Toward a Social History of Crack: Drugs, Informal Economy, and Youth Culture in an Era of Neoliberalism

         Government policies in the 1980s profoundly changed and irreparably damaged the historic continuities of  an earlier era of Black Radicalism.   The Reagan era brought a  brutal social retrenchment, anti-communist foreign policy, support for mass incarceration and a resulting rapid spread of crack cocaine (and related development HIV/AIDS). These policies devastated low income African American communities and spread substance abuse to former activists, large numbers of women, and the community more broadly. These changes combined with the emergence of a hyper-capitalist youth culture affecting not only black life but black consciousness as well.  This historic shift in the 1980s, coincided with an intense social stratification between a small, emergent African American middle-class and an increasingly impoverished black majority. This period might be most crudely summarized as a shift from political optimism to political pessimism. The paper traces important moments of political and economic abandonment in postwar New York City, Washington D.C., Detroit, and Los Angeles. This rightward political turn,  buttressed by a global reorientation towards neo-liberalism, fostered a new hyper-capitalist youth culture that broke with core tenants of the Black Power Movement, while superficially adopting its iconography.

         Beginning in the 1970’s  the paper discusses economic restructuring and urban crisis. It argues that this period of steady decline in real wages  coincided with a new policy consensus that drastically reduced the state’s role in the economy. Like the rest of the world, African Americans faced a global capitalist crisis that unraveled the postwar liberal consensus on Keynesian social welfare.  This created a social breach which fostered a thriving environment for an underground, illegal, and illicit economy, offering the urban poor a means of survival  amidst rapid economic decline and mass unemployment.