the cure for racism is cancer

Tony Hoagland is using personification to give America a realistic aspect of a living being who can indeed catch cancer. He is using cancer as a synonym for a disease that humbles a person into considering all people to be equal. Beings that America itself is considered a white-american country by Hoagland he is hoping that something like cancer which has opened the cancer patients minds wide enough to ignore segregation  he is presuming that this too can happen to America. Cancer itself something incurable and deadly may be the only hope in Hoagland's eyes to get the American style take on life to change into something more formidable like the views these cancer patients develop after going through this traumatic experience. From his point of view people in the American society might need something horrific to force each-other to begin to love and appreciate considering we aren't so different after all as each and every one of us can end up in the same place being treated by people unlike us on the outside but going through the same problems on the inside.