Same Game Different Smokers Exhibition banner
Smoking is still creating a significant health problem for African Americans.
Lorraine Latham is the director of the Wisconsin African American Tobacco Prevention Network. Recently, she told me, “Thirteen percent of adults in Wisconsin are smokers. For African Americans, the rate is 24 percent. In Milwaukee’s inner city zip codes, that rate is still higher.”
The smoker rate of African Americans is twice that of whites, per capita. Tobacco companies tend to focus on local central city residents through higher incidents of advertising in the Black community than in the white suburbs. They are even targeting minors.
“If you are surrounded by the tobacco products,” said Latham, “you are more likely to say, ‘Let me try it.’”
To make the public aware of this troubling issue, the American Tobacco Prevention Network in Oakland, California has created the Same Game Different Smokers Exhibition, a traveling exhibit, which is currently housed at Milwaukee’s Washington Park Branch Library, 2121 N. Sherman Blvd., until June 29 and is free and open to the public.
I recently visited the central city library and viewed the exhibit, a series of connected walls featuring historic posters created by tobacco companies to sell cigarettes and tobacco products. The Same Game Different Smokers Exhibition covers all the way back 400 years ago to Black involvement with the tobacco industry. For subsequent centuries, African American slave captives worked the tobacco fields in the south.
One other fact caught my eye: tobacco is the leading cause of preventable deaths experienced by African Americans as related to chronic diseases.
Over the years, commercial tobacco has evolved from regular cigarettes to menthols, chew, flavored cigars, orbs, and e-cigs, among many other products. One thing that has not changed is the historic targeting and abuse of Black communities and others by the tobacco industry.
It’s the Same Game, just Different Smokers.
For more information, visit samegamewi.com.
