How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #4
Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus—and at the very same time—that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies. (97)
There's a lot of irony running through this book, but this tops them all. Skloot explains how the first HeLa cell factory was established at the Tuskegee Institute. While the establishment there gave black scientists and techs new employment opportunities, it didn't really open up the benefits of research to a more diverse population. And the moment a for-profit biotech company began trading in HeLa cells, these black scientists lost their jobs.
Quote #5
"You know, white folks and black folks all buried over top of each other in here. I guess old white granddaddy and his brothers was buried in here too. Really no tellin who in this ground now." Only thing he knew for sure, he said, was that there was something beautiful about the idea of slave-owning white Lackses being buried under their black kin. (122)
Skloot learns that the Lacks family has white ancestors, white slave-owners having children with their female slaves. But the only form of equality that the black Lackses experienced was when they were buried in the same family graveyard. Though the anonymity of the family cemetery brings grief to Deborah (her mother's grave is unmarked), it also offers a kind of comfort that segregation can't exist here.
Quote #6
Everyone I talked to swore race relations were never bad in Clover. But they also said Lacks Town was only about twelve miles from the local Lynch Tree, and that the Ku Klux Klan held meetings on a school baseball field less than ten miles from Clover's Main Street until well into the 1980s. (124)
Skloot raises an important question here: does the perception of racial tension diminish the more a person's exposed to it? It seems to be the case in Lacks Town, Henrietta's impoverished hometown, which seems to have been surrounded by the worst examples of racist behavior. This desensitization might be a coping mechanism, but it doesn't make the injustice disappear.