Black women are 38 percent more likely to die of breast cancer than white women, and slightly less likely to be diagnosed with it in the first place. Those two numbers sit together and they describe a finding problem, not a getting-sick problem.
Dyanna Knight Lewis, a Chicago media executive, put that figure beside October’s two ribbon colours, pink for breast cancer and purple for domestic violence, and argued that a ribbon has never been the help.
She has a name for why she keeps asking. Her sister-in-law Carolyn Y. Adams, a former Illinois Lottery superintendent, died of breast cancer in 2007. Adams’s advocacy helped build the Illinois Ticket for the Cure, launched in 2006 and renamed the Carolyn Adams Ticket for the Cure in 2011, with proceeds funding research, education and awareness. Adams’s mother, Harriett Van Pelt, founded the What If…Carolyn Y. Adams Breast Cancer Foundation, which works on early detection, getting mammograms to women who cannot easily reach one, quality treatment, and scholarships for children who lost a parent or primary provider to the disease.
On the purple ribbon, Lewis makes the same move from symbol to specifics. Survivors stay quiet out of fear, shame or because the money is not theirs, she writes, and abuse is not only the part that leaves marks. Emotional manipulation is abuse. Coercive control is abuse. Controlling the money is abuse. The CDC’s 2016 to 2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that more than half of the non-Hispanic Black women surveyed reported contact sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetimes.
What she asks for is small and specific: book the screening you put off, check on the women you love, give to the organisations doing the work, pass on what you know, and push for care that does not depend on your address.
The foundation’s name is a question. Lewis ends by telling readers to keep asking it.
