The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Imari DuSauzay,
New York City, NY.
Brooklyn
My friend is full of ideas and fighting with cancer…We hold hands to share love.
I am experiencing too many friends facing cancer, it makes no difference what your color is..
Cancer does not discriminate.
Claire Baiz,
Great Falls, MT.
I was ten years old. On the playground at Emerson School in Great Falls, Montana when a classmate said this to me. During recess.. It was a tough time. My father was at home dying of kidney cancer and I asked my mom if it was true…
Debbie Taylor,
Ann Arbor, MI.
My mother passed away on December 14, 2012 of liver cancer at the age of 80 and she spent her last afternoon and night in Ann Arbor Hospice.
The staff was loving, kind and professional. One nurse in particular examined my mother with such tenderness and care that I was moved beyond measure.
It was such a contrast to the experience she’d had at the hands of another medical professional as a middle school child. While playing with her brothers in a small town near Columbus, Ohio, she fell on a piece of glass and was carried by my uncles to a white doctor’s house. He stitched up her wound WITHOUT any anesthesia, leaving a scar to carry the rest of her life. She never shared that information herself — my uncle was the first to relate the story. Progress in some areas of health disparities has surely been made, but I am concerned about others who have no access to the kind ministrations of a St. Joseph’s Hospital or a fine hospice.
Sharing the words came easily and quickly because my mother raised us to have respect for EVERYONE, including ourselves. All of her children and grandchildren were taught that race was a strange, artificial construct and that “people are people.” So my six words were not the result of a personal revelation, but rather a sigh—one that I wished to share with others. I appreciated the opportunity to do so.
Thank you for your interest.
Debbie Taylor
Jill
Orange County, CA
Assuming “equal-opportunity” and “ass-kicker” are each one word.
Listen, we can all cry victim for one reason or another. If you want to be happy, you have to take ownership of your experience. If you need some perspective, go to a children’s cancer ward or go to a repressed and/or poverty-stricken 3rd-world country and try to find some. There’s only one race. It’s called human.
Jessica Ruth Robkin
Port St. Lucie, FL
I have faced discrimination my entire life, though the moment that brought about the above sentence occurred outside of my mother’s hospital room, while she lay dying from pancreatic cancer at the age of 57. My father and I happened to meet someone who had known my mother when she was just a teenager growing up in the panhandle of Florida – basically the deep south. The woman was unfamiliar with our last name, it being so different from a traditional Anglo-Saxon name. When we told her the origin and what it meant (“rabbi”), she paused as she was moving forward to shake our hand. It took her a few moments and I will never be sure if it was her southern manners that forced her to continue the handshake or if she was able to overcome her aversion. I hope it was the latter. I will never know, but I can always hope that it was. I can only hope that race (even in the highly charged debate over Judaism being a race or a religion) will some day be obsolete. My mother, the reason we were all brought together that night, never saw anything but the person in front of her. She never cared if they were a different race or religion (she was a southern baptist woman married to a Jewish man), she never judged people. I hope that a small part of her incredible ability to look past the surface may have transferred to that woman in the hospital hallway. It is my ardent desire that one day, there will never be hesitation in a handshake because of an uncontrollable factor, that we as a species will learn that there is nothing that separates us from each other but our preconceived ideas.
Kalea Deutsch,
Los Angeles, CA.
That’s how I see it. I am a product of a black father and a white mother. Being black has brought me zero benefit. It is instead a negative label I am burdened with. It is the realization that I, as a partially black woman, am labeled as largely undesirable by society and the opposite sex, no matter how well-educated I am (let alone if I were full black) or how many chemicals I throw in my hair to straighten it, or how many hours I spent masking the cancerous DNA that runs through my blood—I will never be able to escape it. It is the realization that all of my accomplishments will be seen through the lens of my race. I can honestly say that being black is the worst thing to ever happen to me. And I find it to be ugly, damaging, hindering, and cancerous.
Charles D. Scott
IL
Racism is the cancer of our society.
We have been lied to about who we really are. We have been lied to about how the “so-called” Races have come about. Are whites better because they lack the capacity to naturally protect themselves from the sun? Are blacks of a lesser degree because they can produce melanin? It is all utter nonsense and propaganda that divides a nation of one people.
Marie Sutton
Birmingham,AL
The effects of racism are deep — reaching down into the marrow and the soul of this country. We have yet to find a way to effectively treat it. In the meantime, the cancer grows and spreads and reveals itself in many ways like flawed immigration reform, the shooting of Trayvon Martin, etc.
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