. Self-surveillance became the message of education, as it was believed to be the best protection against cancer. The book highlights how Black people caught the message of self examination through a film on breast self-examination (BSE) initially targeted towards White women, and accounts are given of how they endorsed it—teaching Black women about it and stressing the fact that avoiding the disease was their "personal responsibility" (p. 86). Cancer became more politicized in the 1960s. Blacks took on more leading roles in the media to show that cancer affected Blacks and Whites equally. The author discusses the fact that the cause of the rapid rise of cancer in Black people through the course of the 20th century remains a matter for speculation and a topic of debate.

The remaining sections of the book relate how cancer was perceived as "an equal opportunity killer" (p. 92). During the 20th century, people came to realize that patterns in the occurrence of cancer were not so much an issue of biological differences as they were of social disparities. With the increase in the number of cases of cancer in different races, cancer researchers in the 1940s and 1950s turned their focus from race and placed it more on culture and the activities of daily living that could trigger the development of cancer.

Racial classifications and their complexities are also discussed in the book. Wailoo tells how researchers and other practitioners were...

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