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Racism In The Bone Chapter Summary

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The multiple levels of injustice and racism in this book are astonishing and heartbreaking. Everywhere you look in this book there is a problem, not just with the Lacks family but with our cultural as whole. The environmental racism in Turner’s station and displacing 1,300 people for a power plant to the treatment of black patients and Henrietta for being a black woman. It saddens me for two reasons, one being that I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this wasn’t very long ago in the scale of time. Two, we are still dealing with so many of these issues right now. People love to say that the time “was” racist or that racism is dead. If it was then this world would be an entirely different place. For starters Flint would …show more content…

While it’s probably the happiest chapter in the book that is not the sole reason it is my favorite. Chapter 32 “All that’s My Mother” is so cathartic and beautiful. In this chapter is where Deborah and Zakariyya accompany Skloot to the research lab at John Hopkins. The cancer researcher Christoph being the first scientist to sit down and explain in simple terms the beauty of the Hela cells and basic cell theory to them. The patience and humility and empathy that man showed the Lacks children brings tears to my eyes. I genuinely feel like world needs more people like him in the scientific community, or just the world in general. The way Deborah and Zakariyya interact with Henrietta’s cells you can see this internal struggle, the terrible loss they feel by growing up without their mother, having Henrietta’s identity constantly stripped away by the scientific community, to never be acknowledged for the possibilities she created with her cells and the pride they feel for having their mother contribute to all these amazing advancements in science. This chapter is the one only time throughout the book that I wished she was more descriptive. The entire situation, gratitude, the understanding, the entire dynamic and small bit of closer it delivers to Zakariyya is what makes it my favorite

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