Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette – Keith Wailoo
Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette. By Keith Wailoo. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. pp. 396. Cloth, $30.00.)
“Why do Blacks like menthol so much? (5)”
In Pushing Cool, Keith Wailoo traces how cigarette companies created menthol cigarettes as a flavor marketed across race as a healthy alternative to supposedly harsher non-mentholated cigarettes, to ones championing black identity. Cigarette companies deliberately targeted blacks through urban marketing campaigns to racialize menthol cigarettes. Further, when anti-smoking activists such as health experts and government officials called cigarette companies out on their horrific racist practices, cigarette companies retaliated by saying that Blacks made a personal choice to smoke menthols and to ban them was insulting to Black’s intelligence as consumers, not to mention that it violated their right to freedom of choice.
One thing I didn’t know was how deeply imbricated cigarette companies were with Black culture. These ties extended beyond racialized advertising in Black urban enclaves and reached its tentacles into Black advocacy groups and politicians. For example, by funding the NAACP, cigarette companies gained a modicum of control over Black politics by winning them supporters among those they financially backed. I don’t want to deny Black agency here, however, this practice emphasized that Black communities remained divided over the role cigarettes and cigarette companies played in their lives. Did Blacks smoke menthols because they were manipulated by targeted advertising, or was smoking menthols simply a matter of personal preference?
Wailoo comes down heavily on the side of the argument that targeted advertising by cigarette companies led Blacks to smoke menthols and therefore created the public health crises that result from heavy smoking. Just as practices priming young consumers to smoke cigarettes, advertisers appealed to Black desires as observed by extensive market research, to create a Black population primed to smoke menthols. His extensive use of industry sources forced into the public sphere supports his thesis that calculating cigarette agencies deliberately targeted Black smokers through advertising and their support of Black causes, culture, and politicians.
This was a great book, but it left me desperately wanting a cigarette, even though I haven’t had one in years. That is how deep cigarettes dig their claws into you – even when you’re reading about how bad for you they are, you still want one. To me, Wailoo taps into the insidious nature of cigarettes and other tobacco products. Savvy advertising in the face of a bevy of restrictions is still enough to overcome prejudices against smoking, especially in populations consistently targeted to become customers. Wailoo’s use of industry sources is damning, but the question does remain of the role of Black agency. The battle over menthols has in many ways revolved around this question. Pushing Cool is an excellent industrial/business history, and would do well in a class on the history of technology. Cigarettes are technologies, and this book traces menthol cigarette’s trajectory from being advertised as a racially-neutral, health-based cigarette, to a racialized phenomenon.
