Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America

11. Making Crack Babies: Race Discourse and the Biologization of Behavior

11 Making Crack Babies Race Discourse and the Biologization of Behavior JASON E. GLENN 237 although recent medical research has discredited the concept of the crack baby,1 as a narrative of urban behavioral degeneracy it played a pivotal role in the creation of a post–civil rights reconception of race. The revelation that there was no sound empirical evidence supporting the classification of developmentally challenged newborns as “crack babies” is now more than ten years old. However devoid of empirical evidence, it was nevertheless a story of such powerful cultural resonance that it heavily contributed to the demonization of the poor urban underclasses: Americans who experience systemic poverty and joblessness and whose existence has never been captured by national unemployment statistics. This demonization in turn provided political support for increased law enforcement surveillance, an end to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, racially disparate extreme mandatory minimum sentencing legislation, and the continued support for a criminal justice approach to addressing substance abuse that by all accounts has failed to achieve its goals.2 This chapter explores the role that the intensified war on drugs played in redefining race in America in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. In post-1960s America, discourses on race have become obscured in nebulous discourses of crime, personal responsibility, illegal immigration, and most recently, terrorism. Such discourses have a tremendous amount of political currency and are often used to galvanize public support for policies that increase the power and authority of the state. In turn, the state uses its increased power to police racialized bodies in order to demonstrate the need for its increased authority. To understand the emergence of crack babies we must deconstruct its wide cultural resonance. Crack babies shared four parents that 238 JASON E. GLENN made them perfect cultural symbols of the wretchedness of the urban underclasses of the 1980s: poverty, joblessness, substance abuse, and criminal gang activity.They were the outcomes of everything perceived wrong with America. The looming crisis of crack babies, couched in a discourse of health, can best be understood as what Stephen Toulmin describes as a “scientific mythology”: dramatic representations of how the world works that stimulate our emotions, validate our hopes, make sense of our fears, and lend both cosmic and scientific sanction to our order of living.3 Crack babies performed the cultural work of taking all the nebulous white, middle-class, and post–civil rights movement guilt of the 1970s and alleviating that guilt by providing new justifications for categorizing the urban poor as undeserving and degenerate. This chapter investigates the role that the crack baby narrative played in redefining the racial antithesis against which American identity is constructed.The crack baby narrative helped policymakers come to a new consensus as to how newly coded racial discourses of behavioral pathology and personal irresponsibility could be used to manufacture consent for neoliberal economic policies and dismantle the New Deal state. RACE AND HEALTH The histories of the production of biomedical knowledge and discourses of race are strongly intertwined. The conceptual revolution that led to the birth of the biological sciences in the nineteenth century and the transformation of medicine into a clinical practice backed by laboratory and clinical experimentation also led to the creation of the biological categories of race. As Michel Foucault argues, the production of biological knowledge became thinkable when “Man” became a formal object of investigation in the West. “Man’s” history, language, society, economic organization, and most notably his biology all became areas of specialized study.4 It is the production of biological knowledge that allows the rise of the“bio-power”of the state:“an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.”5 The concept of “race” and the emergence of the concept of “Man” were birthed out of the lay-humanist revolution in the fifteenth century, initiated as a way to valorize the hopelessly fallen status of laypersons MAKING CRACK BABIES 239 in the cosmogony of Latin Christianity of medieval Europe.6 This intellectual break shifted the concept of humans as hopelessly irredeemable spiritual beings to“Man”: a political being redeemed by his rationality (or irredeemable in his lack thereof, as in the case of indíos and negros).7 The peculiar characteristic of this concept“Man,”Sylvia Wynter argues, is that for the first time in human history this local, culture...