At the end of today’s class, the question of race being a
factor of how things are perceived in the book. I believe that the view of how
race is a factor depends on the context that you are using. For most of the
time when reading the book, I did not consciously remember Skloot was white
even when Skloot talked about the interactions between her and her family. Race
is an important part when talking about the Lacks family. I believe that it is
important to include the race when describing the Lacks family in the sense of
ethics and how much those ethics have or haven’t changed. When the family
interacts with the medical researchers trying to get more information, Skloot
describes the family as being unknowledgeable towards the topic of Henrietta’s
cells and taken advantage of. When talking about races of writers in
literature, I feel that authors have to express more of their race if they want
to try and prove a point. For example, if I was writing about if I lived in a
dominant African American residence, I would include apparent differences
between me and my neighbors. Skloot does not do that and in my opinion does not
have a large effect on the reader’s opinion of race. Do you agree or disagree?
Darren Pope
To me, when it comes to reading materials about race and how it will be the main message for any book I feel that talking about race is an entire topic of itself. How it applied to Henrietta's story is that she happened to be black and the medical system was not kind to black society. But the book was not about that all together, the main message was the book was about Henrietta the women not the one of several black victims of the medical profession. The book was about her and her cells. It was not all about ethnicity because then you would need to pay proper attention to the other suffering black people of that time like our book by Harriet Washington for our class. So no to your question, I don't believe race was the biggest problem in this issue of our discussion, Henrietta's humanity was the problem in her book not the color of her skin.
ReplyDeleteA interesting point I would like to make is that perhaps Skloot wanted to talk about the issue of race in her book but was afraid to. Perhaps she felt she had no right to bring it up since she is white and has no intrinsic right or authority to discuss and come to conclusions about thorny race issues. She may have felt this would undermined the book's bigger story about Henrietta as human being and ultimately hurt the book's success. So maybe she did want to talk about but simply refrained from doing so.
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