VENTURA : Student Group Says: ‘Smoking Is Slavery’

It has all the components of a classic billboard advertisement: bright colors, bold statement, beautiful woman clasping product.

Except that the woman is in shackles and chains and the words boldly emblazoned across the canvas spell out “Smoking Is Slavery.”

The enslaved woman staring down from the painting, her long fingerswrapped around a burning cigarette, embodies what members of the African American Women’s Group at Ventura High School think about smoking.

About 10 members of the group spent Friday creating the mural, which will be displayed at a conference for African American women in Oxnard today.

The conference will focus on health issues, particularly on tobacco use among African American women, which health studies show is one of the few ethnic groups with an increasing rate of smokers.

“We chose to take all the vocabulary from advertising for this,” said M.B. Hanrahan,, who helped the girls design and draw the canvas. “And the girls thought the ‘Smoking Is Slavery’ statement was one of the strongest things we could say to make our point.”

To help the girls design the canvas, Hanrahan brought in back issues of women’s magazines and told them to look carefully at the advertisements for cigarettes. Drawing on those glamorous images, they sketched out what they wanted to see on the canvas.

Junior Monique Brown, 16, said she was surprised when she started looking closely at the way African American women are portrayed by tobacco advertisers.

“Those advertisements say, ‘Here, you can be so glamorous too,’ ” Brown said. “We’re just been fed this stuff. They just use those women to attract people. Most of those models probably don’t even smoke.”

Although none of the girls said they smoke, they said they are angry that their peers are targeted by advertisers. The mural was a way to show some of that outrage, they said.

“I’m just really glad we did it,” said sophomore Shara (Duncan, 15. “I’m proud of us.”