Pinkin' Ain't Easy

Pinkin’ Ain’t Easy

Big pinkin’, you spendin’ Gs

Ya think you’re backin’ a cause

Meanwhile you spreadin’ disease

You wanna be sure

that your runnin’ for cures

And you're not pinkwashed and pimped like a whore

Rethink pink and not get pimped

You gotta rethink pink don’t get pimped

Before I was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2012, the pink ribbon inundation secretly irked me. I found the entire phenomenon suspicious and unsettling. But then out of guilt, I would buy the pen, USB drive or whatever trinket being shilled for the cause at the cash register. How could I as a woman not support breast cancer awareness and prevention and quite possibly contribute to research for a cure?

Looking back I realize how little the relentless commercialism did for my own awareness. On the contrary, it made me want to NOT think deeply about breast cancer.  The attempt to dress the illness in a traditional femininity and promote consumerism as the path to its eradication repelled me. 

After my diagnosis I did start to investigate, and being a long-time activist, my research eventually led to the unique politics of breast cancer philanthropy and what is referred to by its critics overall as pink ribbon culture. I am still reflecting where I land along the spectrum between pink ribbon culture and its feminist detractors, and that surely will be the topic of a future post or two. I am clear, however, that what I discovered about the way breast cancer is pimped by corporations in ways that run counter to the stated goal of ending the disease made me actively pursue a distance that I already felt from this juggernaut of which I was supposed to be a beneficiary.

And I certainly did benefit from Susan G. Komen’s successful fundraising efforts. At the time of my diagnosis, I was uninsured so I went to Planned Parenthood for my reproductive health care. If not for PPNYC and the funding it received from SGK, I might not have been able to get a mammogram, detect the invasive ductal carcinoma in my left breast or even secure insurance and therefore treatment through the the Medicaid Cancer Treatment Program. 

Then SKG lost is mind and temporarily defunded Planned Parenthood on the advice of its former senior VP for public policy who was intent on imbuing the organization with her pro-life politics. That Handel chick was slick, I’ll give her that. Nice tactic to suggest that the impetus to not fund organizations that provided abortions was to stay remain within federal funding policy. Close but no cigar even if it has a pink ribbon emblazoned on the wrapper.

Hence, my hot little letter to the SKG calling out the fact that their decision to defund PP effectively signaled that they only cared about finding a cure for women who were insured and told the rest of us we could just drop dead. Yeah, I went there. I even wrote, “Neither Planned Parenthood nor cancer asked me what my position on abortion was, and neither should you.”

This is also not to say that there aren’t things about so-called pink ribbon culture that don’t resonate with me. But this branding of the cause that raises so much money for anything BUT the cure? No, ma’am, don’t expect me to register for your race any time soon.

Here’s the ironic thing about the color pink; its choice was probably one of the few things SGK did right. As I learned from watching the documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc. which is based on the book of the same name by Dr. Samantha King, the original breast cancer awareness ribbon was salmon. When the woman who created it refused to get into bed with the foundation, SKG actually asked women with breast cancer what color the ribbon should be. They chose pink – with all its cultural loading. That choice shouldn’t surprise us regardless of how we feel about the color, especially if the members of that focus group were the typical face of breast cancer – White, heterosexual, middle-class women of a certain age. Call me cynical, but when I envision that focus group taking place, I don’t see women of color, queer women or even Goth girls at that table. The cultural loading of the color pink is precisely why the breast cancer survivors in that focus group chose it, and we can’t fault SKG for that.

We can fault SKG, however, for not more actively asking its primary constituency what we want about more substantive things — like where the money goes. Then again, I’m presuming that women in the throes of a BC journey are the foundation’s primary constituency. With all the emphasis on early prevention as opposed to a cure, we may not be. One can have Carte Blanche Healthcare, and cancer treatment still strain finances so perhaps SKG believes that those who have or have had breast cancer don’t have the disposable income as those who have not. Hence, we’re not a lucrative market for handguns and chicken.

All this said, I do pink.  I pink within limits. Like my BC madrina Jenny L. Saldaña, I wear the pink ribbon – usually on some funky attire that’s true to my personality – to identify myself as part of a tribe. To give the illness a different face than what people might be accustomed to.  I find that within certain communities, residual stigma still remains around breast cancer so I wear the pink ribbon to combat that among my own people. Most importantly I realized early in my own cancer journey that my own return to wholeness required that I be visible with both my strength and vulnerability.

That said, I won’t be walking, running, kayaking, skydiving, none of that for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure any time soon. I never say never though. When I have a say in where the money I raise goes, I will eagerly sign up, solicit donations and walk my brown ass off for SGK.  Until then I’ll make my donations directly to the breast cancer organizations whose work are aligned with my own values, priorities and politics.

Resources:

The Business of Breast Cancer Awareness by Eileen Z. Fuentes

Breast Cancer Action and the Think Before You Pink Toolkit

Breast Cancer Prevention Means Eliminating Toxics

Is My Favorite Beauty Product is Safe? Search for It in the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database

  

20 Most Dangerous Cosmetic Toxins (Print This List When You Shop for Makeup)

Watch the documentary PINK RIBBONS, INC

The Projectionist: Why I Watched Basketball Wives and Why I Had to Stop

At the time that I learned I had breast cancer, I was taking little care of myself. For a few months I had let a few guilty pleasures devolve into unhealthy practices.  The occasional ice cream cone from el pillo (as my father calls Mr. Softee) became a nightly indulgence often followed by potato chips, cookies or some other junk food. Sometimes I would chase all this refined sugar with a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, a radical change for a woman who didn’t begin drinking socially until her early thirties and still could count on one hand how many alcoholic drinks she imbibed in any given month. I couldn’t find time to exercise, read or meditate, but there seemed to be endless hours available to watch some pretty horrific reality TV. 

I especially had the time and the mood for Bastketballl Wives. And watching episodes of the show wasn’t enough. I would seek to extend the experience across platforms, scouring the internet for opinions on all the show’s fuckery from running searches on the #BBW hashtag on Twitter to reading the comments posted under inarguably illegal excerpts of the show posted on YouTube.  

Yeah, I can be quite comfortable with my contradictions. Here I am cultural activist who emphasizes the importance of media literacy especially as it pertains to entertainment yet occasionally kicks back by engaging in some egregiously racist and sexist depictions of women of color that television has to offer. Nor do I always feign to do so in the name of conducting in-depth socio-political deconstruction. Of course I do that, but I’d be lying if I said that this was always my primary intention for tuning in. At my most conscientious, I often sought the kick of chopping up the drama with my tweethearts - equally if not more politically interested, astute and engaged sisters than me — as if we were just another high school clique (the honor students natch) side-eying the antics of  Evelyn, Jennifer and Shaunie’s mean girls across the cafeteria. We would tweet snark, psychoanalysis and, yes, sociopolitical commentary all hour long, using the trashy melodrama to inspire the fullest expression of our personalities one-hundred characters at a time. 

But when I was at what I can now accept was a period of mild depression, watching Basketball Wives and shows like it had morphed into a necessary and isolated activity. The compulsion became something far more insidious than an escape from life’s unfulfilled yearnings despite my constant striving according to rules that seemed only to apply to me. I was medicating myself... except that watching the show didn’t make me feel better. On the contrary, it gave me nightmares of getting into catfights with friends and strangers alike. Sometimes I even told myself that indulging Basketball Wives was a practice in gratitude albeit an admittedly high-minded one. At least I have real friends, I would judge from my recliner.  Thank God, I come from a good family.  I’d rather be single than be treated like that. 

Then I got the mother of all wakeup calls. “The smaller lump is nothing as we thought, but the one that you found is invasive ductal carcinoma… cancer.” And suddenly there was no more time for Basketball Wives and such bullshit. While the show went off the rails, I corrected course on a long neglected healing mission. I completed a liver detox and went on what I jokingly call a black supremacist diet (“If it’s white, it ain’t right.”) I quit telling myself that if I didn’t have at least an hour to spare, it wasn’t worth going to the gym and stayed consistent with an exercise regime of at least a half-hour of movement almost every day, and the thirty-plus pounds that had crept on me began to melt. Not only did I reinstitute my morning practice of inspirational reading, meditation and journaling, I finally achieved Reiki Level I, something that had been on my life list for almost a decade. And that is the just the beginning. 

And as I returned to steady self-care and enjoyed the results physically, emotionally and spiritually, I found that not only did I not have time for Basketball Wives, I didn’t miss those chicks not one bit. Since I wasn’t checking for them, it’s only now that I’m realizing how ugly the behavior on the show has become, and it was pretty bad when I was watching it. The tendency to go overboard was always there, no doubt, especially knowing what I do about how a reality TV show is no less concocted than a narrative series. The only difference is that the scripting takes place on the set and in the editing room. So why am I so disgusted now by the depths sunken to by a show I always knew was ratchet and no longer watch? Clearly, as the always problematic Basketball Wives "went left" (as cast member Tami Roman says ad nauseum) with its excessive violence and vulgarity, I had become and therefore came to the news a different person. 

And that begged the question just who was I when I was indulging the show so religiously? Or perhaps more accurately and fairly, which facet of my humanly contradictory being found the show so compelling? What was it feeding to that self?

Could it be possible that Basketball Waves spoke to a baser part of my nature that had not found a safe place for exploration or a healthier form of expression anywhere else? Looking back now on how watching the show made me feel before I embarked on my cancer journey, I can see how as much as I criticized them, I still wanted to be more like Ev and Tami. Not sleeping with ballers, being on TV or stacking weaves and implants (yes, I’ll eventually be undergoing reconstructive surgery, but trust that I would much rather breast cancer had missed me if that was the only way off the Itty Bitty Titty Committee.) Deep down I hungered to be that unapologetically self-centered. That ambitious. That entitled to and uninhibited in expressing my rage.  

The problem is that the things that make me want to behave outrageously are much bigger than she-said-Susie-said. Rape “humor” makes me want to throw wine bottles. I want to run barefoot across conference tables when colleagues make racist jokes.  I’d leave so many dead fish in the cars of men that harass me as I walk down the street, you’d think my name was Jesus. 

But as a socially conscious person, spiritual seeker and, you know, mature adult, that kind of behavior is not supposed to be available to me. I’m too painfully aware that if I were to indulge these impulses, the likely target of my fury would be someone who looks like me just as in Basketball Wives. Look to none other than Tami Roman who has revealed on the show and in follow up interviews the amount of abuse and violence she has survived. Being close in age to Evelyn Lozada and having grown up a stone’s throw away from her in the Bronx, I would bet that she has experienced similar traumas.  But if 14 year old Amber Cole can become the target of malicious vivisection when she most needed sympathy and consolation, how much compassion do you think these women have ever experienced in the aftermath of their woundings whatever they may be? And I don’t know if other women were ever the perpetrators of these transgressions, but I understand intimately that it’s very hard to resist the constant message that you courted and deserved your mistreatment and too easy to lash out the nearest approximation of yourself. The one who seems the most like you, the one whose eyes mirror your own pain and indignation, the one who could be your best healing agent like a blast of cool air in claustrophobic heat is the one you immediately label enemy and set out to vanquish.

If you are a woman of conscience, however,  you make efforts to restrain, reflect and resist, sometimes to our own detriment.  How many times have I checked myself while someone - most likely a sister — has wanted to jump bad with me on the subway over trivia.  I will politick and spiritualize myself out of throwing my hands up even as she comes for me. I don’t think there is a progressive woman of color who hasn’t been in the same situation and later said herself, “I'm reminding myself that somebody has probably hurt her when homegirl didn't thinking twice about hurting me.” It's a scary thought that douses our anger with fear. Where has our instinct for self-preservation gone and what will become of us if we do not recover it? 

Despair builds upon acrimony, and no amount of socio-political understanding of internalized oppression diffuses it. Something must be done with these feelings. Something acceptable. And lots of self-destructive shit is acceptable.  I chose to suppress my ugly feelings with unhealthy food or project them onto someone on TV. Usually I did both at the same time. 

Yet I would watch Basketball Wives, telling myself that I was so much better than Ev or Tami because I know how to act, perhaps all along wishing I could bring wreck with no consequences except maybe a legion of fans who will respect how real I keeps it, a pseudo-celebrity boyfriend, and maybe even my own TV show. But that doesn’t happen in the real world (no pun intended) to sisters who play by the rules never mind those who elect to live down to the stereotypes. No wonder the more heinous the cast of Basketball Wives behaved, the more cathartic it became to my wounded and furious psyche. As with all addictive substances, however, the medicinal effect is short-lived yet the toxicity lingers. Just like an undetected cancer, it feeds on its host and others around her.  

As I discover and practice healthier ways to explore, accept and express my darker emotions, it becomes easier to walk my talk not only as a cultural activist practicing and promoting media literacy but also an evolving spiritual being committed to limiting my ingestion of toxins. That said, I know that I am still far from impervious to the highly addictive drug that is reality TV.  After all, the original toxins — oppression in all its forms — endure unmitigated. But just as the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, the very reasons why Basketball Wives appeals to me are the same reasons it is imperative that I tune it out. 

Arguing with Audre: On My Impending Mastectomy and Reconstruction

As a strident feminist of color, of course, I would read Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals now that I myself was diagnosed with breast cancer. In addition to reading practical books with strategies for beating the illness, I also wanted food for the soul that would enable me as a spiritual being and political animal to draw meaning from the experience. What better to read than the memoirs of radical cultural activists such as Fred Ho and Audre Lorde?

I had long been an admirer of Mother Lorde's work, but I had never had the courage to read the work she produced during her battle with first breast and then later liver cancer. That's how much fear the mere word instilled in me. I was oblivious to just how prevalent this illness is even when my best friend was diagnosed with and survived ovarian cancer in 2003 and my own grandmother succumbed to colon cancer in 2005.

Fear is hereditary it seems. My own mother is a 12-year breast cancer survivor and did not even know she had it. Neither did my father. I remember back in 1993 when they found a lump in her right breast. My only image is of my mother crying quietly as they wheeled her into surgery. Having never been in the hospital her entire life except to birth her three children, Ma was frightened. I remember several hours later the doctor telling us, “It was nothing.”

Once the shock of my own diagnosis had passed and I entered warrior mode, my mother and I shared scars. I showed her the fine needle marks of the two spots where my left breast had been biopsied, and she showed me where she received radiation. “Radiation?” My reaction surprised her. She reminded me of the time that I accompanied her and my father to the hospital for her daily radiation treatment. But they don’t give radiation to people who don’t have cancer, do they? After all, radiation can cause cancer.

She told me she still had her records, and I asked her to find them. Sure enough, in 2000 my mother had been diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, underwent a lumpectomy and had twenty rounds of radiation. It never registered to either of my parents that she was being treated for breast cancer. They just did as the doctors told them and then moved on with their lives.

This discovery left me with a variety of thoughts and emotions. First was the angry thought. What the fuck kind of medical care do we have in this country that a 69-year old woman can be treated for breast cancer and never know it? Then I imagined all the times I sat in waiting rooms over the years, completing family histories across a wooden clipboard with a chained pen and checking No in the box next to cancer. Had I known that my mother had breast cancer, I certainly would have been more vigilant in minding the health of my breasts. I finally settled on the positive. Given her personality, it’s probably best that Ma did not know she had breast cancer, and all that matters now is that she blazed the survivor trail, and I could follow in her footsteps.

Of course, being my own woman, I have to pack different tools for my journey to survivorship. My mother, for example, would rather I not read so much. I had been reading Straight from the Hope: Letters of Hope and Inspiration from Survivors of Breast Cancer and that, coupled with the counseling I had been undergoing (which I began several months before I was diagnosed), helped spurred a healing crisis. As much as the letters delivered on the promise of hope and inspiration, they also triggered long-denied and deeply suppressed loneliness over my challenge in finding a life partner. So many of the women wrote about the men who loved them and stood by them as they faced breast cancer despite all the prices it exacts, from the lost of breasts to the threat of death. I call this a healing crisis because this despair needed to be excavated, felt and cleared if I was going to not only defeat cancer but truly become holistically well. Perhaps it’s because it is difficult for them to watch me sob over things that seem unrelated to my immediate circumstances, but my parents wish I would just focus on getting well. My father in particular understands why a cancer diagnosis would compel me to evaluate my life, but if he had his way, I’d cut it all this painful introspection. I have to remind my parents that my tears are a sign that I am getting well because I am going to the root of my dis-ease.

And I do moderate my cancer-related reading. I read enough to satisfy whatever desire I have in the moment for information or inspiration, and just when I brush against the edge of overwhelm, I stop. This is not typical for me who loves to read and can research incessantly once I become taken with a subject. I recognize that each person who embarks on the cancer journey must do whatever she feels is right for her, and I respect my own choices. Some people like my mother want to entrust themselves to their doctors and, to the best of their ability, focus on other aspects of their lives. Others choose to make confronting the illness their full-time job.

Knowing myself fairly well, I knew from the start that the best thing for me fell somewhere between the two extremes. The kind of person that I am, I cannot beat cancer by becoming a full-time patient. For someone like me, that’s giving the disease too much power. (That is the same reason why, when I begin chemotherapy, I will cut and donate my hair, shave my head and use it as an excuse to stock up on the hats, scarves and earrings I love so much.) By the same token, I cannot wait for my doctors to treat me but rather proactively take actions – change my diet, return to my meditation practice, become a client of You Can Thrive where I receive complementary treatments such as Reiki and acupuncture etc. – to heal myself. (It also means excising things from life – habits, beliefs and people – that do not serve me.) I continue to finish working toward my MFA in writing and producing for television, pursue my interest in burlesque with Pink Light Burlesque, and otherwise live my life – the life I find worth fighting for – on my terms.

Perhaps this is why I find myself becoming angry with Mother Lorde when I read the following passage in her cancer journals:

I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated in a new sense of self. The absence of my breast is a recurrent sadness, but certainly not one that dominates my life. I miss it, sometimes piercingly. When other one-breasted women hide behind the mask of prosthesis or the dangerous fantasy of reconstruction, I find little support in the broader female environment for my rejection of what I feel is cosmetic sham. But I believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other. For instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended on Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?

I don’t know if this is a quirk all my own, but it’s not easy for me to fight with an ideological titan such as Audre Lorde even in my head, but fight with her I did. It’s not lost on me that she lost her breast at a time when breast cancer treatment was far more limited and reconstruction was only available to the economically privileged. (It is now federal law that for women whose health insurance covers mastectomies, the company must also cover reconstruction. This right includes women covered by Medicaid. In fact, I am insured under a special Medicaid program created specifically for people diagnosed with certain cancers.) I recognize that there is much greater awareness and less stigma of breast cancer in the twenty-two years since she first wrote that passage. I have no doubt that if Mother Lorde were alive today she would have radical critique of pink ribbon culture as well as a thorough analysis of the discrepancies in the prevention and treatment of women of color, queer women and poor and working-class women, and that she would experience and acknowledge a wider acceptance of her desire not to hide her mastectomy if she stuck with that decision.

Still I was angry at Audre. I stewed over that passage and wrote furiously in my journal. I understood and respected her point on an intellectual level. She meant that being able to undergo reconstruction can allow someone to become politically complacent about the institutionalized oppression that perpetuates breast cancer. When Audre wrote about what might happen if an army of single-breasted women descended on the capitol demanding change, I saw it. The image compelled me as an activist and an artist. If I did not have the option of reconstruction, I would step without hesitation into that vision and be part of it.

But as a socially conscious woman, I would be a part of such an action whether or not I underwent reconstruction, and I would like to think that I and my saline implants would not have my integrity questioned. I haven’t finished The Cancer Journals, and so perhaps she undergoes a shift of which I’m not yet aware, but thus far Audre talks about reconstruction without considering the blessings she had that made it easier to forgo one. She had a partner. She had children. She had recognition for the work she did. For what of someone like me who is young, single and hopeful that such love and appreciation is still possible for me, especially if I can transform myself through my journey back to wellness?

The ironic thing about my anger at Mother Lorde is that my own mother wants me to conserve my breast. She would rather I have chemotherapy before surgery in an effort to shrink the tumor with the hope that a lumpectomy will suffice. My breast surgeon would comply with my wishes if this was something I chose to do, but I am following my instinct which is to heed his recommendation: give up my breast. While I don't fool myself that I will sail through this without great emotional pain, I am at peace with my choice. Truth be told, reconstruction makes it much easier even though the method I have chosen means that I will not wake up from surgery with an already reconstructed breast to ease the pain of the natural one I lost.

The fantasy Mother Lorde dismisses is about having a certain quality of life and making a decision to not acquiesce everything the disease attempts to demand. I wrote in my journal:

Must I take on every battle? Is this one not enough? Can I sit out the body image struggle, too? The truth is I can’t. Not for a minute. No amount of reconstruction – no matter how aesthetically pleasing to the Western standard of beauty it may be to the immediate eye – is going to make me forget that my God-given breast is gone, a casualty to this disease.

How does the fantasy of reconstruction favor me, if I am lucky enough to meet a man with whom I want to be intimate with in all ways, when I have to reveal and explain to him all the complexities – physical, emotional, spiritual -- of being a breast cancer survivor? There is nothing about replacing my natural breast with an implant that is going to permit me to lie to myself ever about what I am going through right now. On the contrary, it will be a constant reminder. While my feelings, thoughts and beliefs towards the experience may change and even improve over time, I will never be done with it. I can never forget.

How is that a fantasy when there’s no escape but only reminders?

And as I process my anger at Mother Lorde, I find myself wishing that she was alive so I can argue with her. The existence of my anger reminds me that I am very much alive and well, and had she herself survived cancer, Audre probably would have welcomed a loving yet vigorous debate with a younger feminist of color and fellow cancer warrioress. She remains an inspiration to me, and I embrace her challenge to remain politically vigilant in the ongoing war against cancer. I first must win the personal battle, however, and that means making the unapologetic choices that enable me to keep faith that more joy awaits me no matter what challenges oppression might dish.