Second, because of her racial and socio-economic status, Henrietta was vulnerable and may have felt she didn't have much of a choice when it came to giving consent. In 1951, at Hopkins, when Henrietta received treatment, the doctors, nurses, and technicians were white (31). Henrietta was not. She was taken to a "colored-only " operating room at the hospital that she had driven twenty miles to get to because it was the closest hospital that would treat black people (32, 15). Because of this racial and social divide (or one might say injustice) and because of how she was treated, Henrietta did not have much of a choice. She was a black, lower-class woman and for this reason Richard TeLinde did not ask her permission to take her tissues. Even if he had, Henrietta would not have been able to say no. Skloot describes this as a time of "benevolent deception " (63), where doctors withheld information from patients and patients didn't question doctors, especially when the doctors were white and the patients were black. This is what made Henrietta so vulnerable in the Hopkins setting. Additionally, no one thought to tell Henrietta afterwards what George Gey had discovered about her special tissues.
The racial and social divide between the Hopkins staff and the Lacks family allowed the Hopkins staff to withhold important information from them. This was apparent in Henrietta's case, but was also apparent after her death when the doctors at Hopkins asked Day, Henrietta's husband, if they could do an autopsy on her body. On the phone he refused, but once he was asked in person by a white doctor at the hospital, he gave in and let them do it (90). This is another example of vulnerability due to the difference in Day's racial and socio-economic status compared to the doctors'. Day had no choice but to succumb to their recommendations. The doctors wanted the autopsy so that they could take more tissue samples from Henrietta's body.
