The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks By Rebecca Skloot

“Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them” (Martin Luther King, Jr.). Although times have improved since the days to the Civil Rights Movement, discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender, race, and religion still exists today. In “On Being the Target of Discrimination” by Ralph Ellison and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot a message of discrimination in a segregated society between African Americans and whites through the rhetorical devices of pathos and ethos. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot discusses the possible inequality in medical treatment

And once hospitalized, they got fewer pain medications, and had higher mortality rates” (Skloot 64). Because of racism and discrimination, Henrietta may have likely received improper care for her cervical cancer and an abuse of her cells by big pharmaceutical companies. Skloot not only addresses the pain of Henrietta’s family in the unjust use of HeLa cells, but also of one of Gey’s lab assistants, Mary Kubieck. Mary is confronted with the humanity of HeLa cells during an autopsy when she see’s Henrietta’s red painted toenails, “I started imaging her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all

Throughout Ellison’s narrative he addresses times when discrimination occurred and his mother had the courage to stand up to it. By telling the story through the eyes of a young child, he conveys a sense of innocence of a person being born into this institution of discrimination never having done anything to deserve injustice in society. He explains the difficulty of making it to school, “a journey which took you over, either directly o by way of a viaduct which arched head-spinning high above, a broad expanse of railroad tracks along which a constant traffic of freight backers, switch engines, and passenger trains made it dangerous for a child to cross. And that once the tracks were safely negotiated you continued past warehouses, factories, and loading docks, and then through a notorious red-light district where black prostitutes in brightly colored housecoats and Mary Jane shoes supplied the fantasies and needs of white clientele” (Ellison). By including a long list of things which a young boy must walk past just to get to school, Ellison creates an empathy within his reader for a poor, innocent boy being exposed from a young age to discrimination towards African Americans. Ethos is established through the method of personal narrative which Ellison employs. He is the little boy in his story and therefore has an established authority as he has