For these men and others with whom we spoke, questions about responsibility and health elicited responses using us, we, our, and other autobiographical monikers that connoted communal responsibility. We implied populations forged by race and ethnicity—we as African Americans—as well as by assumed common attitudes and experiences—“our family, our parents.” We, as Chicago Defender editor Robert S. Abbott once put it, implied “the Race.”2 Through this framework, black men in Tennessee generally provided profoundly different replies about government intervention into health and health care than
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