Harold Pollack is right about the disastrous effects of mothers using crack that were distinct from the original hype surrounding "crack babies." But I want to point out the original takeaway that we were all supposed to get from the "crack baby epidemic." The goal was to find a modern scientific justification for racism. As Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1989, crack had created "a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth," indeed, a "bio-underclass." It was no longer racism to suggest that black people were inferior, it was science. Again. The press loved this explanation. According to Mariah Blake's 2004 Columbia Journalism Review article (via), between 1984 and 1987 the press ran over a thousand stories on "crack babies." Everyone bought it, not just white people. I remember being a kid and having both adults and other kids explain to me that the bad kids in school were bad because they were "crack babies." The best part about the whole narrative from the point of view of those pushing it was that racism wasn't merely justified by science, it was black people's own fault for making themselves inferior by doing drugs.
Developing better public policy to deal with crime or poverty would therefore be useless, because inferiority was biologically ingrained, scientifically proven, a concrete fact. The perfect anti-government message.
-- A. Serwer
