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I grew up in Florida, not far from Disney World. But as much as I remember being surrounded by Mickey Mouse, I remember being surrounded by tobacco.

When I was a kid, I would walk past three convenience stores on my way to school, and every single one was papered with tobacco advertising, all below an adult’s waistline. Or, exactly at my eye level. It only got worse as more vaping and flavored tobacco products became more popular, and the colorful advertisements with candy flavors seemed even more appealing.

It got so bad that my parents decided to start driving me and my brothers to and from school, just to get away from all the propaganda.

But my experience was completely different from other kids at school. My neighborhood had mostly Black families, like mine, and my white peers in more affluent neighborhoods didn’t have to deal with tobacco on a daily basis.

I saw how these dynamics played out in my own family. My mother was a smoker, which led to my younger brother becoming asthmatic. My grandparents also smoked, and my grandmother ended up getting lung cancer. Even so, knowing how harmful tobacco was, my brother caved to peer pressure and advertising and ended up experimenting with products.

That’s when I started to get mad. How can something so bad for you become so normalized? And how was it OK that it was so much worse in my own community? Addiction seemed like less of a choice for us and more like an inevitability.

When I was in the seventh grade, I became an anti-tobacco activist because I wanted to fight for the health of my community and my family. At our Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) meetings, I met with Black kids from other neighborhoods who had similar experiences to me. My story wasn’t unique, it was actually part of a pattern.

As I got deeper into the issue, I learned that, like many other harms that mostly impact Black people, this inequity is no accident.

The tobacco industry has intentionally singled out Black people, successfully manipulating us into becoming addicted to tobacco products. They created marketing campaigns in Black media, partnered with Black musicians and artists, and advertised menthol cigarettes in Black neighborhoods more than in white neighborhoods. They set up shop in communities where they knew there was less funding for health education, and less access to resources to help people quit. They exploited discriminatory housing policies and economic hardship to exclusively flood Black housing projects with free or cheap menthol products.

But this isn’t just a part of our history. The tobacco industry continues to create higher demand for their product by researching and adjusting their products to repackage harm for different generations. And now, they have updated their playbook. Flavored tobacco products, and, most recently, vapes, are still heavily advertised, widely available and priced cheaper in Black communities, making them particularly appealing to people like me.

Today, Black people are more likely than white people to die from smoking-related diseases, and though they are more likely to try and quit, they’re less likely to succeed.

Despite this, I felt like people like me were being left out of the movement. The targeting of Black people was rarely brought up in meetings and was left off the agenda in statewide summits. I started to get frustrated and felt ignored. I realized that if I was going to fight for my community, I would have to make people listen. I ran for the Youth Advisory Board and took on a greater leadership role in the anti-tobacco space because, well, if not me, then who?

Now that I’m a student at Howard University, I remain committed to the cause because it intersects with so many issues that matter to me today.

What may seem to some like a small problem actually branches off into so many bigger things, and we have to address them all if we’re going to move forward. A perfect storm of white supremacist policies and practices, from redlining to a lack of access to health care, have chipped away at our armor and have made Black communities a target for Big Tobacco’s malicious tactics. Big Tobacco has zeroed in on families exactly like mine and has decided that our lives are less valuable than others, and they have turned Black death into a profitable business plan.

The pandemic, which is disproportionately hurting Black communities, has only exacerbated this problem. I see more of my peers taking up smoking because of the stress of daily life, and vapes have made it even easier to hide their habit from their parents and friends. And without a real campus, it’s been harder to educate people about the danger of tobacco in the Black community and grow this movement.

But even with these challenges, I also hear from people every day who want to quit and am proud to be able to provide them with resources to do so.

I do this work because my family, like all Black families, deserves to exist fully and freely. And I know that taking down Big Tobacco is a necessary fight that we can and will win. Their control can and must end with my generation.

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Allyssa Williams is a student at Howard University and a Youth Ambassador for the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.