By Ekow N. Yankah, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo
School of Law at Yeshiva University
* * *
When crack hit America in the mid-1980s, for
African-Americans, to borrow from Ta-Nehisi Coates, civilization fell.
Crack embodied instant and fatal addiction; we saw
endless images of thin, ravaged bodies, always black, as though from a famined
land.
* FUNNY (IN AN IRONIC, NOT "HA-HA" SENSE), MY
BUDDY JOEY AND I WERE DISCUSSING THIS AT LUNCH TODAY; WE'RE BOTH IN OUR 50's
AND REMEMBER THE CRACK EPIDEMIC - JOEY "PROFESSIONALLY," SINCE HE WAS
AN EMT AT THE TIME AND LATER AN EMERGENCY ROOM HEAD RN.
* SPECIFICALLY WE WERE TALKING ABOUT "CRACK
BABIES." BOTH OF US REMEMBER THEM COMING IN "WHITE" AS WELL AS
BLACK AND BROWN.
(*SMIRK*)
* SO MUCH FOR "ALWAYS BLACK."
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
But mostly, crack meant shocking violence, terrifying
gangs and hollowed-out inner cities.
For those living in crack-plagued areas, the devastation
was all too real. Children learned which ways home were safe and which gang to
join to avoid beatings, or worse.
Even for those of us African-Americans living at a relatively
safe distance, there were soul-deadening costs. City centers, and by extension
black neighborhoods, were seen in the national imagination as lawless
landscapes. We were warned of a new wave of “super predators,” young, faceless
black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans. The addicted, those who preyed
on them and those caught by class, geography and especially race were swept
together. At the edges of my 12-year-old mind was the ominous sense that no
matter how far crack was from my actual life, I was somehow associated with the
scourge.
* BLACK ON BLACK VIOLENCE IS THE MOST PREVALENT VIOLENCE;
IF THE REALITY OFFENDS... SO BE IT.
Once again, African-Americans were cast as pathological,
an indistinguishable and unsympathetic mass.
* AS SOMEONE WHO CAME TO AGE IN THE '70's I CAN ATTEST
THAT IT WAS JUST THE OPPOSITE. BLACKS IN THE '70's AND '80's WERE DELIBERATELY
PORTRAYED AS ROLE MODELS IN LARGE PART. THINK "GOOD TIMES." THINK
"FAT ALBERT." THINK "ALL IN THE FAMILY" AND "THE
JEFFERSONS." THINK "THE BILL COSBY SHOW." THINK THE JACKSON FIVE
AND THEN MICHAEL JACKSON. FOLKS... THE '70's AND '80's WERE THE ANTI-RACIST YEARS!
The plight of Black America was evidence of its
collective moral failure — of welfare mothers and rock-slinging thugs — and a
reason to cut off all help.
* WHAT IS THIS BOZO TALKING ABOUT...?!?! THE REASON WHY
THE '90's BECAME THE ERA WHERE GINGRICH AND CLINTON CLAIMED TO "END
WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT" WAS IN REACTION TO THE EXCESSES OF THE WELFARE
STATISM OF THE MID-'60's THRU THE EARLY-'90's!
Blacks would just have to pull themselves out of the
crack epidemic.
* Er... AGAIN... MY BUDDY JOEY WAS "PULLING BLACKS OUT OF
THE CRACK EPIDEMIC" - LITERALLY!
(*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)
Until then, the only answer lay in cordoning off the
wreckage with militarized policing.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
The dormant carrier of this ill-defined disease, harboring
a mix of criminality and violence, was the young black male.
* "DORMANT?" (PERHAPS HE MEANT
"DOMINANT?")
(*JUST... SHRUGGING*)
By my high school years there was no doubting the danger
strangers saw radiating off me. When I was in college in the early 1990s, my
short dreadlocks meant older women would cross the street to avoid me.
Thirty years later, America is again seeing an epidemic
of drug addiction, particularly heroin. The surge is so great that for the
first time in generations, mortality among young white adults has risen. But
the national attitude toward drug addiction is utterly different.
* NOT MINE!
(*GUFFAW*)
Even Republican presidential candidates are eschewing the
perennial tough-on-drugs speeches and opening up about struggles within their
own families.
* THEY ARE...???
More important, police chiefs in the cities most affected
by heroin are responding not by invoking military metaphors, weapons and
tactics but by ensuring that police officers save lives and get people into
rehab. As one former narcotics officer described his change of heart on
addiction, “These are people and they have a purpose in life and we can’t as
law enforcement look at them any other way.”
* Hmm... I DON'T KNOW WHICH COPS THIS CLOWN (Er... I MEAN
"LEARNED PROFESSOR") HAS BEEN TALKING TO... BUT THEY'RE NOT THE COPS
I KNOW!
(*GUFFAW*)
In his inability to name the change that allowed this
epiphany, his words also capture our cringe-worthy self-denial.
* SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, PROFESSOR!
(*STILL LAUGHING*)
Suddenly, police officers understand crime as a sign of
underlying addiction requiring coordinated assistance, rather than a scourge to
be eradicated.
* BULL$HIT.
It is hard to describe the bittersweet sting that many
African-Americans feel witnessing this national embrace of addicts. It is
heartening to see the eclipse of the generations-long failed war on drugs. But
black Americans are also knowingly weary and embittered by the absence of such
enlightened thinking when those in our own families were similarly wounded.
* AH... "ENLIGHTENED THINKING..."
(*SMIRKING AS I SNORT*)
* AND BY "SNORT" I DON'T MEAN COKE... OR
HEROIN!
(*WINK*)
When the face of addiction had dark skin, this nation’s
police did not see sons and daughters, sister and brothers. They saw “brothas,”
young thugs to be locked up, rather than “people with a purpose in life.”
* I SEE SCUMBAGS - WHATEVER THE COLOR!
(*SHRUG*)
To be clear, no one laments the violence that the “crack
bomb” set off in inner cities more than African-Americans. But while shootings,
beatings and robberies cannot be tolerated anywhere, the heroin epidemic shows
that how we respond to the crimes accompanying addiction depends on how much we
care about the victims of crime and those in the grip of addiction.
* Umm... NO; IT SHOWS THAT WE HATE VIOLENT PREDATORS MORE
THAN PLAIN OL' STRUNG OUT DRUGGIES.
(*SHRUG*)
White heroin addicts get overdose treatment...
* DON'T BLAME ME! THE ONLY "TREATMENT" I'D GIVE
'EM WOULD BE TO FINANCE THEIR RIDE TO THE MORGUE AND PLANTING THEIR BODIES IN POTTER'S
FIELD!
...rehabilitation and reincorporation, a system that will
be there for them again and again and again. Black drug users got jail cells
and “Just Say No.”
* FRANKLY... I WANT 'EM ALL DEAD.
(*SHRUG*)
It would be cruel and perverse to seek equal abandonment
of those now struggling with addiction as payback for the failures of the ’80s.
Nor do I write in mere hopes of inducing cheap racial guilt.
* HA! HA! HA! SURE YOU DON'T, PROFESSOR...
(*STILL CHUCKLING*)
The hope, however vain, is that we learn from our meanest
moments.
Even today, as black communities face pressing problems
of addiction and chronic unemployment and the discrimination in hiring...
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
* MAN! HOW I WISH I HAD BEEN A BLACK WOMAN WHEN I
GRADUATED COLLEGE!
(*SNORT*)
...that helps to perpetuate it, many are dedicated to
ignoring racial prejudice.
Faced with searing examples of unconscionable police
violence against unarmed black men, of concocted justifications laid bare by
video, too many still speak of isolated cases and overblown racial hysteria.
With condescending finger-wagging, others recite the
deplorable statistics of violence within poor minority neighborhoods as though
racist policing were an antidote or excuse.
* THIS IS WHY BLACKS ARE SCREWED - POOR BLACKS ANYWAY.
FOLKS LIKE PROFESSOR YANKAH HERE WOULD ALLOW CRIME-RIDDEN NEIGHBORHOODS TO
REMAIN CRIME-RIDDEN NEIGHBORHOODS AS LONG AS "THE WHITE MAN" IS
REMOVED FOR THE SCENE. FRANKLY... IT'S DISGUSTING. SICK. SAD. DEPRESSING.
Both responses ignore that each spectacular moment of
unjustified police violence represents countless instances of institutionalized
racial control across generations.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
No sane community faced with addiction and crime would
invite or acquiesce to brutal policing as their fate, and no moral community
would impose it as a primary response. We do not have to wait until a problem
has a white face to answer with humanity.
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