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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

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.

“I think housing humbles people. Nowadays, especially with social media, you can run around and pretend that you’re something that you’re not. When we grew up in the projects, we knew everybody’s parents was most likely on welfare. Everyone was receiving government assistance. So it wasn’t like you can say you’re doing better than me, because we’re actually living in the same neighborhood under the same conditions.

“By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires,” Atwater said. “So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.”

This period marked the birth of America’s racial double standard on drugs. While previous generations believed that drugs had a special impact on Blacks, they were simultaneously puritanical about drug use in whites. 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.