Correspondence
Tears were falling down my cheeks by the time I reached the end of Tony Hoagland’s “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer.” I am a retired nurse from a long-term-care facility. Having grown up in a mostly white, working-class neighborhood, I was not immersed in a diverse community until I became a nurse. Since then I have been privileged to work with individuals from all over the globe, of every color and religion. I have witnessed deep caring and compassion, with all prejudices set aside. Memories of my days on the job with those colleagues humble me. My coworkers saved me from the ignorance of perceived differences. I will always be grateful.
William Grogan
Florence, Massachusetts
I was going to let my subscription lapse. I really was. Then I read “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer,” by Tony Hoagland. It was worth paying for a whole year of issues to read this one essay. I agree with Hoagland, who writes, “I believe, more than ever, that at the bottom of each human being there is a reset button.”
Rev. Susan Varon
Taos, New Mexico
I recently told a friend about my three-week stay in an intensive-care unit in a German hospital and the gratitude I still feel when I think of the doctors, nurses, and staff who took care of me. A few days later she handed me a copy of Tony Hoagland’s essay “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” [September 2018]. This was my first encounter with The Sun, and I was deeply moved.
My friend gave me a subscription as a Christmas present, and I learned in your March 2019 issue that Hoagland, the one who brought me to your magazine, had died. Again I felt deeply moved. I’ll always have him in mind while reading The Sun.
Sebastian Erlewein
Hardthausen, Germany
“The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” is one of the most irresponsible pieces of writing I’ve ever read. Tony Hoagland wishes America (though he makes it quite clear he actually means white America) would get cancer because it would magically make whites less racist to have to rely on ethnically diverse professionals in their hour — or week, or month, or year — of need. Diagnosing people with a life-threatening condition will not spontaneously cause them to change their racist ideas.
Racism is a serious problem, and we must continue to strive to overcome it, but to wish cancer on anyone is abhorrent. Stage-III breast cancer found me when I was forty-five. I, too, have ridden the merry-go-round of blood tests, MRIs, CT scans, and surgeries, with thirty days of radiation treatment and ten weeks of chemotherapy. It was hell. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, let alone an entire segment of society.
M. Farmer
Naperville, Illinois
I am a cancer survivor, and I am sorry that Tony Hoagland has died of this disease. I cannot believe that those who objected to “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” actually read his essay in your September 2018 issue.
“Hoagland is ‘stupefied’ to discover,” Joy Katz and her cosigners write, “that minority orderlies and nursing assistants are cheerful while tending to the intimate needs of his body” [Correspondence, November 2018]. What Hoagland actually writes is “here, where I do not expect it, I encounter decency, patience, compassion, warmth, good humor.”
“He might also be stupefied to learn that many do not receive a living wage for their labor,” the letter writers continue. Did they not read the part where Hoagland says, “Let the workers be fairly paid and valued, for their skills draw us together like the edges of a wound”?
Hoagland isn’t wishing cancer on us; he is asking us to bring forth our empathy. Having experienced cancer myself, I read his essay, nodded, sighed, and remembered how living through the disease almost twenty years ago completely changed me: precisely what Hoagland is asking us to do.
Paula Marston
Raleigh, North Carolina
We are disappointed in The Sun’s choice to publish “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer.” The essay lacks an explicit awareness of the life-and-death consequences of racism in the U.S. healthcare system, which affects both minority patients and hospital workers of color. Cancer is very much not a cure for it.
Hoagland views cancer as the great equalizer and implies that all sick people — regardless of race, class, or whether or not they’re insured — get the same care. Extensive data refute this notion. African Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival rate of any racial group in the U.S. for most cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. Hoagland is “stupefied” to discover that minority orderlies and nursing assistants are cheerful while tending to the intimate needs of his body. He might also be stupefied to learn that many do not receive a living wage for their labor.
To conflate illness and personal epiphany with true understanding is a harmful oversimplification that undermines the work others are doing to make our institutions less racist. The suggestion that cancer seems to erase differences perpetuates the fantasy of “color blindness,” which can lead to self-satisfaction and inaction. We are sorry Hoagland is ill, and while it may seem to be in bad taste to criticize a cancer patient writing from his own experience, we offer this response in the spirit of striving to be alert to our own and to others’ racism.
Joy Katz
Erika Meitner
Robin Beth Schaer
Rachel Zucker
After reading the negative letters about Tony Hoagland’s “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” [September 2018] in your November 2018 Correspondence, I went back and reread the essay. I can’t see how anyone can be offended by it. I’ve heard the same kind of reaction that Hoagland describes from my friends who have had cancer. The oncology ward is a great equalizer; everybody there is your brother or sister. It reminds me of what the Yaqui sorcerer in Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan said: If you want a powerful spiritual practice, just remember that everyone you see is someday going to die.
Seven years ago I had cancer, which was treated with chemotherapy and surgery. So I immediately recognized the truth and beauty in Tony Hoagland’s exquisite essay “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” [September 2018].
Jean DiMotto
Greendale, Wisconsin
I am angry about the horrific injustices our country continues to perpetrate against its most vulnerable citizens and native peoples. But after reading your September 2018 issue — with Judith Hertog’s interview with Cornel West [“Prisoner of Hope”], Tony Hoagland’s essay “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer,” and the excerpt from Barack Obama’s speech [“Where We Start”] — I am also grateful to you for helping me to stay awake, and for pushing me to take responsibility for my thoughts and deeds.
Josephine Jackson
Jacksonville, Florida
When I read Tony Hoagland’s “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” [September 2018] it was as if he were speaking aloud things I had only dared to share with my closest loved ones.
Cancer doesn’t discriminate, which means it’s a great equalizer in ways we can’t imagine. To me, cancer is so much more than a cure for racism or other isms. It can be a cure for our suffering.
I may not be healthy, and my future is not what I hoped it would be, but cancer has helped me understand the meaning of this Thich Nhat Hanh prayer: “Waking up this morning, I smile. I have twenty-four hours to live. I vow to live them deeply and to look at the beings around me with eyes of compassion.”
Ann McPherson
Stoneham, Massachusetts
I retired a few years ago, after almost four decades as a nurse. I have worked with seasoned nurses who said, “You have to fall in love with these people if you’re going to survive.” I have also been a critically ill patient. In one hospital the night nurse, a Cuban refugee, stroked my head and whispered, “Don’t worry. You will walk again. I promise.”
Hospitals, where love is regularly shown, are the best places to acknowledge our common humanity. What a relief to fall into the arms of a caregiver. What a gift to reach across your stretcher and hold hands with another patient. This truth is beautifully expressed in Tony Hoagland’s “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer.”
Patricia C. O’Hara
New Mexico
Tony Hoagland’s essay “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” is a wise examination of the possibilities for empathy and appreciation of our shared humanity. Not only does Hoagland call out to society as a whole, but his essay is particularly revealing for those, like myself, who work in healthcare and wonder how they are perceived by patients.
The people Hoagland talks about are not the doctors. Nor does he discuss cutting-edge technology. His focus is on the other patients, their families, and the hospital staff and orderlies. He commends these caregivers for exhibiting compassion toward their patients, and he calls for them to be valued and fairly paid. I hope hospital administrators and other healthcare professionals read the essay and take it to heart.
David Kaufman
Santa Fe, New Mexico
I was drawn to Tony Hoagland’s essay “The Cure for Racism Is Cancer” — not because of racism but because of cancer. His experiences at the clinic mirror my own. Whenever I go back to the doctor to check if the cancer has returned, I feel like I’m in another world. I go home with reassurances that I’m still in remission, but cancer is a club I cannot resign from: a club of strangers who share the most intimate moments of their lives; a club free of gender, class, and race. Hoagland’s essay was a reminder of our common humanity.
Viki Shilaos
Corvallis, Oregon
Tony Hoagland responds:
I write my essays, and poems, and I write them as well as I can. They are explorations for me, and they don’t seek to end conversations but to open and extend them. There is always something more to say on such essential subjects. Different truths and emphases coexist. One truth does not have a monopoly.
So it is sometimes disappointing to encounter rigidity of interpretation, and self-righteousness, and the addictive urge to reprimand others in our public conversations. The desire for the final word, to be Right, is an instinct toward absolutism, and a playful writer might say that such Moral Certainties end in “reeducation camps” for those found at fault. We are most alive when we remain unconstricted and fluid, not clenching and angry.
Now I have written my essay about cancer, and compassion, and race. I’m grateful to The Sun for publishing it.
So I say, let these other writers write their essays on those thorny topics, and let mine be what it is. And I bless them in their work. May they exceed and improve upon my efforts.
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