Black & Mild: A Tutorial, After the CDC.

Abstract

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that smoking causes ~480,000 U.S. deaths annually. Many of these deaths are ultimately coded within "heart disease" and "cancer" deaths-the United States' top two causes of death. These deaths represent aggregations of dozens of distinct International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision (ICD-10) codes. COVID-19 has also killed ~480,000 Americans annually. Yet its codes are much more limited/specific-such that COVID-19 might well be the singular leading cause of death in the United States. And yet here we are: 2+ years of pandemic and the CDC not only acting like it can't do math, but actively clearing paths for continued disease/death. This poem, crafted as counternarrative to the superficially apolitical (re/in)actions of the CDC, enacts the public health critical race praxis principle of "disciplinary self-critique" to suggest that the CDC has indeed aligned itself with neoliberal racial capitalism in an unapologetic endorsement/enactment of necropolitics. It draws from a rich archive of Black music that thematically engages smoking as ritual, resistance, and practice of community, as well as metaphor for/of transcendence and self-love in the face of structural violence and thinly-veiled necropolitical sacrifice at the altar of neoliberal public health-an altar long-built from the blood and bones of the "sick and tired." Or, if you prefer, the lungs and breath of the "mild." In the face of all the resources-financial and regulatory-governmental public health uses to keep us from smoking, vaping, and getting high, apparently, it's the CDC that is high-so high it is no longer able/willing to see the foundations of social justice that anchor our field. To view the original version of this poem, see the supplemental material section of this article online.