A Knock at Midnight(28)

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    I’M PRETTY SURE my fellow students in the SMU law library thought I was going crazy. My facial expressions and gasps while I pored through court documents must have been distracting for those trying to commit case law to memory. But I couldn’t believe what I was reading. How was any of this possible? I kept thinking. Don’t we have a constitutional right to a fair trial? Aren’t we innocent until proven guilty—beyond a reasonable doubt? Isn’t that the very basis of our nation’s legal system?

Still reeling from what I had learned about Keyon’s case, I dug into the history of federal drug legislation, trying to find justification for the clearly inequitable 100-to-1 crack-to-powder ratio. Surely there had to be some legislative history that explained lawmakers’ rationale. But I found none. There simply was no precedent anywhere on the books for these laws. In fact, in its efforts to pass dramatic “War on Drugs” legislation before the November 1986 midterm elections, Congress seemed to have bypassed many of the typical deliberative processes customarily employed to prevent terrible legislation from being passed. No committee hearings were held to examine the cocaine sentencing scheme, and no report was produced analyzing the act’s key provisions. Unbelievably, there was zero record of discussion about possible inequities in the ratio, or even the reasoning for it. The number is completely arbitrary with no rational basis.

What little legislative history there was suggested that legislators justified penalties a hundred times harsher for crack cocaine for reasons unsubstantiated at the time and completely debunked within a decade by the United States Sentencing Commission itself. In an effort to track what had led to the frenzied effort to pass laws that twenty years later had stolen my friend’s life, I scrolled through the archives available in SMU’s research database, searching for clues in articles and media coverage of the time. There I discovered a trail of propaganda that turned my stomach sour.

In the months leading up to the 1986 elections—the year the Anti-Drug Abuse Act mandating the 100-to-1 sentencing ratio was passed—more than one thousand articles appeared in major news outlets around the country focused on the devastation wrought by crack cocaine. There were cover stories from Time and Newsweek, front-page spreads from every major media outlet featuring endless images of thin, ravaged Black bodies. The accompanying articles played on age-old racist white fears of Black criminality, ignoring the fact that white Americans used cocaine at higher rates than Black Americans. “Less than a block from where unsuspecting white retirees play tennis,” one article read, “bands of young Black men push their rocks on passing motorists, interested or not.”

    Every story played upon stereotypes of hypercriminal Black men and a morally degenerate Black community. In picture after picture, young Black boys and men crouched, tatted and lean in baggy jeans and gold chains, throwing up signs, looking every bit the part of pathological perpetrators of this pandemic. That some of the images were of rappers, not drug dealers, didn’t seem to alter the message. The media treated them the same: Crack was not a public health crisis, it was a public safety crisis. The subtext was clear: Get rid of these ruthless (Black) thugs, or we (whites) are all in peril.



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MY MOM WAS recovering from addiction. I had dated a drug dealer. I knew firsthand what drugs could do to a family and community. But these grotesque distortions of the racist imagination were as far away from the real people and communities that I knew and loved—that I came from—as any image could be.

I never shared my own experience with anyone in my class. But it was behind every argument I made. Our final paper seemed deeply personal and deeply urgent. I wanted to make my peers feel the issue as much as I did, not just see it as a topic of intellectual interest outside themselves. But I could sense it would be a challenge. Reading these misleading, hyperbolic stories from the height of the crack era was confusing and distressing, and I was doing it on purpose for a research paper and presentation, with an extensive personal and academic background in the topic. Many of my classmates were white and wealthy. As we moved through egregious examples of institutionalized racism, I was struck by how often my fellow students seemed interested in an abstract way, but not on a gut level. There didn’t seem to be a connection between what we were studying in books and real human lives.

    “But these are people!” I wanted to shout. “Not numbers! Not case numbers or statistics. Everything we talk about in this class is connected to a real, breathing human being, a mother, a father, someone’s child.”

I had to start by debunking the myths. Media coverage of the crack epidemic furthered the false notion that crack was more heinously addictive than pure cocaine and had more devastating effects on the user. In my paper, I explained the science showing that crack was no stronger than cocaine, was in fact a diluted version of the pure form, and that the effects were the same. The data simply do not support Congress’s assumption that crack is significantly more addictive than powder cocaine. The goals of the legislation claimed to be to take down high-level dealers, drug kingpins, as opposed to low-level street dealers. But, I argued, if all crack is made out of cocaine, then every crack sale both relies upon and generates profits for powder cocaine distributors. Under the 100-to-1 sentencing ratio, relatively low-level crack dealers received higher sentences than the wholesale-level powder cocaine dealer from whom crack sellers originally purchase the powder to make the crack.