People of my age well remember the freak out over crack babies. Crack users were having babies and they were supposedly destroyed for life. It turns out that it wasn’t true. Cocaine-using mothers gave birth to babies with low weights. That’s it. But I think we should always remember crack babies because the truth is we repeat this same error over and over again.
And it’s not a coincidence the things like this so often are associated with black people. Society at large loves things like crack because they provide a quick-fix for inequality. Dealing with America’s past and ongoing systemic racism is hard. Even worse, it’s something that all of us white folks will be required to change to facilitate.
It is super easy to assume that the problem is really black women doing cocaine. Then it’s a simple matter of passing some laws and paying more cops to lock them up. Then we’ll have equality! Or rather, we’ll have an excuse for doing nothing for a decade or two before we find out that we destroyed a bunch of lives for no reason and we’re faced with the same problems as ever.
Assume the Newest Outrage Is False
Whenever I hear of an outrage in the news I always remember the crack babies. I remember that at worst whatever people are hysterical about is a much smaller problem than is claimed. And it’s most likely not to be a problem at all. Admittedly, it does kind of suck being the person always throwing cold water on everyone’s dopamine highs.
As mythical as these outrages may be, they result in very real consequences. Today there are laws on the books all over the nation that allow the government to prosecute women if they don’t treat their pregnancies well enough. These were laws that came onto the books, at least in part, to fight the mythical problem of crack babies. Today, people mostly know there were no crack babies, but the laws remain.
Note how absurd this is. Although I think it is often overstated, fetal alcohol syndrome is an actual problem. But it was never associated specifically with blacks and so it didn’t result in mass hysteria. And it didn’t result in new laws penalizing women.
Scratch an outbreak of hysteria and you are more likely than not to uncover yet more systemic racism.
Image cropped from Sleeping Baby by Realt0n12 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
