Abstract
The title for this editorial reflection comes from the epilogue of Wes Moore’s inspirational book, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. He was utilizing the phrase as homage to his father who was a journalist and who may have imbedded him with the discipline to spend countless hours interviewing individuals within his own family and in the other Wes Moore’s family in order to pull together these richly woven African American male, coming of age, portraits. Getting the story right is also what science writer Rebecca Skloot has accomplished as she pieced together over a decade – through individual interviews, observations, and artifact and document review – the incredible life story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from Baltimore, whose cells were used without permission to create a cell line of epic proportions for scientific research.
Baltimore is my adopted home since 2006, and it is a city with a wealth of academic and cultural institutions, including Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland. It is also a city that is majority African American (63.6% – US Census, 2011) and when I first arrived, an article by Dr Matthew Crenson of Hopkins, titled – The Elephant in the City: Why we Don’t Talk about Race in Baltimore (2006) – gave me my first historical glimpse into this complicated and reticent city south of the Mason-Dixon line, which stepped lightly around conversations of segregation and integration for decades. As an academic researcher from the Northeast, whose mother was the granddaughter of a Civil War veteran, I have to ponder with each new study that I consider in this city, the legacy of race, science, historical practices of institutions, and complicated notions of social justice, in similar ways to Moore and Skloot in their geographically situated non-fiction accounts of Black Americans from Baltimore. In my qualitative studies of mainly Black American veterans, I too need to work hard to get the story right, consider all racial and situational contexts, as well as my own biased views.
In the first review, Tanya Sharpe, takes the reader to a time when ‘Blacks were considered Colored property devoid of equal rights and services’. It is with this lens that we as readers are asked to reflect on an era prior to more stringent research consent procedures where parts of one’s body could be harvested without consent and used for profit and the advancement of science. There is a powerful section in Skloot’s book where Jewish doctors refuse to take cells from patients (mostly inmates and poor individuals) for potential use and profit without the consent of the patient. The doctors’ own collective history of Nazi research on Jewish prisoners was enough to make them stand together against a procedure they deemed unethical. These parallel stories of science wrestling with ethics, coalesce around the core story of Henrietta and her family as Skloot moves us from the 1920s to the present.
In the second review, Desmond Upton Patton, explores the impact of absent African American fathers on the lives and outcomes of two men named Wes Moore. The structure of this book, which continuously weaves the lives of both men into one narrative, brings forward the issue of individual choice within multiple contexts, and the important supports or lack thereof that each man possessed to thrive or fail. Patton provides an examination of the power, privilege, resilience of the human spirit, and ultimately luck, that are critical components in the lives of both men and ultimately in individuals whom we encounter in practice and research settings.
While neither book is proposed as a qualitative study, the discipline employed by Skloot and Moore, the desire to stay close to the voice of the participants and elevate their narratives, and the thoughtful analysis applied to the books by the authors, are cross-discipline models that may lend our social work studies essential ballast to right the story when it threatens to capsize. Baltimore has benefited from the publication of these two books and the conversations that have occurred as a result.