Hi John, My name is Tiyanna Stewart, and I'm a Youth Advocacy Program Associate at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. As you may know, we recently launched Campaign for the Culture, an initiative focused on empowering people of color to fight tobacco use. As part of this initiative, I've started a new interview series called The Take Down: Unfiltered Conversations About Tobacco. For the first installment, I sat down with my own parents for a discussion about the long history of tobacco use in our family. |
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Growing up, most trips to the grocery store ended with my mom asking the cashier for Marlboro Menthol 100s. When I went searching for a pencil in the kitchen drawer, the green and white package of cigarettes was just another item to move out of the way. |
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I knew the health impacts of tobacco, but it was not until joining the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids that I understood the tobacco industry’s predatory targeting of Black communities and the disproportionate health burden we bear. The charts about health disparities were no longer just numbers – they were personal. My mother has smoked cigarettes for over four decades, and I lost both of my grandfathers, who were heavy tobacco users, to lung cancer. I had a lot of questions. In planning the upcoming virtual conversation about intergenerational tobacco use in Black communities (RSVP here, by the way!), this curiosity unfolded into an hour-long conversation with my parents about our relationships with tobacco. Read the whole thing and follow The Take Down on our website >> Sincerely, |
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