How Big Tobacco made menthol racial

Keith Wailoo opens his engrossing new book with a vintage Dave Chapelle sketch, and a line from an imagined quiz show called "I Know Black People." Salon spoke recently to Wailoo,a Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, about his new book "Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette." The industry realizes the growth of the smoking market in the 1920s after World War I has produced a huge growth in smokers, but it's also produced something called smokers' throat, the almost omnipresent cough. They study things like drug use to understand what is the connection between the increasing use of marijuana or harder drugs and menthol use, and maybe that's also our market. From a Republican administration, but a physician, and a Black man, he's dedicated his life to kind of improving the health of African Americans, he goes right at the industry in a scathing fashion.