After the Murder

Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the early 1990s. What policy and media makers labeled “the crack epidemic” unfolded around him, not in abstract statistics or through threats of moral panic, but in the homes and lives of his neighbors. In his home, crack was an open but undiscussed secret; “it was like growing up in a steel town where nobody talked about steel,” he writes in When Crack Was King. The rest of the country, or at least its white media, was in a moral panic. Experts spoke of soaring crime rates and a secondary epidemic of crack babies — crises that later, dispassionate studies renounced. So wrong was the destructive myth of the “crack baby” that even The New York Times, nearly two decades later, recanted its position in an editorial entitled “Slandering the Unborn.”

The narrative on crack — like so many narratives that have instrumentalized notions of public health and safety for racist ends — has begun to shift. But Ramsey realized the shift was taking place without any clarity on what,