Cool Consumers
Cool Consumers: Laurie Taylor explores the construction of 'cool' music and the ways in which menthol cigarettes came to be marketed as the 'cool' choice for Black Americans.
Cool Consumers: Laurie Taylor considers how music acquires the social connotations of βcoolβ & its implicit association with youth and outsider status. He's joined by Jo Haynes, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Also, the way in which racial marketing promoted menthol cigarettes to African Americans, linking them to notions of βcoolβ, with enduringly harmful effect. Keith Wailoo, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, unpacks a poignant and intricate story which reveals why 85% of Black smokers prefer menthol brands and how difficult it has been to ban them, not least because of the way that tobacco companies forged deep connections with Black media publishers and civil rights campaigners. He argues that the cry of 'I can't breathe' has multiple meanings in America's painful racial history.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
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Guests and Further Reading
Jo Haynes, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Bristol
Β by Jo Haynes & Β RaphaΓ«l Nowak, published in the British Journal of Sociology
Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette by Keith WailooΒ (University of Chicago Press)
Broadcasts
- Wed 22 Sep 2021 16:00ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
- Mon 27 Sep 2021 00:15ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
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ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ Thinking Allowed is produced in partnership with The Open University
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