Gendering Blackness

An Analysis Of Crack In The 80s & The Warfare of The American State

The topic that I will be discussing in this paper is gendering blackness within the documentary “”Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy”  , throughout the film I was able to analyze a lot of things. There were multiple chapters that explored various stages of the crack epidemic , the documentary explained the lived experiences and media representations of Black people during this period. The ramifications of the War on Drugs can be still felt today and still frame the policies that shape our society. Through things like the 1994 crime bill that “criminalized” crack, what was actually occurring was the criminalization of a people those people being Black people. I believe that the crack epidemic was the most transformative and detrimental incident of state warfare in contemporary Black American history.  

In the first chapter of the documentary we can see that the Black community was already in disarray from the racist mandates of urban renewal and segregation. Black people were 2x more likely to be poor, poverty is a form of financial violence. In the book Black Marxism , Cedric Robinson states “The historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism (Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000). With the analysis that the system and the mode of production of capitalism was based and influenced by racism we can see how Black people are 2x more likely to be poor. The system of racial capitalism is set up for Black people to be disproportionately harmed. Black people were pushed into urban enclaves due to segregation during periods like the Great Migration , Within the text “African American Migrations we can read“ In the first half of the 20th century many states imposed segregation as the means to bind African Americans to the land and end their political participation “ (Phillips, Kimberley L. Daily Life During African American Migrations. Greenwood Press, 2012). The subjugation of Black people was not something that was just noticeable, it was something that was intentional to maintain the status quo and the white supremacist state of being within America.

Due to the urban ghettos and enclaves that were made due to redlining and segregation, Black people were disenfranchised and impoverished. In the Color of Law we can see how African Americans were purposely disenfranchised due to being subject to racist zoning laws. “ Robert Whitten, wrote in a 1922 professional journal that notwithstanding the Buchanan decision, “establishing colored residence districts has removed one of the most potent causes of race conflict.” This, he added, was “a sufficient justification for race zoning.... A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable.” Whitten then went ahead and designed a zoning ordinance for Atlanta, advising city officials that “home neighborhoods had to be protected from any further damage to values resulting from inappropriate uses, including the encroachment of the colored race.”( Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright Publishing, 2017.)  Neighborhoods or zones that were disproportionately Black were subject to property values dropping immensely. The drop in property value made it evermore harder for Black people to build legitimate wealth within this system. The poverty that was experienced by future crack dealers was noticeable , minimum wage was $3.35/ hour which is around 10 dollars an hour in today’s wages. We can see that this wage wasn’t livable by any means so the alternative was always going to be an industry in which you could attain legitimacy , status , and wealth. These very things that Blackness is deprived of within this society. The chasing of this legitimacy was ultimately a trap , the lie was sold to many of us and we believed it , the state showed that it was not only in behind the epidemic but also had the power not only to criminalize the drug but the people who were framed as the “main users and abusers “. 

We see the criminalization of Blackness through the documentary. This is another way that Blackness is “gendered” ; the scripting of Blackness is something that has been a constant throughout Black people’s existence in this hemisphere. The way that Blackness has been shaped by the white and non Black gaze is undeniable. We can see within the documentary that most of the users of Crack were not Black they were white. The state wanted to manufacture consent for a new front of warfare on Blackness , the conduit in which this warfare would be carried out would be through the prison industrial complex, the police state , and most importantly through the media. The state as a concept is something that has been analyzed by various scholars , organizers, and revolutionaries throughout history. The definition of the state that I will be using is from Lorenzo Ervin “ But what is the state? It is a political abstraction (really a socio-political corporation), a hierarchical institution by which a privileged elite strives to dominate the vast majority of people. The state’s mechanisms include a group of institutions containing legislative assemblies, the civil service bureaucracy, the military and police forces, the judiciary and prisons and the sub-central state apparatus. The government is the administrative vehicle that runs the state. The purpose of this specific set of institutions, which are the expressions of authority in capitalist societies “ ( Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’boa. Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition, Pluto Press, 2021). 

The state is what causes war, political repression , and other forms of systemic violence that we see within our society , the government is the administrative body in which the state’s bidding is carried out. This helps set the scene for what was detailed within the documentary, the American state carried out chemical warfare as one former addict described within the documentary. The American state was content on spreading its influence and imperialism within the global south and specifically within Nicaragua , what we have within Nicaragua is a conflict between the Contras and the Sandinistas. The Contras were a group of far right Nicaraguan fascist who were trying to overthrow the Marxist Sandinistas. In order to pay for this illegal war , the Regan administration secretly started selling American missiles and arms to the Iranian government. The funding of the Contras was something that was strictly prohibited from being legal due to the “Boland Amendment”. We can see that the war in Nicaragua couldn’t continue without the support of the American government , without the funding and material support from the Reagan Administration and the CIA the Contras wouldn’t have been able to maintain a fascist struggle within the global south. 

The imperial and colonial violence that the United States was committing within Nicaragua was working in congruence with the structural violence that Black people were subjected to domestically , with the text “Death Gap” by David Ansell , Ansell writes “  But it was not just incidents of racist urban violence that limited housing options for these migrants. Other forces of structural violence fueled neighborhood residential instability. Foremost were racist bank lending policies created and abetted by the US government and enforced by unscrupulous real estate agents, thugs, and the police. These lending policies had their roots in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when millions of mortgage holders defaulted and banks became wary of lending” ( Ansell, David A. The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills. University of Chicago Press, 2021.) The state maintains a monopoly on this violence , the contradiction of not just capitalism was seen during the crack epidemic but the ultimate contradiction of the state itself was seen. One dealer says explicitly that as crack dealers that they were “street capitalist”. While the state was trafficking cocaine into the country and into our communities , the state used the already made machinery of antiblackness that is foundational to society itself to criminalize Black people once more. 

Misogyny and misogynoir were prevalent during this period of history just like we see its continuance in modernity. During the crack epidemic Black women were depicted as “welfare queens “, they were also hyper sexualized into “crack addicted jezebels “ as well. The Black woman was not only criminalized but her unborn children were as well. Blackness is something that is marked as criminal before it can even breathe its first breaths of life. The construction of the “Crack Baby “ was something that was also seen during this era even though research and overwhelming amounts of evidence show that “Crack Babies “ don’t actually exist . “Two decades ago, we panicked over the predication that “crack babies” would cause an undue burden on their families, the education system, and on society. Yet, after almost 20 years of research, not one single condition or disorder that could be labeled “crack baby” has been identified. Nor is there evidence of the extent of harm that was predicted by physicians and trumpeted by the media. What happened? Punitive legislation was directed at newborns and their mothers, legislation which only increased the stigma against them and decreased the chances of addressing their real problems – poverty and a lack of prenatal care. It is now clear that the anti-crack baby policies were based on assumptions, which have no scientific validity. The civil and child welfare actions that resulted were harmful to women, children, and families who instead desperately needed treatment.” ( We Were Wrong About “Crack Babies”: Are We Repeating Our Mistake With “Meth Babies”? , David Lewis , National Library of Medicine, 2005 )  

The media was the main driver of this myth and stereotype , the Black mother was seen as someone who was incapable of not just being able to take care of herself but her child as well , the framing that Black women would rather use crack than be a mother was not only harmful but it has detrimental effects even in 2025.  Addiction was seen as not a sickness that we needed treatment for, it was seen as something that the state could then use to make us property once more. Many mothers were stripped of their babies forever , or were themselves committed to the prison system. There was no compassion for these mothers. This is ultimately due to Blackness not being considered as “human” within this society , Blackness is the objective antagonist that exists within civil society , to reaffirm the human relation , Blackness must be in a perpetual state of criminality or being seen as criminal for the civil societal order to function. 

In conclusion , we can see that we are still dealing with the ramifications of the War on Drugs , the War on Poverty , and the multiple Wars on Crime, we can see these were always dog whistles and the primary constant when you get to the root of it is a war on Blackness itself. The state uses these buzzwords and dogwhistles to excuse its actions of terror and violence. The media still shows images of Black people as criminals in 2025, the state still manufactures warfare through politics , which is the non violent continuation of war fare. As long as Black people exist within this society we will always be subject to the terrors of racial capitalism, white supremacy , anti Blackness , and the derivatives of oppression and repression that we have been subjected to ever since we got off of the boats that brought us here to be enslaved.