"African Americans and whites use cocaine at similar rates, but Blacks are twice as likely as whites to use it in crack form. However, 80 percent of drug users are white, and in raw numbers, twice as many whites as Blacks use crack cocaine. This means that white crack users should be twice as easy to find, but most peoples' image of the crack user is informed by media accounts that had focused nearly exclusively on African American users since the early 1980s.
Now, Americans associate crack with Blacks, and crack users' infants, dubbed "crack babies," are always portrayed as Black. During eighteen years as a news and science editor at metropolitan dailies and national magazines, I have never seen a published photograph of a white crack baby. The putative harms done to crack babies were first popularized in graphic detail in 1989 by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer who warned,
"The inner city crack epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror: a bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth." These infants, he claimed, constitute a "race of (sub) human drones [whose] future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.... the dead babies may be the lucky ones."
By "inner city", Krauthammer meant, of course, "Black". Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute, who coined the phrase "bio-underclass", did not shy from the racial label: "This is not stuff that Head Start can fix. This is permanent brain damage. Whether it is 5% or 15% of the Black community, it is there."
Krauthammer's column triggered a cascade of national headlines describing these infants as born addicted to crack and neurologically damaged to the point where they constituted a permanent army of inferiority- miniature Golems who could never be human."
Chapter 8- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
