TOLERANCE.ORG
LESSON 5
© 2010, 2012 BY MICHELLE ALEXANDER. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE NEW PRESS.
TEACHING THE NEW JIM CROW
Numerous paths were available to us, as a nation, in the wake of the crack crisis, yet for
reasons traceable largely to racial politics and fear mongering we chose war. Conservatives
found they could finally justify an all-out war on an “enemy” that had been racially defined
years before.
Almost immediately after crack appeared, the Reagan administration leaped at the oppor-
tunity to publicize crack cocaine in an eort to build support for its drug war.
The strategy bore fruit. In June 1986, Newsweek declared crack to be the biggest story since
Vietnam/Watergate, and in August of that year, Time magazine termed crack “the issue
of the year.” Thousands of stories about the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and news-
stands, and the stories had a clear racial subtext. The articles typically featured black “crack
whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers,” reinforcing already prevalent racial stereo-
types of black women as irresponsible, selfish “welfare queens,” and black men as “preda-
tors”—part of an inferior and criminal subculture.
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In September 1986, with the media frenzy at full throttle, the House passed legislation
that allocated $2 billion to the antidrug crusade, required the participation of the military
in narcotics control eorts, allowed the death penalty for some drug-related crimes, and
authorized the admission of some illegally obtained evidence in drug trials. Later that
month, the Senate proposed even tougher antidrug legislation, and shortly thereafter, the
president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties,
the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine,
including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—
than powder cocaine, associated with whites.
Congress revisited drug policy in 1988. The new Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized pub-
lic housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal
activity to occur on or near public housing premises and eliminated many federal benefits,
including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug oense. The act also expanded use
of the death penalty for serious drug-related oenses and imposed new mandatory mini-
mums for drug oenses, including a five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession
of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell. Remarkably, the penalty would apply
to first-time oenders. The severity of this punishment was unprecedented in the federal
system. Until 1988, one year of imprisonment had been the maximum for possession of any
amount of any drug.
Reagan’s successor, President George [H. W.] Bush, did not hesitate to employ implicit
racial appeals, having learned from the success of other conservative politicians that subtle
negative references to race could mobilize poor and working-class whites who once were
loyal to the Democratic Party. Bush’s most famous racial appeal, the Willie Horton ad
[released during the 1988 presidential campaign], featured a dark-skinned black man, a
convicted murderer who escaped while on a work furlough and then raped and murdered
a white woman in her home. The ad blamed Bush’s opponent, Massachusetts governor
Michael Dukakis, for the death of the white woman, because he approved the furlough pro-
gram. For months, the ad played repeatedly on network news stations and was the subject