Every few years I give in to the compulsion to check out what’s new in pinkwashing. Promoted by purveyors of breast cancer (awareness), Pinktober trends have included pink police cars, pink candy and popcorn (colored with potentially carcinogenic dyes), pink (forever chemical) plastic wreaths to mark the graves of women who died of breast cancer (see Buy Pink to Support Breast Cancer? Pinktober 2019 Round-up), pink handguns, pink stiletto heels, pink vaping supplies and t-shirts proclaiming that ‘my breasts tried to kill me’ (see Pinktober 2017), pink handcuffs, pink margaritas, and pink (definitely carcinogenic) nail polish and dry cleaning supplies (see Pinktober: A Consumer Dystopia.)
This year a new-ish theme seems to have joined the annual celebrations of pink carcinogenic cosmetics and carceral restraints. I’m seeing more and more images of pink-clad smiling black, brown and white women joining hands in what purports to be their common experiences of (enjoying?) breast cancer.
Why am I so disturbed by these ersatz performances of diversity?
These images proclaim that “we are all in it together” but the reality is that we are NOT all in it together. Black women diagnosed with breast cancer are significantly more likely than white women to die. According to researchers at the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, “Although they have a similar risk of developing breast cancer, Black women are 42% more likely than white women to die from the disease. Among women younger than 45, the mortality rate for Black women is more than double that of white women.”
These disparities are consequences of specific, identifiable social and economic policies (see Krieger, Jahn & Waterman, 2017). As Linda Villarosa details in Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, residential segregation is the norm in the United States, and black women are disproportionately constrained to neighborhoods polluted by carcinogenic chemicals in the air, earth and water. Health care in the United States is a commodity rather than a human right, and women of color are far less likely than their white counterparts to enjoy timely and appropriate access to high quality medical services that impact chances of survival. And the pain suffered by women of color continues to be dismissed, belittled, denied, commodfied, and — in our era of mass incarceration and the racialized ‘war on drug users’ – criminalized.
There is much more to say about the many ways in which we are not all in it together. But having spent the past few years obsessing about images of pink handcuffs and squad cars, I’ll end this post by citing a 2022 study of impacts of incarceration on cancer survival rates. “For breast cancer, the 5-year survival rate was lowest for incarcerated patients (60%), compared to those within 12-months after release (81.8%) and those never incarcerated (89.5%).”
Pinkwashing plus whitewashing: A truly lethal combination.