Prostate cancer’s toll on Black men demands attention, not just survival: Justice B. Hill
- Published: Nov. 08, 2024, 5:30 a.m.
Columnist Justice B. Hill highlights the urgent need for greater awareness and equitable healthcare to combat prostate cancer's disproportionate impact on Black men, encouraging regular screenings and advocating for systemic change.Getty Images/Tetra images RF
I can’t fret about who will serve as our next president, because that matter settled itself Tuesday night. So, to dwell on it takes my mind off the present, off things that hold more personal significance.
Prostate cancer, for one.
I’m a survivor of a disease that takes thousands of men’s lives each year. I’m into Year No. 12 and counting. I’ve had a few friends who died from prostate cancer; I have more than a few friends and kin who are surviving it.
I want more to fit into the latter category. I want to celebrate their joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and me as survivors.
For years, Abdul-Jabbar has talked about his fistfight with prostate cancer. Back in August, he penned an essay for survivornet.com in which he expressed his thoughts about prostate cancer the same way I do — honestly and openly.
“No one wants an NBA legend dying on their watch,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “Imagine the Yelp reviews.”
Yelp won’t craft Abdul-Jabbar’s obituary, although it should honor him somehow. As for me, the website surely won’t write one for me.
Yet, I try to speak loudly like Abdul-Jabbar does about this horrific disease, a relatively slow-growing cancer. I know the statistics he cited. I’ve run them through my mind time after time over the last decade. They’ve proved as sobering now as then.
As a Black man, I understand well what Abdul-Jabbar, 73, said about prostate cancer: He and I were 60% more likely than white men to get diagnosed with it. Once we got the unsettling news, we were two to three times as likely as white men to die from prostate cancer.
Looking face to face with these grim statistics, Abdul-Jabbar and I bumped up against this concern, which was that Black men, victims of second-rate health care in America, were unlikely to know about the cancer till it was too late.
Oh, and it isn’t as if statistics favor Black Americans when the medical community tracks outcomes for other cancers. Overall, we have the highest cancer death rates and the shortest post-diagnosis survival times of any ethnic or racial group.
In his essay, Abdul-Jabbar called our healthcare system an insidious and damaging threat to the economic wellbeing of Black folk. He pointed his words, however, at more than just prostate cancer.
Think about strokes, diabetes and heart problems, because they too shorten the lives of people of color, Abdul-Jabbar wrote.
Turn those statistics around, and I’d be willing to bet white Americans wouldn’t accept such dismal outcomes.
Sadly, I don’t see improvement coming, not even here, where Cleveland Clinic has led the way into best practices on prostate cancer. I’ve been crossing my fingers in hopes the hospital will record a breakthrough.
Better still, I’ve been praying for God’s help.
In the spotlight of today, all I can do is turn first to Him and then reiterate what Abdul-Jabbar wrote, which was to advise Black males to get their prostate examinations on the regular.
Whether they’ll listen to him or me, I can’t say with certainty. But I can say they’ll be hearing me bang the drum about prostate cancer the remainder of my living years.
Because I want to see prostate cancer disappear as the scourge of Black men it has become today.
Justice B. Hill grew up and still lives in the Glenville neighborhood. In his over 25 years in daily journalism, he wrote and edited for several newspapers before settling into a professorship at Ohio University. He quit teaching there on May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He continues to do both.
Comments