When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

by Donovan X. Ramsey

When she finally concluded her research in 2015, the results were astounding: there were no significant differences in the development between children exposed to cocaine in utero and those who were not.

The myth of the crack baby was widely accepted as gospel, it seems, because it mapped so well onto existing ideas of Black biological inferiority and cultural pathology, and it stoked anxieties regarding violent crime and the cost of America’s social safety net. Indeed, in the form of the crack baby, America was delivered a perfect symbol for its animosity toward Black America—a ticking time bomb of violence and expense created because Black mothers cared too little about themselves and their offspring.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,” Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

From this emerged a Black America with two faces: a community either flourishing or languishing, depending on where the observer was standing.

Unbridled ambition requires a vehicle. Without one, it can torture those who have it, perverting their judgment until ambition meets opportunity and is finally satisfied. It seems that’s what happened for many young Blacks in the late 1970s determined to let “nothin’, nothin’ ” stand in their way. Cocaine seemed tailor-made for the moment. A stimulant, the substance gets into the bloodstream of users and intoxicates them, making them feel confident, energized, and serene. Those qualities, of course, made cocaine the ideal drug for Black youth at a time when we were either celebrating—or fighting to be one of those who were “movin’ on up.”

Cooke said she never thought it would, but she should have known better. The country’s appetite for stories of Black suffering and sickness is well documented, and Black drug addiction is one topic for which Americans have proven ravenous.

Williams argued that just a few sniffs of cocaine led to lifelong addiction in Black people, rendering the addict a constant menace until he was “eliminated.” For added effect, the doctor claimed cocaine had the double-whammy effect of making Black people both better marksmen and somehow impervious to gunshots, even when vital organs were hit.

In the 1970s, however, Americans developed two minds regarding drugs. They continued to believe in the Black drug fiend but also came to accept “experimentation” in whites as a hallmark of youth. At the absolute worst, addiction in whites was considered a sickness, a tragedy.

But what the evidence supports is more insidious: the crack epidemic was the consequence of the anti-Blackness that permeated and continues to permeate every facet of American society and public policy.

designed either to our detriment or with no regard for us at all. The crack epidemic was not the product of an anti-Black conspiracy but the product of an anti-Black system.