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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

I suppose we made it a slur because we feared what it represented, a rock bottom to which any of us could sink. That’s what children do when they’re in search of power over things that frighten us.

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.

the U.S. criminal legal system functions as a means of social control by targeting Black communities through the war on drugs.

In a diary entry from 1969, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman paraphrased Nixon’s private thoughts. Referring to the president as “P,” Haldeman wrote, “P emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

“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.”

It’s one thing to be thought of as a bad person. It’s another entirely to be thought of as so bad that you’re no longer a person.