Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (66 page)

But Reagan’s tough-on-crime Republicans had no intention of committing political suicide among their donors and redirecting the blame for violent crime from the lawbreakers onto Reaganomics. Nor were they willing to lose their seats by trying to create millions of new jobs in a War on Unemployment, which would certainly have reduced violent crime. Instead, turning the campaign for law and order into a War on Drugs enriched many political lives over the next two decades. It hauled millions of impoverished non-White, nonviolent drug users and dealers into prisons where they could not vote, and later paroled them without their voting rights. A significant number of close elections would have come out differently if felons had not been disenfranchised, including at least seven senatorial races between 1980 and 2000, as well as the presidential election of 2000. What an ingeniously cruel way to quietly snatch away the voting power of your political opponents.
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Even the statistics suggesting that more violent crime—especially on innocent victims—was occurring in urban Black neighborhoods were based on a racist statistical method rather than reality. Drunk drivers, who routinely kill more people than violent urban Blacks, were not regarded as violent criminals in such studies, and 78 percent of arrested drunk drivers were White males in 1990. In 1986, 1,092 people succumbed to “cocaine-related” deaths, and there were another 20,610 homicides. That adds up to 21,702, still lower than the 23,990 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year (not to mention the number of serious injuries caused by drunk drivers that do not result in death). Drug dealers and gangsters primarily kill each other in inner cities, whereas the victims of drunk drivers are often innocent bystanders. Therefore, it was actually an open question in 1986 and thereafter whether an American was truly safer from lethal harm on the inner city’s streets or on the suburban highways. Still, White Americans were far more likely to fear those distant Black mugshots behind their
television screens than their neighborhoods’ White drunk drivers, who were killing them at a greater rate.
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Since Reagan never ordered a War on Drunk Driving, it took a long and determined grassroots movement in the 1980s, forged by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and countless horrible incidents—such as the drunk driver who killed twenty-seven schoolbus passengers in 1988—to force reluctant politicians to institute stronger penalties. But these new penalties for DUIs and DWIs still paled in comparison with the automatic five-year felony prison sentence for being caught for the first time with five grams of crack.

AS IT WAS
, the media’s attention in 1986 was not on the drunk drivers but focused narrowly on sensational crack crime stories and the subsequent effects on the Black family. In a CBS special report on “The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America,” the network presented images of young welfare mothers and estranged fathers in a Newark apartment building, stereotypical images of Black female promiscuity, Black male laziness, and irresponsible Black parenting—the pathological Black family. It was these types of tales that prompted an aggravated Angela Davis to write an essay on the Black family in the spring of 1986. The percentage of children born to single Black women had risen from 21 percent in 1960 to 55 percent in 1985, Davis said. Black teenager birthrates could not explain this increase (those figures had remained
virtually unchanged
from 1920 to 1990). Davis explained that the “disproportionate number of births to unmarried teenagers” had been caused by the fact that older, married Black women had started having fewer children in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, it was the overall percentage of babies born to young and single Black mothers as opposed to married mothers—not the sheer number of babies born to single Black mothers—that dramatically rose.
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But to Reagan propagandists, welfare caused the nonexistent spike in single Black mothers, and the nonexistent spike had made the Black family disappear. “Statistical evidence does not prove those suppositions [that welfare benefits are an incentive to bear children],” admitted
Reagan’s chief domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, in
The Family: Preserving America’s Future
(1986). “And yet, even the most casual observer of public assistance programs understands there is indeed some relationship between the availability of welfare and the inclination of many young women to bear fatherless children.” Evidence hardly mattered when convincing Americans that there was something wrong with Black welfare mothers—and therefore, with the Black family.
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Even the adored civil rights lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton felt the need in 1985 to urge the restoration of the “traditional Black family.” “The remedy is not as simple as providing necessities and opportunities,” Norton explained in the
New York Times
. “The family’s return to its historic strength will require the overthrow of the complicated predatory ghetto subculture.” Norton provided no evidence to substantiate her class racism that “ghetto” Blacks were deficient in values of “hard work, education, respect for the Black family and . . . achieving a better life for one’s children,” in comparison to Black elites or any other racial class.
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This racist drug of the declining Black family was as addicting to consumers of all races as crack—and as addicting as the dangerous Black neighborhood. But many of the Black consumers hardly realized they had been drugged. And they hardly realized that the new television show they thought was so good at counteracting unsavory thoughts of Black people was just another racist drug.

CHAPTER 34

New Democrats

STAUNCH BELIEVERS IN
uplift and media suasion looked to NBC’s
The Cosby Show
, which premiered on September 20, 1984, to redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America. While many viewers enjoyed Bill Cosby’s brilliant comedy and the show’s alluring storylines, and many Black viewers delighted in watching a Black cast on primetime television for eight seasons, it was Cosby’s racial vision that made
The Cosby Show
America’s No. 1 show from 1985 to 1989 (and one of the most popular in apartheid South Africa). Cosby envisioned the ultimate uplift suasion show about a stereotype-defying family uplifted by their own striving beyond the confines of discriminated Blackness. He believed he was showing African Americans what was possible if they worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism. Cosby and his millions of loyal viewers actually believed that
The Cosby Show
and its spinoffs were persuading away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers. And it did, for some. For other Whites, Cosby’s fictional Huxtables were extraordinary Negroes, and the show merely substantiated their conviction—and Reagan’s conviction, and racist Blacks’ convictions—that racism could be found only in the history books. Some commentators understood this at the time.
The Cosby Show
“suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgement of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face,” critiqued literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the
New York Times
at the crest of the show’s popularity in 1989.
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Like every attempt at uplift suasion before it,
The Cosby Show
did nothing to hinder the production and consumption of Reagan’s racist drug war. Quite possibly the most sensationally racist crack story of the era was written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, Harvard medical degree–holding
Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer: “The inner-city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies,” he wrote on July 30, 1989. These babies were likely a deviant “race of (sub) human drones” whose “biological inferiority is stamped at birth” and “permanent,” he added. “The dead babies may be the lucky ones.”
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The column triggered the second major round of horrendous crack stories. The
New York Times
told of how “maternity wards around the country ring with the high-pitched ‘cat cries’ of neurologically impaired crack babies.” The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
had one headline warning of a “Disaster in the Making: Crack Babies Start to Grow Up.” Medical researchers validated these reports—and the racist ideas that inspired them—alongside pediatricians like UCLA’s Judy Howard, who said crack babies lacked the brain function that “makes us human beings.” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia neonatologist Hallam Hurt began following the lives of 224 “crack babies” born in Philadelphia between 1989 and 1992, and she fully anticipated “seeing a host of problems.” In 2013, she concluded her study with a simple finding: poverty was worse for kids than crack. Medical researchers had to finally admit that “crack babies” were like the science for racist ideas: they never existed.
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BACKED BY SCIENCE
or not, racist ideas persisted in American minds, and Reagan’s vice president made sure to manipulate them when he ran for president in 1988. George H. W. Bush had been losing in the polls to the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, until he released a television advertisement about a Black murderer and rapist of Whites, Willie Horton. “Despite a life sentence,” the scary voiceover stated, “Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man, and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime.”
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Setting himself apart from the “weak” Dukakis on crime, the “tough” Bush endorsed capital punishment and its rampant disparities. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in
McCleskey v. Kemp
that the “racially disproportionate impact” of Georgia’s death penalty—Blacks were being sentenced to death four times more frequently than Whites—did not justify overturning the death sentence for a Black man named Warren McCleskey unless a “racially discriminatory purpose” could be demonstrated. If the Court had chosen to rule in McCleskey’s favor, it would have opened the future to antiracist cases and to renovations of the criminal justice system, which was rotting in racism. But instead the justices disconnected racial disparities from racism, deemed racial disparities a normal part of the criminal justice system, and blamed these disparities on Black criminals, yet again producing racist ideas to defend racist policies.
McCleskey v. Kemp
turned out to be—as New York University lawyer Anthony G. Amsterdam predicted—“the
Dred Scott
decision of our time.” The Supreme Court had made constitutional the rampant racial profiling that pumped up the inhumane growth of the Black executed and enslaved prison population.
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Like their ancestors, young urban Blacks resisted the law enforcement officials who condemned them to twentieth-century slavery. And they resisted sometimes to the beat. Hip Hop and rap blossomed in 1988 after a decade of growth from the concrete of the South Bronx. BET and MTV started airing their popular Hip Hop shows.
The Source
hit newsstands that year, beginning its reign as the world’s longest-running rap periodical. It covered the head-slamming rhymes of Public Enemy—and “Fuck tha Police,” the smashing hit of N.W.A., or Niggaz Wit Attitudes, from straight out of Compton.
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Hip Hop and Black Studies programs blossomed together in 1988. That year, professor Molefi Kete Asante established the world’s first Black Studies doctoral program at Philadelphia’s Temple University. Asante was the world’s leading Afrocentric theorist, espousing a profound theory of cultural antiracism to counter the assimilationist ideas that continued their ascent after the demise of Black Power. Too many Black people—and too many Black Studies scholars—were “looking out” at themselves, at the world, and at their Black research subjects
from the center and standards of Europeans, he argued in
The Afrocentric Idea
(1987). Europeans were masquerading their center as the finest, as sometimes the only, perspective. To Asante, there were multiple ways of seeing the world, being in the world, theorizing about the world, and studying the world—not just the Eurocentric worldviews, cultures, theories, and methodologies. He called for “Afrocentricity,” by which he meant a cultural and philosophical center for African people based “on African aspiration, visions, and concepts.”
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In 1989, Public Enemy recorded one of the most popular songs in Hip Hop history, “Fight the Power.” The song headlined the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s critically acclaimed 1989 urban rebellion flick,
Do the Right Thing
. “Fight the Power” tied together the commencement of the socially conscious age of Hip Hop and Black filmmaking and scholarship.
Do the Right Thing
was Lee’s third feature film. His second,
School Daze
(1988), addressed assimilationist ideas related to skin tone and eye color (the lighter the better) and hair texture (the straighter the better), a theme suggested by the fact that Black Power’s Afros were being cut or permed down. Some Blacks were even bleaching their skins White. The most known or suspected skin bleacher in the late 1980s and early 1990s was arguably the nation’s most famous African American, singer Michael Jackson. It was rumored Jackson lightened his skin and thinned his nose and lips to boost his career. Indeed, light-skins still secured higher incomes and were preferred in adoptions, while dark-skins predominated in public housing and prisons and were more likely to report racial discrimination. Racists were blaming dark-skins for these disparities. Antiracists were blaming color discrimination. “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence,” was a popular antiracist saying.
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