African-Americans who smoke tend to smoke menthol cigarettes. From an anti-smoking website:

If it seems like most smokers in black communities smoke menthol cigarettes, it’s not a coincidence. For years, the tobacco industry has heavily targeted African Americans with menthol cigarette marketing through culturally-tailored advertising images and messages. Their marketing has worked. In the U.S., nearly nine out of 10 black smokers aged 12 years and older prefer menthol cigarettes.3 In fact, African-American cigarette smokers are nearly 11 times more likely to use menthol cigarettes than white smokers.

From the Wall Street Journal a few months ago:

FDA Seeks Ban on Menthol Cigarettes Big Tobacco defends the flavored cigarettes and raises possibility of a legal battle

By Jennifer Maloney and Tom McGinty

Updated Nov. 15, 2018 1:18 p.m. ET U.S. regulators are seeking a nationwide ban on menthol cigarettes, a move that would remove nearly a third of the roughly 250 billion cigarettes sold annually in the country.

But perhaps this racial difference is not just nurture but also nature? From PLOS:

An African-specific haplotype in MRGPRX4 is associated with menthol cigarette smoking Julia Kozlitina et al

Published: February 15, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007916 Abstract

In the U.S., more than 80% of African-American smokers use mentholated cigarettes, compared to less than 30% of Caucasian smokers. The reasons for these differences are not well understood. To determine if genetic variation contributes to mentholated cigarette smoking, we performed an exome-wide association analysis in a multiethnic population-based sample from Dallas, TX (N = 561). Findings were replicated in an independent cohort of African Americans from Washington, DC (N = 741). We identified a haplotype of MRGPRX4 (composed of rs7102322[G], encoding N245S, and rs61733596[G], T43T), that was associated with a 5-to-8 fold increase in the odds of menthol cigarette smoking. The variants are present solely in persons of African ancestry. Functional studies indicated that the variant G protein-coupled receptor encoded by MRGPRX4 displays reduced agonism in both arrestin-based and G protein-based assays, and alteration of agonism by menthol. These data indicate that genetic variation in MRGPRX4 contributes to inter-individual and inter-ethnic differences in the preference for mentholated cigarettes, and that the existence of genetic factors predisposing vulnerable populations to mentholated cigarette smoking can inform tobacco control and public health policies.

I’m not going to take this Single Gene of Large Effect announcement too seriously yet because it sounds more like the kind of discoveries that got a lot of publicity 15 years ago but didn’t always pan out well in replications. I’d first want to run some reality checks, such as: Do sub-Saharan blacks in Britain and France also traditionally prefer menthol cigarettes?

A similar stereotype among market researchers is that black consumers really like grape soda.