Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (65 page)

Days earlier, on August 3, 1980, the press did show up in full force when the former California governor more or less opened his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair. The event was just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been killed in 1964. It was a clever strategy that improved on the tactics Nixon had mastered before him. Reagan never mentioned
race when he looked out at some of the descendants of slaveholders and segregationists, people who had championed “states’ rights” to maintain White supremacy for nearly two centuries since those hot days in the other Philadelphia, where the US Constitution had been written. Reagan promised to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” He then dodged Carter’s charges of racism. Thanks in part to southern support, Reagan easily won the presidency.
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Reagan wasted little time in knocking down the fiscal gains that middle- and low-income people had made over the past four decades. Seemingly as quickly and deeply as Congress allowed and the poor economy justified, Reagan cut taxes for the rich and social programs for middle- and low-income families, while increasing the military budget. Reagan seemingly did offscreen what Sylvester Stallone had done on-screen, first knocking out elite Blacks the way Rocky had knocked out his opponent Apollo Creed in
Rocky II
(1979). And then, amazingly, Reagan befriended these Creeds—these racist or elite Blacks he had knocked down in previous fights—and used them to knock down the menacing low-income Blacks, as represented by Rocky’s opponent in
Rocky III
(1982), Clubber Lang, popularly known as Mr. T.
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During Reagan’s first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent, and the number of poor Americans in general increased by 2.2 million. In one year, the
New York Times
observed, “much of the progress that had been made against poverty in the 1960s and 1970s” had been “wiped out.”
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As the economic and racial disparities grew and middle-class incomes became more unstable in the late 1970s and early 1980s, old segregationist fields—like evolutionary psychology, preaching genetic intellectual hierarchies, and physical anthropology, preaching biological racial distinctions—and new fields, like sociobiology, all seemed to grow in popularity. After all, new racist ideas were needed to rationalize the newly growing disparities. Harvard biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, who was trained in the dual-evolution theory, published
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
in 1975. Wilson more or less called on American scholars to find “the biological basis of all forms of social behavior
in all kinds of organisms, including man.” Though most sociobiologists did not apply sociobiology directly to race, the unproven theory underlying sociobiology itself allowed believers to apply the field’s principles to racial disparities and arrive at racist ideas that blamed Blacks’ social behavior for their plight. It was the first great academic theory in the post-1960s era whose producers tried to avoid the label “racist.” Intellectuals and politicians were producing theories—like welfare recipients are lazy, or inner cities are dangerous, or poor people are ignorant, or one-parent households are immoral—that allowed Americans to call Black people lazy, dangerous, and immoral without ever saying “Black people,” which allowed them to deflect charges of racism.
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Assimilationists and antiracists, realizing the implications of
Sociobiology
, mounted a spirited reproach, which led to a spirited academic and popular debate over its merits and political significance during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who released
The Mismeasure of Man
in 1981, led the reproach in the biological sciences against segregationist ideas. Edward Osborne Wilson, not to be deterred, emerged as a public intellectual. He no doubt enjoyed hearing Americans say unproven statements that showed how popular his theories had become, such as when someone quips that a particular behavior “is in my DNA.” He no doubt enjoyed, as well, taking home two Pulitzer Prizes for his books and a National Medal of Science from President Jimmy Carter. Wilson’s sociobiology promoted but never proved the existence of genes for behaviors like meanness, aggression, conformity, homosexuality, and even xenophobia and racism.
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Angela Davis joined other antiracist scholars in fighting back against these segregationist claims inside (and outside) of the academy. Her most influential academic treatise,
Women, Race & Class
, appeared in 1981. It was a revisionist history of Black women as active historical agents despite the prevailing sexism and exploitation they had faced, and despite the racism they had faced from White feminists in the suffrage struggles and the recent reproductive and anti-rape struggles. Davis showcased the irony of the most popular pieces of anti-rape literature in the 1970s—Susan Brownmiller’s
Against Our Will
,
Jean MacKeller’s
Rape: The Bait and the Trap
, and Diana Russell’s
Politics of Rape
—for reinvigorating the “myth of the Black rapist.” This myth, Davis said, reinforced “racism’s open invitation to white men to avail themselves sexually of Black women’s bodies. The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous.” Davis’s wide-ranging account of Black women activists provided a powerful response to Michele Wallace’s—and patriarchal historians’—racist pictures of Black women as “passive” during racial and gender struggles. Along with bell hooks’s
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
, also published in 1981, Davis’s
Women, Race & Class
helped forge a new method of study, an integrative race, gender, and class analysis, in American scholarship. As hooks indelibly penned, “racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.”
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But no great work of antiracist feminist scholarship—and
Ain’t I a Woman
and
Women, Race & Class
were instant classics—stood any chance of stopping those producers of the segregationist ideas that were defending Reagan’s racist and classist policies. In 1982, Reagan issued one of the most devastating executive orders of the twentieth century. “We must mobilize all our forces to stop the flow of drugs into this country” and to “brand drugs such as marijuana exactly for what they are—dangerous,” Reagan said, announcing his War on Drugs. Criminologists hardly feared that the new war would disproportionately arrest and incarcerate African Americans. Many criminologists were publishing fairytales for studies that found that racial discrimination no longer existed in the criminal justice system.

“We can fight the drug problem, and we can win,” Reagan announced. It was an astonishing move. Drug crime was declining. Only 2 percent of Americans viewed drugs as the nation’s most pressing problem. Few considered marijuana to be a particularly dangerous drug, especially in comparison with the more addictive heroine. Substance-abuse therapists were shocked by Reagan’s unfounded claim that America could “put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement.”
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REELING FROM THE ANNOUNCEMENT
, Angela Davis ran again for vice president on the CPUSA ticket in 1984. “Bring to victory the defeat of Ronald Reagan,” the “most sexist[,] . . . racist, anti–working class[,] . . . bellicose president in the history of this country,” she charged at a Black women’s conference in August. But the racial story of the 1984 elections was the stunning primary-campaign success of Martin Luther King Jr.’s former aide, the spellbinding orator and civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson. Neither Jackson nor Davis garnered enough votes. Too many Americans fell for the myth of the good “morning in America” Reagan was selling them about the better economy.
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It may have been morning in America again in certain rich and White neighborhoods, which had awakened to prosperity repeatedly over the years. But it was not morning in America again in the communities where the CIA-backed Contra rebels of Nicaragua started smuggling cocaine in 1985. Nor was it morning in America for Black youths in 1985. Their unemployment rate was four times the rate it had been in 1954, though the White youth employment rate had marginally increased. Nor was it morning in America when some of these unemployed youths started remaking the expensive cocaine into cheaper crack to sell so they could earn a living. And the Reagan administration wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was not morning in America in Black urban neighborhoods, and that drugs—specifically, crack—and the drug dealers and users were to blame.

In October 1985, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) charged Robert Stutman, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York City office, with drawing media attention to the spreading of crack (and the violence from dealers trying to control and stabilize drug markets). Stutman drew so much attention that he handed Reagan’s slumbering War on Drugs an intense high. In 1986, thousands of sensationally racist stories engulfed the airwaves and newsstands describing the “predator” crack dealers who were supplying the “demon drug” to incurably addicted “crackheads” and “crack whores” (who were giving birth to biologically inferior “crack babies” in their scary concrete urban jungles). Not many stories reported on poor White crack sellers and users. In August 1986,
Time
magazine
deemed crack “the issue of the year.” But in reality, crack had become the latest drug addicting Americans to racist ideas.
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If Reagan’s take on drugs was the overreported racist issue of the year, then the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) made apartheid—and Reagan’s fiscal and military support of it—the under-reported antiracist issue of the year. The FSAM movement brought out into the open the long-standing ethnic racism between African Americans and African immigrants, an ethnic racism Eddie Murphy displayed in his box-office breaker of 1988, which became one of the most beloved Black comedies of all time.
Coming to America
, the love story of a rich African prince coming to Queens in search of a wife, hilariously mocked African Americans’ ridiculously untrue racist ideas of animalistic, uncivilized, corrupt, and warlike people in Africa, racist ideas that
Roots
had not managed to fully expunge.

Weeks after passing the most antiracist bill of the decade over Reagan’s veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act with its strict economic sanctions—Congress passed the most racist bill of the decade. On October 27, 1986, Reagan, “with great pleasure,” signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, supported by both Republicans and Democrats. “The American people want their government to get tough and to go on the offensive,” Reagan commented. By signing the bill, he put the presidential seal on the “Just say no” campaign and on the “tough laws” that would now supposedly deter drug abuse. While the Anti-Drug Abuse Act prescribed a minimum five-year sentence for a dealer or user caught with five grams of crack, the amount typically handled by Blacks and poor people, the mostly White and rich users and dealers of powder cocaine—who operated in neighborhoods with fewer police—had to be caught with five hundred grams to receive the same five-year minimum sentence. Racist ideas then defended this racist and elitist policy.
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The bipartisan act led to the mass incarceration of Americans. The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000 due entirely to stiffer sentencing policies, not more crime. Between 1985 and 2000, drug offenses accounted for two-thirds of the spike in the inmate population. By 2000, Blacks comprised 62.7 percent and Whites 36.7
percent of all drug offenders in state prisons—and not because they were selling or using more drugs. That year, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that 6.4 percent of Whites and 6.4 percent of Blacks were using illegal drugs. Racial studies on drug dealers usually found similar rates. One 2012 analysis, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found that White youths (6.6 percent) were 32 percent
more
likely than Black youths (5 percent) to sell drugs. But Black youths were far more likely to get arrested for it.
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During the crack craze in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the situation was the same. Whites and Blacks were selling and consuming illegal drugs at similar rates, but the Black users and dealers were getting arrested and convicted much more. In 1996, when two-thirds of the crack users were White or Latina/o, 84.5 percent of the defendants convicted of crack possession were Black. Even without the crucial factor of racial profiling of Blacks as drug dealers and users by the police, a general rule applied that still applies today: wherever there are more police, there are more arrests, and wherever there are more arrests, people perceive there is more crime, which then justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime.
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Since heavily policed inner-city Blacks were much more likely than Whites to be arrested and imprisoned in the 1990s—since more homicides occurred in their neighborhoods—racists assumed that Black people were actually using more drugs, dealing more in drugs, and committing more crimes of all types than White people. These false assumptions fixed the image in people’s minds of the dangerous Black inner-city neighborhood as well as the contrasting image of the safe White suburban neighborhood, a racist notion that affected so many decisions of so many Americans, from housing choices to drug policing to politics, that they cannot be quantified. The “dangerous
Black
neighborhood” conception is based on racist ideas, not reality. There is such a thing as a dangerous “unemployed neighborhood,” however. One study, for example, based on the National Longitudinal Youth Survey data collected from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males were far more likely than young White males to engage in serious violent crime. But when the researchers compared
only
employed
young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared.
Certain
violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.
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