It Was All a Dream Quotes

“The reason why the Willie Horton ad is so important in the political landscape—it wasn’t just about a racist ad that misrepresented the furlough process,” said Marcia Chatelain, a Georgetown University professor of African American history, in 2018. “But it also taught the Democrats that in order to win elections, they have to mirror some of the racially inflected language of tough on crime.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“A twenty-four-hour stretch in early September 1990 marks an important but largely unknown juncture in the history of America’s complex history with drugs. On September 5, “Freeway” Ricky Ross pleaded guilty to a drug conspiracy count in a Cincinnati courtroom. The notorious crack kingpin had shifted his multi-million-dollar drug operation to the Midwest to stake claim on a higher profit margin. He was later sentenced to 121 months.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“Money was king. It provided access to people, places, and opportunities, and the culture drilled into the country’s psyche that wealth was good and poverty was evil. Coming from a community with few to no resources or avenues for upward advancement, drug dealing represented a way to acquire wealth in immediate fashion.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“For young Black folks just trying to make it in neighborhoods gutted by abandonment and disinvestment, drug dealing was about money and a lack of other opportunities. Hustling was appealing because one could walk out their door and have money in their pocket by the end of the day. Of course, the drug game is way more complex than that, but for many, it beat filling out endless applications for minimum-wage jobs they’d have to be lucky to get.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“Almost immediately, amid an avalanche of media attention of Bias’s death, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. It was signed so quickly that no one really took the time to understand its long-term ramifications, of which there many. “It was a real low point and dark chapter in the war on drugs,” Michael Collins, deputy director of the Drug Policy Alliance’s Office of National Affairs, said on the thirtieth anniversary of Bias’s death in 2016. “It was a point where hysteria dominated over evidence, and it was really the catalyst for a lot of the prison problems we are trying to reform today.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“In 1986, shortly after Chris’s fourteenth birthday, came a moment that would permanently alter drug enforcement polices moving forward. On June 19, just two days after being selected second overall by the defending champion Boston Celtics, Len Bias died from an overdose, and the world stopped. Bias was a basketball superhero. He had dominated college basketball at the University of Maryland with a combination of force, beauty, grace, and destruction that made him a true one-of-one. In joining the Celtics, he was pinned to become Michael Jordan’s greatest rival (the two had phenomenal duels in college) and prolong the dynasty in Boston, where Larry Bird had led the team to three titles in the last six years. Rumors spread in the press that Bias died after smoking crack. Cocaine, usually associated with lavish white communities and those living in the lap of luxury, was seen as an addiction. But crack was a crime. The drug, far cheaper than powder cocaine, was largely associated with Black communities and was being held significantly responsible for the erosion of society’s moral fabric.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“By January 1983, in the midst of a recession, Black unemployment had reached an astounding 21.2 percent. While American history frequently chooses to romanticize him, there was perhaps no bigger antagonist to Black Americans, legislatively at least, than President Ronald Reagan. His economic agenda, better known as “Reaganomics,” disproportionately harmed lower-income Black communities. Reagan cut funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, and his emphasis on “trickle-down” economics was starving Black communities. The former Hollywood-actor-turned-California-governor-turned-American-president understood the value of crippling Black lives.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“On October 14, 1982, less than a month before Republicans would suffer an embarrassing showing in the midterm elections, Reagan declared a new front in the war on drugs—establishing a dozen task forces under the direction of the attorney general “to mount an intensive and coordinated campaign against international and domestic drug trafficking and other organized criminal enterprises.” But three years later, Reagan called the Contras, who were seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, “our brothers” and “freedom fighters” who were “more equal of our Founding Fathers.” They were also, as National Security Council Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North knew, protecting traffickers and running cocaine themselves. “We permitted narcotics,” then-U.S. senator John Kerry said at a 1988 subcommittee hearing on drugs, terrorism, and international operations. “We were complicitous as a country in narcotics traffic at the same time as we’re spending countless dollars in this country to try to get rid of this problem. It’s mind-boggling.” “I don’t know if we’ve got the worst intelligence system in the world,” Kerry blasted.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“Under Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, the war on drugs intensified, fueled not just by domestic policy, but by foreign entanglements as well. The Reagan administration funneled money to right-wing paramilitaries in Central and South America, offering protection to cocaine traffickers like Nicaragua’s Manuel Noriega.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“In 1973, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller signed into law the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which mandated harsh minimum sentences of fifteen years for the sale or possession of even small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. Years later, statistics would show that almost 90 percent of those convicted under these laws were either Black or Latino. And throughout the 1970s, Black folks were twice as likely as white people to be arrested on drug-related offenses. By the eighties, when the young Christopher Wallace was sitting on the stoop, that number ballooned to five times as likely.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“the New York Times reported that heroin usage by American troops in Vietnam “had reached epidemic proportions.” “Tens of thousands of soldiers are going back as walking time bombs,” an officer was reported as saying. “And the sad thing is there is no real program under way, despite what my superiors say, to salvage these guys.” They were returning from a war they were hated for to a country unwilling or unable to help them with their addictions. This was particularly hard for Black veterans, and the armed forces had a disproportionately high percentage of Black service members. Back in 1965, approximately 11 percent of the population was Black, but a quarter of Americans who died in combat in Vietnam were Black, and in 1967, 23 percent of combat troops were Black. And back home, resources and tax dollars were being stripped from densely populated areas where the Black population was high. The quality of the schools and neighborhoods diminished.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him

“In New York, thirteen Black Panthers were unanimously acquitted on charges of conspiring to bomb department stores and police stations and murder cops in what history has come to call the Panther 21 Trial. One of those thirteen was an eight-months-pregnant woman born Alice Faye Williams, known now as Afeni Shakur. She decided to represent herself throughout the trial after reading Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me, and as a three-hundred-year prison sentence hung over her head, Shakur spent eleven months in prison before being acquitted.”
― Justin Tinsley, It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him