Radar's resident race expert answers the questions you're too afraid to ask. First up, blacks and menthols

Every time I bum a cigarette off a black person, I get a Kool or a Newport. Why do African Americans smoke menthols? Is it a cultural thing, like Chaka Khan?—Anonymous

Welcome to the first ever installment of The Ethnicist. Once a month we'll answer the impolitic questions you've been wondering about but have been too busy with important projects and inter-office hookups—okay, felt too totally embarrassed—to ask. Questions like: Why do certain black guys like big butts and why can't they lie about it? Are Jews truly good with money? Do Koreans really eat dogs? (And if so, who brings them their slippers and newspapers?)

First up, a question that has become like a modern-day koan—often asked but never actually answered: Why do so many black people smoke menthols? In an effort to track down the answer, we checked in with all black people—it was exhausting—and it turns out, actually, that not all of them smoke menthols or even cigarettes. Some of them just smoke blunts. Kidding! But really, three out of four black Americans who smoke cigarettes smoke menthols, compared to only one out of four white Americans. Your Ethnicist found a few reasons why.

Three out of four black Americans who smoke cigarettes smoke menthols, compared to only one out of four white AmericansBack in the 1920s, when mentholated cigarettes were first introduced, their cool, refreshing taste made them popular with folks white and black alike. But Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University, suggested that the sensation you get from a menthol cigarette—a rush of cold, a feeling like your lungs are clearing—might have appealed particularly to black people because of its similarity to eucalyptus- or menthol-laced over-the-counter cold medications. Such meds were popular with blacks who, perhaps not surprisingly, had limited access to health care. For a time, in fact, people thought menthols did have medicinal benefits and that they were healthier than regular cigarettes.

Once Big Tobacco saw their product catching fire with this demographic, they began a long-term marketing campaign targeting black consumers. By the 1960s, magazines like Ebony and Jet were packed with cigarette advertisements that featured African-American models and referenced black culture, like Lorillard's "Newport is a whole new bag of menthol smoking" (after James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag") and R.J. Reynold's "Different Smokes for Different Folks" (a nod to a Sly Stone hit) campaign for Salem Extra. Some of the ads seemed almost progressive, encouraging the era's burgeoning black middle class to "Come Up to the Kool Taste," and promising them that smoking a Kool was "Like riding a Rolls Royce."

To make further inroads, the tobacco companies loudly supported the Civil Rights Movement and later made regular and significant contributions to organizations like the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. By the early '80s, when a young Kool G Rap (neé Nathaniel Wilson) was growing up in Queens, mentholated cigarettes had become so ingrained in the black community they were widely considered the Official Cigarettes of Black Folks. (Kool G, you may recall, came to prominence in the late '80s as a member of Marley Marl's Juice Crew.) "When you're first introduced to smoking it's more likely to be from one of your own, and certain brands are already the brand of choice in certain areas, aaiight?" says the rapper, whose MySpace profile features a photo of him sucking on a 100. "In my case it was mainly Newports and Kools. If I was white, I might have ended up smoking Marlboros 'cause that's what most of the white kids in my school smoked." Kool G says that he didn't intend for his name to be derivative of the cigarette brand. But then, he muses, "Whatever you're subjected to has the greatest influence on you, aaiight?"

Tobacco companies made regular and significant contributions to organizations like the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil RightsAaiight. That tobacco companies creepily court smokers is not exactly a shocker—we all know that the industry is made up of immoral fat dudes who would hand out cigarettes in the playground if they thought they could get away with it. But the black people-menthols metric has had some particularly nasty results: According to the CDC, African Americans are at least 50 percent more likely to develop lung cancer than white smokers, which is partly because African Americans metabolize nicotine more slowly. Recent research from Harvard also suggests that this has something to do with the mint sticks—the cooling, anesthetic effect once seen as medicinally benecifial may actually just be numbing the throat enough to facilitate deeper inhalation. Which, when you think about it, is totally uncool.

Illustrations: Alex Eben Meyer

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