"600 words by Esther J. Cepeda"

Black Star Project: shining a light on the darkness

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

It’s June 19th – not even officially summer yet – and the wave of violence in Chicago has already kicked into high gear.

Just in the last two days more shootings, more death. This morning the Chicago Tribune reports two teens, 19 and 15, are dead and one 14-year-old is struggling to live through a gunshot wound to the head.

Faced with this community-wide epidemic of violence, some look away or gnash their teeth and weep. Some have made a fuss about forming commissions to figure out what to do about murder in their streets. The folks over at The Black Star Project are just out there solving the problem themselves – one kid at a time.

"People say the way to end violence is policemen or with helicopters or automatic weapons. That’s not going to stop violence! If you can teach these young people to read, if we can give them some hope, some vision, and some skills…that’s the only way," Phillip Jackson, BSP’s Executive Director, told me Tuesday afternoon as the media whipped itself into a frenzy over 19-year-old Jose Rivera’s bloody end on a south side playground. "It’s not very popular, it gets almost no funding and people say to me ‘It’s too hard.’ I don’t care how hard it is, it’s the only way."

The "way" to stop the street killings Phil’s referring to is best described by the 165,000 black, Hispanic, and other-wise underserved young students BSP has tutored, mentored, and inspired at public and private schools all over Chicago and its suburbs during a 12-year quest to use education to lift kids above the clamor of their neighborhood’s dangers.

Not to mention the 4,000 parents at BSP’s Parent University program, who get classes and support, in both English and Spanish, on how to guide their kids toward becoming life-long learners.

Oh, and let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands fathers who have come out en masse across 238 American cities on the first day of school to pledge their commitment to their kids' education during BSP’s wildly successful, four-year-old Million Father March.

The Black Star Project is, as I've come to think of them, the most effective, nationally-recognized anti-violence program you've never heard of.

"I try not to do things that are sensational, we do work of substance with all children, even if they're gangbangers," said Phillip, a retiree of Chicago Public Schools' system, "but the newspapers [and television] want more pizzazz – it's only front page news whenever we have a weekend when people are shot and there's a child or woman killed. We're working on solutions not gimmicks so there's almost no interest."

Barriers like media interest matter little to Phil and his team of 5 full-time employees; there's work to be done BSP has put the power of the internet to it. Lucky you if you're one of the 16,000 readers who get their bright, yellow-topped, e-blasted newsletters exclaiming "He who controls the education of the children control the future of that race."

Though that might sound politically incorrect, in reality, the color-blind organization services children of all races and ethnicities but their niche is African-American. "Our board members, mentors and volunteers are diverse – we don't discriminate, we make no apologies," Phil said, "But when you make a concerted effort to reach black boys– the Consortium on School Reform found that of black boys in kindergarden only 3 out of 100 will graduate college by age 25 – then you curtail the pipeline to jails and prisons."

But there is a price to pay for being bold, and nationally lauded but locally ignored. Not being the most quoted, or "go-to" social service organization makes it difficult to get people with money excited about the work that gets done each and everyday out of the glare of camera flashes and TV lights. Though BSP does make up part of their meager budget with earned income from CPS payment for mentorship programs, and enjoy generous donations from The Chicago Community Trust, ComEd, and Toyota Motor sales, the needs are many.

"We need funding stability, I spend 50-60 percent of my time making sure the lights stay on and people are going to get paid rather than spending time with the children but it doesn't matter. I'm going to be leaving this planet soon but what does matter is that the children we leave behind are going to be able to live together, work together, and learn together. That's what really matters."

You want an antidote to the daily "violence in our neighborhoods!!" news drama? Sign up for the Black Star Project's e-blast and get ready to receive a dose of real solutions.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the "600 Words" & "Pregunta del Dia" columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. "600 words" is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact

eejaycee@600words.com

Doctors, please: “habla culture,” not language

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

If the English language unites us as a country, and other languages are what supposedly divide us, then cultural understanding is the bridge – and the best hope – for fixing health care inequities for U.S. minorities.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently announced it was going to devote $300 million to setting national standards to fix the problem, noting – just to take diabetes as an example – that African Americans lose legs to amputations at a rate nearly five times that of whites.

While the Johnson Foundation grant is designed to "reduce racial and ethnic disparities," none of their information even mentioned Hispanic/Latino patients, but I can tell you we aren’t far behind. The National Diabetes Education Program of the National Institutes of Health says that on average, about 2.5 million, or 9.5 percent of Hispanic and Latino Americans aged 20 years or older have been diagnosed with diabetes. Mexican Americans and residents of Puerto Rico are almost twice as likely to have diabetes as non-Hispanic whites of similar age, and are two to four times more likely to have their legs amputated due to the disease.

As with diabetes, obesity, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, and so many other diseases, the impact on minorities is far greater than on white populations. And though the most-prescribed salvo is eliminating medical professionals’ language barriers, it’s obviously not just about linguistics.

Constantina Mizis, a nationally-recognized expert in the field of cross-cultural healthcare and the Multicultural Outreach Manager for the Greater Illinois chapter of the American Alzheimer’s Association, says, "You can’t think about speaking a language, you have to speak culture. I tell doctors and nurses that culture – the collections of how different groups of people see and feel life, death, joy and even their health – paints everything."

With such a wide assortment of cultures – not just in the population of sick people, but in the corps of doctors and nurses practicing medicine today – the most important cultural/linguistic tools for healthcare providers are open ears and eyes.

Understanding that, according to a June 2007 study titled Cultural Characteristics of African Americans: Implications for the Design of Trials that Target Behavior and Health Promotion Programs, African Americans’ driving cultural forces are religion, family structure, general mistrust of Caucasians, a feeling of being undervalued and not respected as a people, a feeling of limited resources and limited opportunities to make lifestyle changes and a deep desire to preservation their ethnic identity, is crucial.

Knowing that level eye contact, warm greetings that include hugs and hand-holding, chit-chat before and after asking for a count of ailments, and showing reverence are key to winning over Latino patients is also very important.

And yes, the highly educated doctors and nurses caring for us should know that certain cultures aren’t going to respond to "prescriptions" such as cutting down on rice – a staple in Latino and Asian households – or to going out for long walks which are, sadly, a danger in many minority communities.

But most important are the skills of trained observers, which might really go a long way to bettering healthcare for patients of all colors and ethnicities.

"It’s not just what [health care practitioners] say or in what language," Mizis says, "it’s how they say it. Notice if the patient is intimidated, look at the body language, talk in simple language and be friendly. It’s all about gaining patients’ confidence."

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Dangerous optimism: JAMA study not as happy for Hispanics

“600 Words” by Esther J. Cepeda

Let’s just face it: we’re fat. Ok, maybe not you, specifically, dear reader, but we Americans are tipping the scales.

The latest world ranking put our affluent girths at numbers five for men and eight for women, not surprising for the home of the super-size value meal. The statistics are astounding: the Endocrine Society of America and the Centers for Disease Control estimated from 2004 Census numbers that obesity currently results in an estimated 400,000 deaths annually and costs the U.S. nearly $122.9 billion bucks. And, just one mortality statistic for you just to put it in context: the number one killer of women? Heart disease – obesity’s good pal.

But there is, seemingly, a light at the end of the tunnel. The Journal of the American Medical Association just published a report called High Body Mass Index for Age Among US Children and Adolescents, 2003-2006 which posits that maybe the incidence of childhood obesity in kids ages 2-19 has leveled off. Possibly.

In terms of longitudinal studies, data collected from the 1960’s to 2006 is a small data set, and the authors didn’t make any firm proclamations. But after accounting for ambiguities such as the difference in what was considered obese then and today, researchers found that obesity rates in kids have held steady at 32 percent since 1999.

This is progress, this is good news! This proves that with education and advocacy lives can be changed…for some. For others the numbers are not as celebratory. Let us be happy that Hispanic and African American children are experiencing the possible plateau at the same rates as the rest of the population but in truth, compared to white kids, they’re still not doing very well.

The most recent data show that 14.5 percent of white girls ages 12 to 19 are obese compared to 20 percent of Mexican American girls and 28 percent of African American girls. Mexican American boys are also heavier than Caucasian boys. Any school teacher in America could accurately recite those statistics without reading the study but just by looking at their classrooms: Hispanic kids are fatter than other kids.

My colorblind side, of course, believes that no child should suffer from the kind of over-malnutrition that leads to Type-2 diabetes, increased risk of heart-attacks and general ill-health regardless of race or ethnicity. But my brown eyes see dark-skinned ticking time bombs and I wonder what the shape of our young Latino adults will be in 2050 when we make up 29 percent of the population.

And why should it matter to anyone who’s not Hispanic?

“Because the Latino is the backbone of the American economy,” Dr. Elena Rios, President and CEO of the National Hispanic Medical Health Association told me yesterday. “We are fast becoming the biggest group [of employees] and the youngest. [The concern] is not just about helping ‘our community’ understand, it’s important that everybody understand that if we don’t control this we’re going to see more diabetics, more amputations, more blindness and lower employee productivity.”

“If we ignore this, it’s going to have a direct impact on the general economic health of America,” Elena said, “it’s going to be worse for Hispanics and for all the small business, hotels, factories, and every industry that relies on productive and healthy Hispanics.”

This is not an “immigration issue” so don’t bother emailing me to question the legality of these workers. The facts are that by 2050 most of the Latinos you know will be U.S.-born and as American as mami and apple flan. So let’s turn our attention to both.

“Food is an important part of the Latino culture,” Dr. Elena said sort of rolling her eyes, “we do believe in celebration and we have strong family values so our celebrations end up being every Sunday at dinner, but that’s why we need to communicate about how to eat right and eat better.”

“We can’t stop the good efforts to target the Hispanic population, and we have to do better at helping the non-Hispanic health providers share this knowledge with the communities they serve,” Elena said, “there is no magic bullet. It’s a social change, a transformation in society. It’s just like what happened with smoking it took us thirty years for knowledge and research studies to trickle down to everyday life.”

So bottom line: less obese kids is great all around but even less Hispanic and African American kids obese will be that much better. JAMA’s statistics aren’t cause for a sigh of relief and a turn to other matters. As Karen Carpenter and Dr. Rios said: “We’ve only just begun.” But we’re on our way, and already seeing the positive progress.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Still separate, still unequal but still hopeful

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

In overturning of Brown vs. Board of Education – the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed children would not be forced to attend schools based solely on race – Chief Justice John Roberts said Louisville and Seattle school districts’ voluntary public school integration plans failed to justify their desire to integrate schools by assigning certain students to schools based on race.

Last June 28, 2007, the country groaned at this so-called "huge step backwards," the assumption being that race discrimination was the numero uno culprit in the staggering failure and drop-out rates among minority students.

At the time I argued that the flip meant nothing in a society where scores of kids were failing miserably because of the color-blind blight of poverty.

It’s almost a year later and not only are kids still being left behind, we’ve recently learned the numbers are surely worse than we’d imagined. U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is floating a plan to make the formula for calculating the number of drop-outs uniform across states so districts can no longer cheat down their annual reporting.

And the left-behinds? Big surprise – none of them are Carnegies. According to Census data analyzed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, back in 2006 – before the economic downturn – 17.4 percent of kids under 18 lived in poverty. That’s thirteen million kiddies living in real, actual poverty in the United States, and yes, over half of them were black or Hispanic – but why discriminate? A poor kid with a lop-sided shot at a decent life is just that, regardless of race.

But discrimination comes in many forms and to change how we educate tomorrow’s multi-hued leaders we must start with how every one of us sees them today.

"The challenges of race are not behind us and, in fact, are compounding with poverty," Matthew L. Kramer, self-professed affluent white kid and President of the hugely successful Teach for America – a national corps of new-to-education brainiac teachers dedicated to eliminating educational inequity – told me this week.

Matthew says the success his 17,000 teachers have experienced in reaching nearly 3 million low-income children since 1990 comes from being focused on solving the problems kids come to school with each day, "but because 90% are either African American or Latino, their particular challenges of poverty and race are fundamentally intertwined – both are factors in their lives."

The difference between the educational philosophy of his corps and the teachers getting pumped out of traditional education programs? It’s all in how they look at their charges.

"Our experience is that even though the majority come to school with these challenges, our teachers have the ability to motivate kids to work harder than they’ve ever been expected to work – and the kids perform! The evidence is overwhelmingly clear, we may not be post-race but it’s not credible to say these kids can’t learn, whether the issue is race or poverty."

Matthew rhapsodized about tangible successes like a phenomenal youth symphony orchestra comprised of low-income charter school students – "It’s hard to see the KIPP orchestra and not start crying" – and evangelized his belief that it is possible to keep poor or minority children from being left behind. And that opportunity is not solely in teachers’ hands.

"It is not legitimate to say is this unfixable and people don’t want to maintain that view. There are many successes out there but I think we’re stuck until many, many more people have seen them with their own eyes," Matthew said. "It’s hard to change our minds but it is only a matter of time at this point before [people] come into more examples of successes."

Until that happens, as you drive past, ask yourself if you can believe the gaggle of kids clustered on the street corner can achieve despite the odds stacked against them. Then tell yourself "yes."

If as a society we start to believe in the promise of today’s left-behinds, they’ll start to believe in themselves. And if we demand that everyone who has a stake in their education – you and me included – expect nothing less than success, we will get it.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

No vote, no voice if you're poor, scatterbrained

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

If you’re happy to break one law, then you’ll surely break another, right? You’ve jaywalked so you’re a good candidate for committing an armed robbery.

That’s the exact logic being used to defend the ridiculous scheme to limit voters in Missouri and approximately 20 other states across the country by requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

That state’s proposed constitutional amendment, which if passed could go into effect as early as August, could keep approximately 240,000 unregistered Missouri-dwelling U.S. citizens from voting in the most interesting Presidential election of the last several decades.

Why? Fear the estimated "12 million" illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. who were bold enough to break federal immigration laws but are too terrified of getting deported to seek medical care or report crime might get it in their minds to commit voter fraud by giving a municipal system all their contact information for a shot at electing a president from a pool of candidates too terrified to broach the subject of immigration.

Already the elderly, the disabled, those who can’t afford – or choose to not to – drive and haven’t gotten around to sitting at their secretary of state facility for most of a day to get an official photo identification card, have been denied their right to vote in seven states. By decree of the U.S. Supreme Court, no less, who upheld Indiana’s photo-ID requirement law on April 28th.

The argument: according to the Justice Department, of forty voters indicted for registration fraud or illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, twenty-one were non-citizens. Also, anyone could easily forge an electric or phone utility bill or paychecks, which are just some of the many forms of ID currently used to register voters.

If you buy into that, then why not note the reported tens of thousands of native-born Missourians who were kicked off Medicaid in 2006 because they couldn’t find their birth certificates to argue that more U.S.-born people will be screwed out of their voting rights than impostors? It’s better to deny suffrage to people who live on the margins of society – or are simply prone to misplacing things – than take a chance on "illegal Irma" blackening the ovals?

On the other side of the conspiracy theory coin are rumors that the Republicans are masterminding a scheme to keep the ethnic minorities – assumed to lean Democratic – from voting them out of office in droves as they vote the country’s first African American into the "White" House.

How about the theory that photo ID voting restrictions are designed to counteract the backlog of 930,000 citizenship applications that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently promised to process by September 30th because about nine thousand almost-new Americans sued USCIS in order to get them to do things "the right way." The letter of the law demands the decision to grant citizenship be made within 120 days of interviewing the applicant, after all.

I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume the people who make these laws up aren’t malevolent but instead simply ignorant.

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that the well-to-do bureaucrats who propose laws simply can’t imagine a world in which you don’t have mommy or daddy drive you to the DMV on your sixteenth birthday for a driver’s license? Is it really too hard to imagine people of certain means not having a clue how hard it is to navigate replacing a lost birth certificate when you don’t read well or have a disability?

No harder, I guess, than imagining legislators so stupid they actually believe droves of illegal aliens are going to throw the next election.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Prostitution's Hidden victims: boys

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

That "dirty old man" who pays cash to use women as disposable sex toys may have started out as a bewildered, ten-year-old boy.

Of the many shocking revelations meticulously documented in the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation’s report "Deconstructing the Demand for Prostitution" released late last week, the most heartbreaking and disturbing was that among men who frequently pay prostitutes for sex, many had their first sexual experience paid for by a close relative – at as tender an age as ten.

In 2006 and 2007, a team of twelve male and female project interviewers from CAASE and a group called Prostitution Research Education set out to look into the minds of Chicago men who pay for sex from the estimated 16,000 to 25,000 women in the city who sell their services. They advertised their study on Craigslist, Chicago After Dark, and the Chicago Reader, and eventually spoke for two hours each with 113 men ages 20-71.

Their "average" john was 39 years old, only slightly more likely African American than Caucasian, overwhelmingly college-educated and making over $40,000 a year, with a girlfriend or wife at home. A little over half of them bought sex from once a month to several times in one week, soliciting women on the internet, in person, and through escort services alike.

The average age of their first purchase was 21 with the jaw-dropping age of ten pulling down the average. These stark numbers – 29% of these guys’ first time ever was paid and 17% had that first experience on a dad’s dime – round out the tragedy.

"We have to do a lot better job of talking about exploitation and violence toward women just to counteract the overwhelming glamorization of prostitution in this country," study author Rachel Durchslag told me last week. "One thing we need to do is talk to young men about this issue. Moms and dads don’t want to talk to their sons about this but with one quarter of our participants reporting they had their first paid experience before the age of seventeen, it tells me we have to talk to dads about how to bond with their sons with some healthy masculinity instead of based on exploitation and domination."

Up until now, the conversation about the fallout of pay-to-play has been focused on the female part of the prostitution equation. The facts in this report, found on http://www.caase.org, point to the serious need to intervene in the lives of very young men today in order to make a difference in the lives of women and men – both those involved in prostitution transactions and those hurt by after-effects like sexually transmitted diseases, the pain of betrayal, and the inability to have healthy relationships – for generations to come.

That’s a tall order in a society where young boys and girls are constantly bombarded by images of ultra-sexual women, and pimp culture has become so mainstream you can buy pre-packaged costumes at your local Halloween supply store. The same society where parents scoff at the idea of their 8^{th-graders learning about condoms in health ed. classes.}

"Absolutely young women are growing up with unbelievable amounts of pressure to be sexual but that’s only half of the equation. Prostitution not only harms women in communities but harms men as well," Rachel said, citing the guilt, shame, and real remorse the men in the study expressed to their interviewers after having the opportunity – in many cases for the first time in their lives – to talk openly about their behavior and feelings out.

Calling all moms and dads: get over your embarrassment about the "sex talk." Your sons and daughters need you to have frank and open heart-to-heart conversations about sexual health and responsibility, today. Sexual victimization for either gender can happen early but it’s never too late to do everything possible to avoid it.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

We do all get along, mostly

by Esther J. Cepeda

"Pregunta del Dia" translates to Question of the Day and today’s comes from R.M., a Chicago reader who emailed to "ha-ha."

Q. Did you hear about the brawl between the blacks and the Hispanics in L.A.? Aren’t you the one always talking about how there’s no problems between the two?

A. Yes. R.M. was referring to the Associated Press story from last Friday – at around noon 600 students at a high school in Los Angeles got into a huge fight, leaving several injured and three arrested. The fight had been planned between members of rival Hispanic and Black graffiti gangs.

The media loves to report on these things. I’m sure there is some poor Californian soul whose entire reporting job is to find blacks and Hispanics who hate each other. Why not keep a person in Boston to report on the tensions between the Irish and everyone else who lives there? Because it’s not really a story, that’s why.

First off, rival gangs hate each other regardless of skin color – that’s why they come up with convoluted dress and communication codes to transcend race and gender. Second, give it a rest – no monolithic group of any persuasion gets along in complete harmony with any other, that’s just human nature.

If the energy put into pointing out tensions between ethnic groups – a dialogue on Japanese-Chinese relations, anyone? – went into observing the millions of ways in which all of us get along and work together everyday, the world would be a better place.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Cynic’s guide to pink ribbons

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

I like breasts as much as the next guy – even more, maybe – they feed babies, provide shock absorption, and are pleasing to look at. No downside, right? Well, not unless they get cancer. Many have.

The race to their cure has become a global, multi-billion dollar philanthropic and cultural phenomenon – and that’s how I came to be annoyed by pink ribbons.

Don’t worry, I didn’t stay annoyed, but who could have blamed me when last week on one day alone I ran across “breast cancer awareness” batteries at the 7-Eleven, a “Think Pink” accessory pack for a kids’ portable video game at Circuit City, and a pink ribbon Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation street-sweeper!

“Come ON!” I thought, “How many ways can marketers make money off women’s breasts?!” That was followed immediately by my standard, “It’s not even the number one killer of women in the U.S.!” That would be heart disease, followed by cancers (lung!), strokes, lung disease in general, and Alzheimer’s disease, just FYI.

And it’s not even October yet, but aahhh, close to Mother’s Day.

But rather than remain peeved at the preponderance of pink in my life, I instead bowed to the temple of what will go down as one of the strongest consumer brands in history –one that actually saves real women’s lives – the Susan G. Komen For the Cure breast cancer awareness foundation, and its pink ribbons.

Google ‘em if you want, you know the story: 25 years, a promise between two sisters, the Y-Me Race for the cure, etc. I blew in a call to ask them if they felt their message was becoming diluted because of the marketing blitz, if people are getting tired of it all.

“We have tested, informally, in various ways and found that both men and women are still very open to the messages,” Caroline Wall, Manager for Cause Marketing Operations told me yesterday. “We’re trying to engage all different types of niches and consumer groups…whether it be Kitchen Aid mixers, or Major League Baseball, or Garth Brooks.”

I became interested in the success of the brand not realizing the power of the pink to pervade different cultures and languages. And not realizing how desperately that’s needed.

I was thinking along the lines of targets to sell products to, after all, the pink ribbon peddled 58 million green dollars – 20% of Komen’s revenue – in 2006, according to one Los Angeles Times article. And yes, there have been some unscrupulous logo users, which Komen actively roots out, and certainly no shortage of critics of the success of the campaign. But back to those “targets.”

“We don’t want to pigeon-hole anyone but there are opportunities to have an ‘in’ with a particular population, for instance, the African American and Latino communities through product placement,” she said, noting that black and Hispanic women get diagnosed way later than Caucasians.

The numbers: breast is the most common cancer in African American women and the second leading cause of cancer death among African American women. It’s the most commonly diagnosed and the leading cause of cancer death among Hispanic/Latina women.

Consider my cynical mouth shut.

Mother’s day breast-health support buyer beware, yes you can look on their web site to make sure the pink products you want to purchase will fulfill Komen’s mission of funding research for a cure. Shop smart and find a balance but don’t automatically buy into the backlash.

“There are still over 200,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer every day in this country,” Caroline said, “and they would say they’re not tired of hearing about it."

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com